Your DNA is the key to finding out more about your ancestry. At the University of Sheffield researchers were frustrated with the traditional methodology used to identify a skeleton and assign it to one of the ancient populations that once roamed the planet. The process was long drawn, and not always very accurate.

That’s when Eran Elhaik and his team decided to try something new. They identified a group of mutations that are sufficiently informative to identify and classify ancient populations. The Ancient Ancestry Informative Markers (aAIMs)  use the diversity that was much more prevalent in ancient times to identify which bones belonged to a certain civilization.

As per Elhaik, the people today are a lot more similar than the populations of ancient times. Finding a few relevant markers from an ancient population can make it much easier to identify them. However the problem they faced with this science project is that the ancient DNA is often degraded so much that it’s difficult to extract markers.

The team has managed to improve the system that was already in place. They just need a more comprehensive ancient DNA data base to compare the markers isolated against to improve accuracy even more.