DNA is recovered from ancestral snack

WE MAY soon find out exactly what our ancestors ate when they sat down to dinner. The discovery that DNA can be extracted from ancient cooked bones overturns the expectation that heat would destroy such genetic material. Claudio Ottoni of the University of Rome, Italy, and his team studied 1100-year-old cattle bones from an archaeological site in the UK. By heating modern cattle bones, they found that temperatures of 140 °C damaged the collagen, and 170 °C destroyed it. While the team are unsure how hot the ancient bones got, they did find that only up to 16 per cent of the collagen that remained in them was undamaged. In contrast, the DNA they extracted from the old bones was identifiably bovine. The team speculate that heat might destroy enzymes that break down DNA or inhibit DNA amplification in the lab.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026865.100-dna-is-recovered-from-ancestral-snack.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=life