Christina Warinner uncovers ancient tales in dental plaque
DNA on fossil teeth offers clues to past lifestyles, health and disease
Christina Warinner’s work with microbes hasn’t made her a germaphobe. “It’s given me this deep appreciation for this microbial world in which we live,” she says.
Christina Warinner, 37 Molecular anthropologist University of Oklahoma Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
In a pitch-black rainforest with fluttering moths and crawling centipedes, Christina Warinner dug up her first skeleton. Well, technically it was a full skeleton plus two headless ones, all seated and draped in ornate jewelry. To deter looters, she excavated through the night while one teammate held up a light and another killed as many bugs as possible.
As Warinner worked, unanswerable questions about the people whose skeletons she was excavating flew through her mind. “There’s only so much you can learn by looking with your own eyes at a skeleton,” she says. “I became increasingly interested in all the things that I could not see — all the stories that these skeletons had to tell that weren’t immediately accessible, but could be accessible through science.”
At age 21, Warinner cut her teeth on that incredibly complex sacrificial burial left behind by the Maya in a Belize rainforest. Today, at age 37, the molecular anthropologist scrapes at not-so-pearly whites to investigate similar questions, splitting her time between the University of Oklahoma in Norman and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany.