Oldest DNA Sequenced Yet Comes From Million-Year-Old Mammoths        Genetic material from three anc

Oldest DNA Sequenced Yet Comes From Million-Year-Old Mammoths        Genetic material from three ancient molars reveals secrets of about how the Ice Age elephants evolved.Woolly mammoths were icons of the Ice Age. Starting 700,000 years ago to just 4,000 years ago, they trundled across the chilly steppe of Eurasia and North America. As ancient glaciers expanded across the Northern Hemisphere, these beasts survived the rapidly cooling temperatures with cold-resistant traits, a characteristic they came by not through evolution, as earlier thought. Woolly mammoths, a new Nature study finds, inherited the traits that made them so successful from a mammoth species closer to a million years old.The clues come from some incredibly old DNA extracted from a trio of molars uncovered in northeastern Siberia. The oldest is nicknamed the Krestovka mammoth, dated to about 1.2 million years ago. The other two molars are nicknamed the Adycha and Chukochya mammoths, dated to 1 million and 500,000 to 800,000 years old, respectively. The fact that the researchers were able to extract and analyze the DNA from these fossils at all is a landmark. Up until now, the oldest look at ancient genes came from an Ice Age horse that lived over 560,000 years ago. The new mammoth samples double that, taking the title for the oldest DNA yet recovered from fossil remains. “We had to deal with DNA that was significantly more degraded compared to the horse,” says Swedish Museum of Natural History paleogeneticist Love Dalén, an author of the new study..Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/oldest-dna-sequenced-yet-comes-million-year-old-mammoths-180977035/ -- source link

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