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Million-year-old DNA provides a glimpse of mammoth evolution

DNA has been retrieved from mammoth specimens that are more than one million years old. Comparing the genomes of these animals and their descendants provides insights into the changes that occurred as one species evolved into another.
  1. Alfred L. Roca

    1. Alfred L. Roca is in the Department of Animal Sciences, College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA.

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In 2013, DNA from a horse that lived sometime between 560,000 and 780,000 years ago was sequenced1. It was the most ancient DNA sample ever analysed. But that record has just been smashed by van der Valk and colleagues2, writing in Nature. The authors retrieved DNA from the molars of three mammoths found in northeast Siberia, two of which lived more than one million years (Myr) ago.

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Nature 591, 208-209 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-00348-w

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