Around 19,000 years ago, a woman from a group of hunter-gatherers died and was buried in a cave in northern Spain. In 1996, archaeologists started exploring the cave, finding abundant evidence of prehistoric people and their activities.
In 2010, Lawrence Straus, Emeritus Leslie Spier Distinguished Professor at The University of New Mexico, and a Spanish student, David Cuenca Solana, found the woman's remains, including her jaw, after Straus had a hunch to dig behind an engraved block at the back of the huge vestibule of El Mirón Cave, whose excavation he and his colleague Professor Manuel Gonzalez Morales of the Universidad de Cantabria have directed for over a quarter-century.
The prehistoric woman's age was estimated to be 35-40 years at death and her bones were coated with non-local ochre, a red, iron oxide pigment that sparkles with specular hematite, earning her the moniker "the Red Lady of El Mirón." Since that finding, the Red Lady has continued to offer a torrent of extraordinary information to archaeologists and bioanthropologists.
Usually when speaking of DNA and archaeology, people know that it's been retrieved from bones or teeth of human remains, which was the case with the Red Lady herself. But new, revolutionary research also uses DNA found in dirt—sedimentary ancient DNA or "sedaDNA"—and has revealed new information about the human and animal populations that preceded the Red Lady of Mirón.
An article about the findings titled A sedimentary ancient DNA perspective on human and carnivore persistence through the Late Pleistocene in El Mirón Cave, Spain was recently published in Nature Communications, a top-tier multidisciplinary journal dedicated to publishing high-quality research in all areas of the biological, health, physical, chemical, Earth, social, mathematical, applied, and engineering sciences. The DNA research team, which included Straus and Gonzalez Morales, was led by Pere Gelabert and Victoria Oberreiter in Professor Ron Pinhasi's lab in the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Vienna, Austria.
Straus was approached about three years by Pinhasi, who wanted to try sedaDNA analysis at the site. Straus believes he was asked because of the success that Nobel Prize-winning researcher Svante Paabo at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, had had with the Red Lady's DNA and then the success of Professor Christina Warinner, a bioarcheologist at Harvard and the Max Planck Institute in getting DNA of bacteria from the Red Lady's dental calculus.
Straus provided the archeological, chronological and faunal information and references, and wrote supplementary material on the site for the new research paper.
Human and animal mitochondrial DNA were extracted from the sediments of the lower levels of the site.
"We don't need bones," Straus said. "The results show that several animals not represented by bones from the dig were present—either once living in the cave or as carcass pieces—in the past and, importantly, the humans who made the Solutrean artifacts during the height of the Last Glacial Maximum (about 25,000 to 21,000 years ago) had 'Fournol' genetic ancestry, as has been found in bones or teeth from sites in France and Spain (including La Riera in Asturias, a site dug by Straus in the 1970s). These were the people whose range had contracted southward during the climatic crisis and who preceded the Red Lady of El Miron and contributed to her DNA, along with DNA of Villabruna ancestry derived from humans whose genes had come to Cantabrian Spain in Lower Magdalenian times from the Balkans via northern Italy."
The ability to extract DNA from dirt makes it much more possible to study ancient animals and humans, since bones with well-preserved DNA, especially from humans, are rare.
"As with everything else at El Miron DNA-wise, the preservation of DNA in dirt here is extraordinary. We now know who the predecessors of the Red Lady were, confirming evidence from other sites with DNA from bones and teeth."
The sedaDNA shows the presence of carnivores like the dhole, a species of wild dog now confined to eastern and southeastern Asia, leopard and hyena, and ungulates like wooly mammoth, rhinoceros, and reindeer that are either only minimally or not at all represented by the bones that had been found and identified by the archeologists.
The sedaDNA evidence at El Mirón ranges from more than 46,000 years ago from Mousterian-Neanderthal times to the Initial Magdalenian, circa 21,000 to 20,000 years ago.
"This is another methodological and empirical breakthrough, like the DNA research on natural products that may have therapeutic value from bacteria preserved in the Red Lady's dental calculus published in Science by Warinner, Pierre Stallforth, Martin Klapper and colleagues in Jena," Straus said. "Meanwhile, we continue to publish on the basic archeology of El Miron: the seasonality of human occupations from the animals that they hunted, which is determined from teeth and bone development, stone tools, bone tools such as needles, and weapons such as points." Research at El Miron continues under the co-direction of Straus, Gonzalez Morales and, since 2023, Cuenca Solana and Igor Gutierrez Zugasti of the Universidad de Cantabria. The next step is the publication of the newest results by Gelabert and his team: the successful recovery of nuclear DNA from the El Mirón sediments, another big methodological and empirical breakthrough.
