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World’s Oldest DNA Unlocks Lineage of Ice Age Mammoths - The Wall Street Journal

World’s Oldest DNA Unlocks Lineage of Ice Age Mammoths - The Wall Street Journal

World’s Oldest DNA Unlocks Lineage of Ice Age Mammoths - The Wall Street Journal
Feb 17, 2021 1 min, 27 secs

Reaching back in time more than a million years, scientists reported Wednesday that they had recovered the world’s oldest known DNA from mammoths whose carcasses had lain frozen in the Siberian permafrost since the Ice Age.

Extracted from molars taken from the long-extinct elephants, the DNA dates back about 1.2 million years, the scientists reported in the journal Nature.

“With this mammoth DNA, you can look directly at evolution across more than a million years of time,” said.

At the height of Ice Age some 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.

As many as 10 million mammoth carcasses are preserved in the Arctic permafrost, according to paleontologists at the U.K.’s Natural History Museum in London.

at the Centre for Palaeogenetics at Stockholm University took the DNA from mammoth carcasses that had been found in northeastern Siberia during the 1970s and then kept at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Geological Institute in Moscow.

DNA from the older two specimens dated to around 1.2 million years ago, the scientists said.

Both belonged to a species called the steppe mammoth, which typically measured 15 feet tall and sported curving tusks up to 16 feet long.

The third specimen belonged to one of the earliest known woolly mammoths, a smaller species that lived between 500,000 and 800,000 years ago, the scientists said.

The genetic analyses identified one of the steppe mammoths as a member of a group that eventually evolved into the woolly mammoth, a species that survived in some regions until about 4,000 years ago.

The other steppe mammoth belonged to a previously unknown lineage that may have been an ancestor of the Columbian mammoths that later lived in North America.

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