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1
TWELVE THOUSAND YEARS OF
SOLITUDE
Everything was ready. I selected one of the diamond-tipped bits from the sterile rack and tightened
it into the jaws of the high-speed drill. Turning the dial up to 500 revolutions a second, I looked
carefully to see that the spinning drill was centralized in the chuck. There must not be any mistakes,
especially today. In my left hand, I picked up the jaw bone and turned it so that the outer surface of
the first molar tooth was facing me. I moved the jaw under the magnifier and brought the rotating
drill to within a millimetre of the enamel surface of the tooth. The tooth that had never bitten into a
pizza, nor crunched a piece of celery. The tooth that I was about to drill into was 12,000 years old.
The last food this tooth had touched was the flesh of a reindeer or wild horse. It was the tooth of a
young man, about twenty years old when he died. This man was a hunter, one of the first people to
arrive in Britain since the end of the last Ice Age.
The skeleton of the young man had been dug out of the limestone caves of Cheddar Gorge in
Somerset in 1986. Ten years later, in the autumn of 1996, I had brought his lower jaw, with the
beautifully preserved teeth still embedded, to my laboratory in Oxford. I was about to attempt to
recover the DNA, the genetic essence, of its original owner, trapped in the dentine beneath the hard
enamel which had encased and protected it for thousands of years. As the drill made contact with
the enamel surface, I steadied my left arm on the lab bench and pressed the bit into the tooth. The
whining pitch of the drill came down slightly as it cut into the enamel. This was a good sign. The
enamel was not too soft. That would have been a sure sign of biological decay, which would have
dashed any chance of finding intact DNA. Neither was the tooth granite-hard. That would have
meant that all the organic remains, including the DNA, had literally turned to stone. The Cheddar
tooth was somewhere in between, neither too soft, nor too hard.
After a few seconds, the drill had cut through the enamel layer and into the dentine which lay
behind. I could feel the drop in pressure as the tip of the drill moved into the softer dentine, and
heard its pitch rise as the speed increased. A second or two later, I caught the scent of burning – the
same unforgettable smell that instantly recalled dread visits to the dentist and the fillings of a
sweet-toothed youth. It was the smell of burning teeth. This was the unmistakable scent of
vaporizing protein, and the moment I caught the smell of it coming from the ancient tooth my spirits
rose. From that moment on, I was sure I would find his DNA, for if the protein which was being
vaporized by the drill had survived for 12,000 years, then there was every chance that his DNA
would have done so too. Both are biological molecules subject to the same laws of age and decay.
As soon as I smelled the burning, I pulled across the suction line. This was a device rather like