Biocodicology - A Deeper Dive

[MichelleL11]

I would have thought it might be possible to roughly date human DNA on the basis of comparison with the DNA of living people. 

Hi, Mark:

I did find a paper where they were able to date the entry of particular SNPs into the human genome (also discussed as "allele age").  This is super high level (population) work and the dating is related to hundreds or even thousands (rather than 10s) of generations.  I believe the shortest time frame discussed is 858 generations -- so about 22,000 years.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., Albers & McVean

Interestingly, it did allow for identification of the date of a likely common ancestor for a pair of different individuals (see results in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) which could maybe be adapted into buckets that could distinguishing between various individuals in a mix -- but I am not certain the values would be great enough difference to be able to categorize "old" from "new" when we've only got a 600 years of difference to work with (especially if those individuals aren't all that different genetically from a long term point of view).  Adding this kind of analysis on top of the basic issue of distinguishing reads from one individual from reads coming from another individual makes this really, really challenging.

But as you know this is really speculative and may be possible in the future -- I hope you get at a general level why this isn't practical at this point.  But this kind of work could form the basis for such a distinguishing if it were possible in the future.