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.