I can still remember back in 1997 being shocked that a team of scientists had managed to extract a few hundred bases of DNA from a 40,000 year old Neanderthal fossil. Neanderthal DNA! In the years that followed, scientists made huge advances in recovering ancient DNA, with the entire Neanderthal genome published in 2010. But for all that amazement, I had to learn to be resigned that scientists probably wouldn’t get human DNA older than about 100,000 years. Beyond that vintage, the DNA was just too busted up to be recoverable.

Wrong. Very wrong.

I’ll point you to the newspaper for the straight story. But there is, of course, a lot more to the tale than can fit into 1000 words. Let me