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Million-Year-Old Mammoth Teeth Contain Oldest DNA Ever Found
A woolly mammoth tusk discovered in a creek bed on Wrangel Island in 2017.
Photo: Love Dalén
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An international team of scientists has sequenced DNA from mammoth teeth that is at least a million years old, if not older. This research, published today in Nature, not only provides exciting new insight into mammoth evolutionary history, it reveals an entirely unknown lineage of ancient mammoth.
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Mammuthus primigenius) may rival
T. rex in popular imagination, but it is, in fact, one of the last mammoth species to have evolved, and it’s only one of various, sometimes odd-looking species of large, tusked animals belonging to the order Proboscidea. Mammoths are believed to have originated in Africa approximately 5 million years ago, with populations traveling north into what is now Eurasia and eventually moving into North America. We still have much to learn about these ancient proboscidean predecessor
Beth Zaiken/Centre for Palaeogenetics
For the first time, preserved DNA has been recovered from animal remains over a million years old. The DNA belonged to two mammoths that lived around 1.2 million years ago.
The genetic sequences change our understanding of mammoth evolution. They reveal that, at that time, Siberia was home to two distinct groups of these animals. The mammoths of North America were the product of a hybridisation event between these two groups, and obtained half of their DNA from each.
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“Instead of there being one species [or lineage] of mammoth up in Siberia around 1-2 million years ago, it now looks like there are two,” says Love Dalén at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm, Sweden.