DNA from animals and plants that populated Siberia from 395,000 to 10,000 years ago has been recovered from permafrost. The discovery of the genetic fragments – by far the oldest DNA sequences yet authenticated – will give scientists unprecedented power to reconstruct ancient ecosystems and track them over time.
Eske Willerslev and his team at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark sampled permafrost along 1200 kilometres of Siberia’s Arctic coast. They drilled to depths of 31 metres, removed cores of soil, and then extracted any DNA preserved in the frozen earth. Using the PCR technique, the team amplified segments of…
