A summer for twenty-four years ago, I worked at the DN:s Göteborgsredaktion. Together with a small group of local journalists, I was invited to a press conference to Huseby Klev on the island of Orust. An archaeologist by the name of Bengt Nordqvist went around across the park and told exalterat of their new bargains.

And they were certainly attention-grabbing.

traces of people who lived in the archipelago for approximately 10,000 years ago. They had eaten delfinbiff, fish, and hazelnuts, and they had chewed on the näverolja from birch, a kind of resin.

Kådabitarna soon became known as “the world’s oldest chewing gums”, and with the distinctive title became the findings from Huseby Klev an international news story.

dental impressions, showed that children as young as five years had helped to chew. For there was enough question about a work, and not just to chew on something good for fun. Already the first findings indicated that delfinjägarna at Huseby Klev used björkkåda as a kind of mankind’s ancient stone age plastic padding, to attach the lace of the stone in wooden shafts and to seal the boats.

the , five years ago, I started working full time with a book on the history of Europe in the light of new dna technology.

the Findings from Huseby Klev, I wanted to obviously have with you. There were also a few bones of the dead. With an age of nearly 10,000 years later these bones with a few other relics to be the oldest people that have been found in present-day Sweden.

I remember so well when I visited one of the most prominent scientists working with ancient dna in our country. ”Unfortunately,” he said and shook his head. ”We have really tried with the legs from Huseby Klev. But it was not. We were not proposing any dna.”

the new winds. The other day la a Swedish team like a article on a web page förpublicering called Biorxiv. Förstaförfattare is the doctoral student Natalija Kashuba in Uppsala.

She has been using a new way to extract dna from Huseby Klev. Not from the old legs, but from the old kådabitarna. The resin tuggades long and well to get the right consistency, and at the chewing emanated lots of saliva, and this saliva was abundant with the dna.

Which thus has been preserved in ten thousand years, just as Natalija Kashuba hoped.

this news is the technical breakthrough – dna-technology goes so fast forward. Even if the dna in the bones and teeth are too broken down, scientists can analyze the objects that ancient people have managed. Yes, and with the floor in their settlements may do, according to Svante Pääbo recently has shown.

But the new results from Huseby Klev also confirm how it happened, Scandinavia was populated after the ice age.

It seems to have been about two completely different groups.

from the continent. They were probably blue-eyed and quite dark-skinned, and they made their stone tools by hitting them.

from the East came completely other people. Through the river Volga in present Russia, but before that from Siberia, the current Mongolia, or China. They probably were paler in skin and brunögda, and had a more advanced technology to produce the tool by squeezing the stones hard.

Somewhere in the region of the north cape, they were met with both groups. They mixed with each other, despite the fact that they were so different (although both had their origins in Africa once upon a time, but they had lived separately for tens of thousands of years).

presstekniken eventually came to dominate in large parts of present Norway and Sweden.

And exactly as it looks in the Huseby Klev. The three tuggummituggande individuals who have the dna analyzed is genetically a mixture of eastern and western stone-age hunters. The tools are of the eastern presstekniken.

the Story from the island of Orust was a good news already for 24 years ago. Now it has become very much better.