Scientists reported on Wednesday that they had recovered the world’s oldest known DNA from mammoths whose carcasses had been frozen in the Siberian permafrost since the ice age.
The DNA was extracted from molars belonging to long-extinct elephants and dates back about 1.2 million years, scientists in the journal Nature reported. Until now, the oldest known DNA belonged to a prehistoric horse that lived between 560,000 and 780,000 years ago in the current Yukon area of Canada.
The researchers reconstructed relatively complete rows of DNA from three specimens as part of the effort to study the giant pedigree. Variations in genetic material have shown how ten-tonne slaughter cattle evolved in an era when mile-wide ice sheets covered much of the Northern Hemisphere – and a previously unknown ancestor of the mammoths that once lived in North America wandered around, revealed.
“With this giant DNA, you can look directly at evolution for more than a million years,” says Alfred Roca, a conservation geneticist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who studies but does not share the evolution of elephants. of the group that did the new research. “You can see the changes in the DNA and see how one species evolves into a completely different species.”
At the height of the ice age about 20,000 years ago – what scientists call the last glacial maximum – the cold, dry grassland where the mammoths lived was the most extensive habitat on earth. It stretches from Spain eastward across Eurasia to Canada and from the Arctic Islands southward to China.