World's oldest DNA in a more than million year old mammoth

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2021-02-18 03:00

International

The illustration represents a reconstruction of the steppe mammoths that preceded the woolly mammoth, based on the genetic knowledge we now have from the Adycha mammoth. Illustration: Beth Zaiken/Centre for Palaeogenetics

International researchers have unearthed DNA from two specimens of mammoths that walked the earth over a million years ago. The oldest previously sequenced DNA dates back from 780,000 to 560,000 years ago. The team discovered the mammoth remains in the Siberian northeast, and suggest that of the three mammoths discovered, one was approximately 1.65 million years old, and another lived around 1.34 million years ago. Two of the mammoths came from the line that gave rise to the woolly mammoth, they add.

Media release

From: Springer Nature

Ancient DNA that is more than one million years old has been recovered from two specimens of mammoth, reports a study in Nature. The oldest previously sequenced DNA dates from 780,000 to 560,000 years ago.

Ancient DNA has improved our understanding of prehistoric populations. However, some evolutionary processes, such as speciation (the formation of new and distinct species), often occur over time periods that are thought to be beyond the limits of DNA research. Nonetheless, theoretical models suggest that DNA might be able to survive on the timescales required.

Love Dalén and colleagues report the recovery of DNA from the molars of three mammoth specimens from the Early and Middle Pleistocene subepochs from northeast Siberia. On the basis of the age of the deposits from which the teeth were collected, two of the samples (designated Krestovka and Adycha) are more than one million years old. DNA-based age estimates obtained using mitochondrial genome data suggest that Krestovka is approximately 1.65 million years old, Adycha is around 1.34 million years old, and the final specimen (Chukochya) is 0.87 million years old.

Genomic data from these specimens suggest that there were two lineages of mammoth in eastern Siberia during the Early Pleistocene. Adycha and Chukochya come from the line that gave rise to the woolly mammoth, whereas the Krestovka mammoth represents a previously unrecognized lineage. The authors estimate that the Krestovka genome diverged from that of other mammoths around 2.66 to 1.78 million years ago, and that this lineage was ancestral to the first mammoths to colonize North America.

Multimedia

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Journal/
conference: Nature

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: Centre for Palaeogenetics, Stockholm, Sweden

Funder: T.v.d.V., P.P., D.D.-d.-M., M.D. and L.D. acknowledge support from the Swedish Research Council (2012-3869 and 2017-04647), FORMAS (2018-01640) and the Tryggers Foundation (CTS 17:109). A.G. is supported by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation (1,000 Ancient Genomes project). A.B. and P.S. were supported by the Francis Crick Institute (FC001595), which receives its core funding from Cancer Research UK, the UK Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust. P.S. was supported by the European Research Council (grant no. 852558), the Wellcome Trust (217223/Z/19/Z) and the Vallee Foundation. M.H., J.A.T., I.B., A.M.L. and G.X. were supported by NERC (grant no. NE/J010480/1) and the ERC StG grant GeneFlow (no. 310763). B.S. and J.O. were supported by the US National Science Foundation (DEB-1754451). P.N. was supported by RFBR (grant no. 13-05-01128). The authors also acknowledge support from Science for Life Laboratory, the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, the National Genomics Infrastructure funded by the Swedish Research Council, and Uppsala Multidisciplinary Center for Advanced Computational Science for assistance with massively parallel sequencing and access to the UPPMAX computational infrastructure. N. Clark at the Hunterian Museum provided access to the Scotland mammoth sample. Finally, we thank our late friend and colleague A. Sher, who defined and described the Olyorian sequence, collected large quantities of fossil vertebrate material (including all of the Early and Middle Pleistocene specimens studied here) and consistently promoted multidisciplinary studies on his finds.

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