An illustration of the ancient lineage of steppe mammoths, which led to the wooly mammoths that roamed the Arctic (Credit: Beth Zaiken/Center For Palaeogenetics)
A team of Swedish scientists has successfully extracted and reconstructed the world s oldest DNA from the tooth of a Siberian mammoth, which roamed Earth over a million years ago. Also known as deoxyribonucleic acid, the all-important molecule which contains the genetic instructions for the development and function of living things. provides new insights into the evolution of the ancient Ice Age giants. Prior to this, the oldest DNA sequenced came from the bone of a horse that trotted around Canada about 700,000 years ago.
By Kelly MacnamaraAgence France-Presse PARIS Teeth from mammoths buried in the Siberian permafrost for more than a million years have yielded the world's oldest DNA ever sequenced, according to a recently published study, shining the genetic searchlight into the deep past. Researchers said the three specimens, one roughly 800,000 years old and two over a million years old,
T
he wooly mammoth (
Mammuthus primigenius) is an iconic animal, like the saber tooth tiger or dire wolf, from a time in human history when our position at the top of the global food chain was decidedly not assured (and being something s prey was not limited to just other humans). Perhaps this is a reason that resurrection of mammoths using Jurassic Park-like technology has some currency and appeal (
but see
How to Clone a Mammoth for reasons why this may not be such a good idea). Perhaps paradoxically, the mammoth arose in Africa 5 million years ago and like its (very) distant
The First Example of Hybrid Speciation in Ancient DNA
The new study has also amplified the ability for researchers to track the evolutionary process of speciation – the formation of new and distinct species. A
Nature press release states that this process generally occurs “over time periods that are thought to be beyond the limits of DNA research.”
A tusk from a woolly mammoth discovered in a creek bed on Wrangel Island in 2017. (Credit: Love Dalén)
Nonetheless, the scientists’ study of the mammoth DNA suggests that there was not one, but two different lineages of mammoth alive during the Early Pleistocene in the region of what is now eastern Siberia. Adycha and Chukochya are believed to be members of a species that spawned the woolly mammoth, but Krestovka appears to come from an unknown, and possibly entirely new, mammoth lineage. Tom van der Valk, the study’s lead author and a bioinformatician at the University of Uppsala in Sweden, explains the researchers’