The world's oldest DNA ever sequenced, dating back over a million years, was recovered from mammoth teeth buried in permafrost in Siberia, a study published Wednesday (February 17th) revealed.
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Analyzes carried out on three mammoth specimens shed new light on the Ice Age, when large mammals reigned, and the legacy of the woolly mammoth, the last survivors of which disappeared only 4000 years ago from the island. from Wrangel, off Siberia.
The decrypted genomes far exceed the oldest DNA ever sequenced so far, that of a horse 500,000 to 700,000 years old.
Here, DNA - the carrier of genetic information, called the genome - “
is incredibly old.
The samples are a thousand times older than Viking remains, and even predate the existence of modern humans and Neanderthals,
”marvels Love Dalen, of the Stockholm Center for Paleogenetics, who oversaw the study published in the Nature journal.
The fossils were discovered in the 1970s in Siberia, in permafrost (deep frozen ground, also called permafrost), and kept at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.
The researchers first succeeded in dating the teeth (molars) by comparing them to other species, such as small rodents, known to have been unique to particular periods, and found in the same sedimentary layers.
These early comparisons suggested that two of the large mammals were ancient steppe mammoths over a million years old.
The "
youngest
" of the three, around 800,000 years old, was the oldest woolly mammoth (a species that diverged from the Steppe mammoth) ever discovered.