Ancient human genome sequence of an extinct Palaeo-Eskimo

We report the first ancient human genome. Obtained from ~4000 year old hair preserved in the Greenlandic permafrost, the genome represents a male individual from the first known culture to have settled the New World Arctic. Through the application of biochemical and statistical approaches, we ensured that the effect of DNA-damage and sequencing derived errors is negligible. Sequenced to an average depth of 20x, we recover 79% of the diploid genome, an amount close to the practical limit of current sequencing technologies.