The ancient bone finds mapped in high resolution

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Development of a new technology to protect the cultural heritage of ancient bone finds. It is an innovation developed by a study by the Universities of Bologna and Genoa, which allows the presence of collagen, a fundamental protein to be mapped at high resolution, for carrying out radiocarbon dating.
It will thus be possible to strategically sample the finds, identifying the fragments and suitable areas to be subjected to analysis.

The results – published in the journal Communications Chemistry of the Nature group – were described as “surprising” by the all-Italian team, which tested the new method on archaeological bones, effectively making the invisible visible and presenting itself as a real own revolution in the field of archaeology. “This innovation will make it possible to make significant progress in the study of human evolution”, explains Sahra Talamo, co-author of the study and director of the Bravho radiocarbon dating laboratory of the University of Bologna, because “we will be able to analyze the precious bone finds and obtain precise dating , minimizing the amount of material taken”.

The bones of ancient hominids

The information that can thus be found appears extremely important because the bones of ancient hominids and bone jewelery found in archaeological sites are extremely precious assets. Not only because what has been discovered will be better placed on the time line, but above all because from these finds it will be possible to obtain a lot of information on the life of ancient human populations, what they ate, their reproductive habits, their diseases, their movements and migrations. However, the possibility of obtaining this information is linked to the amount of collagen present in the bone findings. To combine the need to preserve the integrity of the finds as much as possible with the need to carry out analyzes with radiocarbon, scholars have developed a method which, thanks to a camera associated with the near infrared, allows to detect the average content of collagen in the observed samples. Scholars predict that this technique will make it possible to carry out radiocarbon dating even in many archaeological sites where until now it had not been possible to analyze the samples that came to light due to their poor conservation.