Professor is leading authority on where exactly we came from, Yang Feiyue reports.

Fu Qiaomei (second from right), a leading paleogenetic scientist, discusses experiments with colleagues in a superclean lab. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Fu Qiaomei has been affectionately nicknamed by her colleagues and the moniker gives a clue to her line of work. Her nickname is "DNA detective".

The 39-year-old's efforts and persistence have enabled extinct societies to tell their tales, even though their remains and clues to their identity have been compromised, almost beyond recognition, by the passage of time.

Understanding the process of coevolution of ancient humans and microorganisms will also shed some light on modern or future human adaption to the environment.

Fu Qiaomei, director, Molecular Paleontology Laboratory at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleon-tology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Her evidence-backed discoveries of a modern human from Romania dating back 36,000 years with its recent Neanderthal ancestor, and a 14,000-year-old European featuring dark skin and light-colored eyes, who lived during the Ice Age, took academia by storm in 2015-16.

Her decoding of the first and earliest modern human's genome from China opened up new prospects for the genetic study of past East Asians in 2017.

Using cutting-edge paleogenetic (the study of genetic material to uncover the past) techniques, she retrieved the first Denisovan DNA in East Asia from soil in 2020. Denisovans and Neanderthals split into separate branches about 400,000 years ago.

These are just some of the achievements from her exploration of the genetic roots of humankind.

Fu's work in the field of paleontology has played a big part in untangling the early admixture history of modern humans and Neanderthals, and revealing how early agriculture affected European farmers.

"I'd like to be of some service in illuminating the human prehistory of Asia by investigating the ancient genomes of humans, animals and pathogens," Fu says.

If the Earth's history of 4.6 billion years were to be compressed into 24 hours, humans arrived at 23:59.

"However, it still remains a mystery exactly what our ancestors went through," Fu says.

She has been on the quest for answers to such eternal questions as who human beings are and where they came from.

"What attracts me most about doing scientific research is exploring the unknown," says Fu, who has served as a researcher and director of the Molecular Paleontology Laboratory at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

"I come from China, and I have an eagerness and a responsibility to study the evolutionary history of East Asians, starting with the past populations of China."

DNA study of ancient remains came into being in the 1980s and has made great strides since the beginning of the 21st century.

"Through the ancient DNA, we can directly observe the genetic composition of ancient individuals and the promiscuous pattern of genes," Fu explains.

"The ancient DNA data can reflect the genetic characteristics of the population to a large extent, which is a useful tool for the study of individuals of the past in different regions, as well as evolutionary characteristics and changes of the related groups."

Yet, using the technology to capture DNA from ancient biological samples is by no means an easy task.

"DNA traces in biological remains become increasingly more fragmented and even disappear after a long period of natural degradation, making extraction rather difficult," Fu reveals.

Fu prepares DNA samples. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Invasion and contamination by microbial DNA only makes things more challenging. In 2013, Fu led a team to tackle those problems, and codeveloped an advanced ancient nuclear genome capturing technology that can adsorb, separate, enrich and "fish out" human DNA. This is remarkable considering the feat can be achieved with a concentration of merely 0.03 percent of DNA mixed with a large number of microorganisms from the environment.

The technology allowed Fu and her team to "fish out" the nuclear DNA of the Tianyuan men who date back to about 40,000 years ago in Beijing in 2013, and to further acquire its genome sequence in 2017－the first ancient human genome in China and the earliest modern human's genome in East Asia.

Science Magazine rated the genome information as filling a key gap in geology and time concerning East Asia.

While the genetics of ancient humans in Southeast Asia, Siberia, and the Japanese archipelago have been well-studied, little had been known until now about the genetics of ancient humans in China.

Fu and her team turned to investigate the past populations in northern and southern China and cast a spotlight on an important period in East Asia's early history, which marked the transition from hunter-gathering to agricultural economies.

They found that these Neolithic humans share the closest genetic relationship to present-day East Asians. While more divergent ancestries can be found in Southeast Asia and the Japanese archipelago, in the Chinese mainland, Neolithic populations already displayed genetic features belonging to present-day East Asians.

The findings reflected the profound impact that population movement and mixture has had on human history and proved a continuity that extends back 9,500 years.

From a small-town girl, Fu became a leading scientist through continuously opting out of comfortable choices.

In college, she majored in protective technology for cultural relics. But out of a preference for a biologyrelated discipline, she gave up the postgraduate recommendation from her own college, and went on to pass the entrance exams of the CAS to engage in bone research.

Upon completing her master's degree in 2009, she changed her major again. She headed to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany to study for a PhD in ancient human genomics, despite an absence of the relevant background.

This paved the way for her to engage in ancient DNA studies.

During her studies overseas, she published a string of research papers that shed light on our human ancestors. Along with her international team, she helped to decode the genome of the then earliest modern human unearthed in Siberia, with the sample retrieved from a 45,000-year-old femur.

In the paper published in 2014 in the scientific journal Nature, they found that strands of Neanderthal DNA in the Siberian sample genome were on average 1.8-4.2 times longer than those found in present-day populations. The early modern human's genome helped scientists estimate the date of Neanderthal admixture to 50,000-60,000 years ago.

In June 2016, the geneticist was named as one of the 10 science stars in China by Nature, for her work in redrafting the history of Europe's earliest modern humans and her potential for making groundbreaking revelations pertaining to Asia's ancient past.

Earlier that year, Fu had returned to China and served as director of the Ancient DNA Laboratory of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology.

Her research provided important evidence about the formation and evolution of the Chinese nation.

Fu and her team have found the Austronesian islanders that populate the Taiwan Straits, Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific have very close connections with people who lived in the southern coastal areas of China during the Neolithic period.

"Fu's findings are of great scientific value and social significance," says Bai Chunli, honorary president of the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Fu and her team have also mapped the dynamic genetic history of early populations in China over the past 40,000 years, proposing that the East Asian-specific adaptive gene, EDAR, appeared at least 19,000 years ago.

At the moment, one of Fu's focuses has been on human evolution combined with ancient microorganisms, especially pathological ones.

"Much information has been lost in the long process of evolution that is important to the human," Fu says.

Fu and her team are working on displaying the long process through extracting information from more materials and traces, such as ancient dental calculus and pathological bone samples.

"This work is not only based on our own interests, but more importantly, it may provide important genetic information for us to understand the health problems of modern humans," Fu says.

"At the same time, understanding the process of coevolution of ancient humans and microorganisms will also shed some light on modern or future human adaption to the environment."

What Fu hopes to pass onto younger scholars and students is a skeptical spirit.

Whenever she is about to overturn an existing result, she says her first response is not excitement, but suspicion of a possible mistake on her part.

The self-doubt only goes away through a process of constant faultfinding and authentication.

"I encourage them (students) to make an attempt at challenging authority, and then test and verify over and over again," she says.

"Many breakthroughs come from moments like this."

Contact the writer at yangfeiyue@chinadaily.com.cn