The first study of what would come to be called aDNA was conducted in 1984, when Russ Higuchi and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley reported that traces of DNA from a museum specimen of the Quagga not only remained in the specimen over 150 years after the death of the individual, but could be extracted and sequenced. To determine whether DNA survives and can be recovered from the remains of extinct creatures, they examined dried muscle from a museum specimen of the quagga, a zebra-like species endemic to South Africa that went extinct in 1883. Over the next two years, through investigations into natural and artificially mummified specimens, researchers confirmed that this phenomenon was not limited to relatively recent museum specimens but could apparently be replicated in a range of mummified human samples that dated as far back as several thousand years.
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