The Molecule Hunt: Archaeology and the Search for Ancient DNA (review)

Martin Jones began his career as an archeologist with an interest in the impact of humans on plant communities, specifically, domestication. His research on carbonized seeds from a range of sites in Great Britain has established him as an expert in the domestication of wheat and other plants. Jones is currently the George Pitt-Rivers Professor of Archaeological Science at the University of Cambridge. Some might wonder, then, why he now writes a book about ancient DNA. This question is answered in the introductory chapter of The Molecule Hunt, in which Jones describes his early experiences with excavation, including the scrubbing of pottery shards to remove layers of organic residues and his developing realization that "those assiduously scrubbed pot fragments around which the whole exercise then revolved are seen now as the mere tip of a vast information 'iceberg'" (p. 9).

In fact, we now know that the molecules preserved in those lost residues—and in ancient skeletons or plant material—can yield vast troves of data on species' identity, kinship, evolution/domestication, and disease, even specific genetic mutations. Jones has been involved in this quest from the ground floor. In the 1990s he helped to establish and chaired the Ancient Biomolecules Initiative (funded by Great Britain's National Environment Research Council), which sponsored much of the early ancient DNA research. Jones has kept his finger on the pulse of this field and, unlike many books that lose their currency during the lag between being written and hitting the bookstore shelves, his ability to incorporate unpublished results from scientists in this field has resulted in a book that is mostly still current, even a few years after publication.

The book begins with a description of Jones's own journey to ancient molecular research and gives a brief history of the study of ancient DNA in general in the second chapter. Jones then hooks us with a discussion of the oldest "human" DNA recovered thus far—that of several Neanderthal individuals—in his third chapter on the origin of modern humans. He follows that with a chapter discussing decay and makes even the details of the formation of peat interesting. The next two chapters discuss Jones's favorite topic, domestication, with one chapter devoted to plant domestication and the other to animal domestication. In these chapters Jones not only covers the obvious domesticates (wheat, cattle) but also includes interesting discussions of other crops (such as rice and maize) and a wide variety of animals (horses, dogs, camels, llamas, and nondomesticates such as aurochsen). In his seventh chapter Jones discusses what he calls "great journeys," or large-scale human population movements, including the peopling of the Americas and the Pacific Islands and several movements in and out of Africa or the Middle East, such as those accompanying the spread of agriculture.

Jones devotes his eighth chapter to a discussion of ancient molecules other than DNA (proteins, lipids, plant silica, etc.) that can tell us a lot about human history and prehistory, including the discovery that boiling appears to have been the preferred method of cooking cabbage in medieval England (p. 185). Jones covers the smaller scale questions of human relations in Chapter 9, in which he discusses what we can learn about individuals and kinship using ancient DNA, with considerable discussion of forensic applications, such as the identification of the bodies of the Romanovs. In the tenth chapter Jones moves on to even smaller organisms, covering ancient molecules from various microbes and what they can tell us about the history of human disease, such as the plague and tuberculosis.

The final chapter reviews the major points of the book and highlights promising new approaches to ancient molecules, such as novel techniques to access molecules that have become tightly bound to solid substrates, like pottery. In this chapter we are confronted with the jarring image of celebrating the dissolution of ancient pottery in a vial...