Scientists have for the first time unravelled the human genome from a clump of prehistoric hair found in the permafrost of Greenland, and produced an image of what this ancient man would have looked like. The clump of hair was discovered alongside some ancient stone tools in north-west Greenland in 1986, and belonged to a member of the first Eskimo group called the Saqqaqs who hunted reindeer and lived away from the coast.
Advances in DNA analysis have allowed the scientists to discover specific traits such as the thickness of the hair and the colour of the skin and prove that Eskimos originated in Asia and not in North America. The man has been named 'Inuk' and the portrait of him is based on screening for single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), which are points in the genetic code that vary from individual to individual.
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