Scientists Discover Oldest DNA Ever, Revealing 2 Million-Year-Old Lost World

In a major breakthrough for genetic research, scientists have recovered what is by far the oldest DNA to date. The 2-million-year-old DNA reveals an unprecedented glimpse of a unique Ice Age ecosystem that existed long ago, while also offering an eerie preview of our own future in a warming world, reports a new study.

The discovery of this lost world is based on environmental eDNA (eDNA), a mishmash of genetic detritus that represents an entire habitat, extracted from Kap København Formation, a fossil bed that sits in a polar desert in Northern Greenland. The frozen landscape and mineral conditions at the site contributed to the unrivaled preservation of this genetic material, which is a full million years older than the next oldest DNA, found in a mammoth tooth.

Since 2006, researchers led by Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Cambridge, have meticulously worked to collect and analyze samples from Kap København. Now, the team unveils a “reconstructed ecosystem [that] has no modern analogue,” home to mastodons, reindeer, geese, horseshoe crabs, corals, and other lifeforms that lived around an open boreal forest that flourished when this part of Greenland was 11 to 19°C warmer than it is today, according to a study published on Wednesday in Nature.

“It was super exciting when we recovered the DNA of a very different ecosystem,” Willerslev said in a press briefing on Tuesday that included several other study co-authors. “Obviously, it's important that we can go much further back in time, but it's also the time we can go back to. This is a time where it was significantly warmer” and featured “a climate which is very similar to what we expect to face with global warming.”

“Therefore, of course it gives some kind of idea or impression of how nature can respond to increasing temperatures,” he continued. “The great surprise is that this ecosystem that we see is an ecosystem with no modern analogue. It's a mixture between Arctic and temperate species and you don’t see that anywhere today.”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/88q3xa/scientists-discover-oldest-dna-ever-revealing-2-million-year-old-lost-world

This is so cool I can't even begin to process it.