very confused as to what DNA is, and have no technical expertise to understand detailed articles! Is DNA something you can look at under a microscope or what?
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DNA is a molecule that records the patterns that make the proteins that make up everything in your body. It’s a long and *extremely* tough molecule, as these things go, and has a lot of built in redundancy and repetition in its patterns as well. DNA can survive intact for a long time in good conditions, and even in bad conditions it takes a lot to break it down to the point where we cannot put it back together again, using those patterns and redundancy as a guide.
Imagine a book – if all the pages are ripped out, you can still put them back in the right order, using the page numbers. If half the pages are missing, it takes more work, but you can still have a good guess at the right order, and get a sense of what the book was about. When you try to examine very old bones for DNA, it would be like a book run thru a shredding machine, tiny fragments all mixed up – but still extractable, and with a lot of patience and technique, still able to be put back together.
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