THE OBSERVER: Meet Denny, the ancient mixed-heritage mystery girl

Description

However, Douka and Higham will use a new technology called Zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry – ZooMs. Developed by Mike Buckley, at Manchester University, the technique, which is derived from food science research, exploits the fact that collagen, a protein fibre found in bone, can survive for hundreds of thousands of years. Every major mammal group has a distinctive type of collagen, and ZooMs can read its structure like a molecular barcode, identifying which animal was the originator of a particular bone. This makes it ideal for differentiating human and animal remains.