Using the oldest DNA ever recovered, scientists have reconstructed a rich ancient ecosystem in Greenland’s northern tip.
In a bleak valley not far from Greenland’s massive ice sheet, scientists have reconstructed a rich ancient ecosystem, down to its roving mastodons and smooth-barked birch trees. The clues come from the oldest DNA ever recovered: 2-million-year-old snippets of genetic material from more than 100 kinds of animals and plants, extracted from buried sediments.
Another surprise is that DNA—a fragile organic molecule—can stay intact for so long. Quartz and clay in the soil played a crucial role: The charged surfaces of the minerals captured the DNA and protected it from degrading enzymes and oxidizing agents, says study co-author Karina Sand, a geochemist at the Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre at the University of Copenhagen. The onset of the ice ages—the Pleistocene Epoch—about 2.
Undeterred, Willerslev spent the next 2 years honing methods to extract DNA from permafrost. In December 2002, he hit literal paydirt, prying from Siberian soil the genetic remains ice age mammoths, musk ox, and all sorts of plants. The following year, his team extracted eDNA from ice cores near bedrock under the Greenland Ice Sheet,It took ancient DNA pioneer Eske Willerslev and his team 15 years to succeed in prizing out of northern Greenland genetic secrets from the onset of the ice ages.
Decipherable DNA belonged to 102 different plant genera. Some are familiar today, but a few dozen no longer exist in Greenland. Of the handful of animals identified, the mastodon “blew our mind,” says study co-author Mikkel Pedersen, a geoarchaeologist at the GeoGenetics Centre. No one expected the range of the extinct relative of elephants to extend that far north, he says.
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