Going back more than a million years, scientists reported on Wednesday that they have recovered the world’s oldest known DNA from mammoths whose carcasses had been frozen in Siberian permafrost since the ice age.
Extracted from molars taken from long-lost elephants, the DNA is about 1.2 million years old, scientists reported in the journal Nature. Until now, the oldest known DNA belonged to a prehistoric horse that lived between 560,000 and 780,000 years ago in what is now Canada’s Yukon Territory.
The researchers reconstructed relatively complete DNA sequences from three specimens as part of an effort to study the mammoth family tree. Variations in genetic material have shown how 10-ton behemoths evolved in an era when miles of ice covered a large part of the northern hemisphere – and revealed a previously unknown ancestor of mammoths once traveling to America. north.
“With this mammoth DNA, you can look directly at evolution over a million years,” said Alfred Roca, a conservation geneticist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who studies the evolution of elephants. was part of the group that conducted the new research. “You can see the changes in DNA and you can watch a species evolve into a very different species.”
At the height of the ice age about 20,000 years ago – what scientists call the last glacial maximum – the cold, dry pastures where mammoths lived were the largest habitat on earth. It stretched from Spain to the east, through Eurasia, to Canada and from the Arctic islands to the south, to China.