SEPULTAMENTOS PRÉ-HISTÓRICOS: UM PROTOCOLO ALTERNATIVO PARA EXTRAÇÃO DE DNA DOS OSSOS ANTIGOS NO BIOMA CERRADO DO BRASIL CENTRAL

Abstract

Archeology, from the Greek archaios (ancient) and logos (study), is the science that studies the material culture of past societies in order to understand their structure, how they work, and how change occurs. Finding the origins of the American man is one of its challenges. Among the theories put forward to explain the origins of the American man, the most famous affirms that Homo sapiens crossed the Bering Strait, having migrated from Africa 150.000 BCE, eventually occupying, at the end of the Pleistocene and the beginning of the Holocene, the last great landmass of the Earth: the Americas. The genetic mapping of haplogroups may be a positive evidence for that hypothesis. But if primitive man spread throughout the Americas, one needs to know who the central Brazilian Cerrado inhabitants were, whose skeletal material was found in various archeological sites. Dated material found in archeological sites point to more than 7.000 years ago. In order to know who were those people, we need to classify them into haplogroups. The first step is the collection of DNA, which is difficult because of contamination and bad weather in the cerrado. Once bones and teeth were provided, the search for a protocol for efficient DNA extraction began, going through countless trials and modifications of existing methods. More than one hundred extraction trials were done, finally concluding an adapted protocol with greater amounts of certain substances, which was used to extract DNA from 32 bone and tooth samples collected in various archeological sites. The extracted material was quantified and presented to PCR for the amplification of the ZFX/Y gene, having as a control DNA extracted from peripheral human blood through NaCl technique, after it was proved that they were human bones and teeth. Having established an efficient alternative protocol for DNA extraction, the task of sequencing and identification of primitive peoples of the central Brazilian Cerrado is made easier.