Pharaoh Tuthankamen's famous burial mask.
Credit: Wikimedia
On 26 November 1922, the British Egyptology Howard Carter peered through a tiny hole into the tomb of Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings.
"I see wonderful things," he gasped as he glimpsed a profusion of gold and ebony, hidden for more than 30 centuries.
The mummy, the gorgeous funeral mask, coffin and artifacts that accompanied the boy king into the afterlife yielded an extraordinary insight into the long-lost world of the pharaohs.
Yet what would Carter have said about computerised tomography (CT) scanners and genomics?
That without even laying a finger on the precious relic, archaeologists could get a 3D image of Tutankhamun's remains?
That a tiny sample of preserved tissue could shed light on the monarch's lineage and help explain the mystery of his demise?
In a major investigation into Tutankhamun, Egyptian scientist Zahi Hawass and others used genetic fingerprinting to build a family tree thanks to DNA variations handed from generation to generation.
The technique leapt into the lexicon of history sleuths in 2004.
That was the year genetic material coaxed from a pickled heart in a French cathedral, and compared to a strand of hair cut from the head of Marie-Antoinette, proved that a child who died in prison at the height of the French Revolution was indeed the uncrowned 10-year-old king, Louis XVII.
For two centuries, French royalists had claimed the child had been spirited from his cell by a Scarlet Pimpernel character, a notion that unleashed a rash of pretenders to the throne.
A year ago, scientists in Germany published a draft of nearly two-thirds of the genome of the Neanderthal. It suggests this strange, extinct cousin of humans did not interbreed with modern Homo sapiens.
And last week, Danish researchers, working on a sample of 4,000-year-old hair found in a long-abandoned settlement in Greenland, were able to say it came from the head of a man who most probably had brown eyes and brown skin and died quite young.
He had shovel-form front teeth and had dry earwax, which increased susceptibility to ear infections.
Even better: a comparison with the DNA of ethnic groups alive today indicates the man's tribe hailed from ... Siberia. It had crossed the Bering Strait into Alaska and headed east to colonise Greenland.
