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A woolly mammoth tusk emerges from the permafrost (handout of the journal "Nature")
Photo: HANDOUT / AFP
From the teeth of mammoths from the Siberian permafrost, researchers have extracted the oldest traces of DNA that have been available to science in history.
"This DNA is incredibly old," said Love Dalén from the Center for Paleogenetics in Stockholm.
"The samples are a thousand times older than the remains of Vikings and go back to the time before humans and Neanderthals." The results of the study were published on Wednesday in the latest issue of the journal "Nature".
You can read the original article here: Million-year-old mammoth genomes shatter record for oldest ancient DNA
In total, there are three mammoth finds, one of which is around 800,000 years old and the other two more than a million years.
This means that they go far behind the oldest DNA finds so far, which come from a horse and are 560,000 to 780,000 years old.
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Steppe Mammoth - in a reconstruction of the magazine "Nature"
Photo: HANDOUT / AFP
The mammoths now examined are on the one hand two steppe mammoths that lived more than a million years ago.
The third mammoth is one of the earliest woolly-haired mammoths ever found.
The researchers used small samples of the genetic material DNA obtained from the animals' teeth.
Dalén compared this to "a pinch of salt on your plate".
The researchers succeeded in sequencing millions of base pairs from these small samples.
The oldest mammoth is called Krestovka and could even be 1.65 million years old.
The second mammoth, Adycha, is dated 1.34 million years ago,
the youngest, Chukochya, at 870,000 years.
Dalén restricted, however, that there was a lack of clarity in the dating of Krestovka's DNA.
By comparing the genome with that of an African elephant, a modern relative of the mammoth, the researchers were able to reconstruct parts of the mammoth genome.
The Krestovka genome indicates that it is a previously unknown genetic line.
This could have branched off from the other mammoths two million years ago and lead to those mammoths that lived in North America.
In Siberia, ice age conditions and warm, humid periods followed each other.
Because of climate change, the permafrost is melting and currently releasing more mammoth remains, Dalén explained.
He was optimistic that, in the future, even older DNA traces could be obtained from the permafrost, dating back as much as 2.6 million years.
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