> The advent of second-generation sequencing technologies allows for the retrieval of ancient genomes from long-dead people and, using non-human sequencing reads, of the pathogens that infected them.

This is pretty cool. I'm not sure what state of the art is in DNA sequencing, but it sounds like this is impressive. The abstract mentions that it's the oldest DNA sequencing sourced the celluloid (a newspaper in this case), but I don't know if there are successes from other sources that are older.