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Scientists have retrieved the oldest DNA ever, which points to an ecosystem unlike anything on Earth today.

Researchers drilled in the Kap København formation in Greenland to collect soil samples.

Scientists have retrieved the oldest DNA ever, which points to an ecosystem unlike anything on Earth today.

Oldest DNA Ever Found Reveals Secrets of the Ancient Arctic

Researchers drilled in the Kap København formation in Greenland to collect soil samples.

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Oldest DNA Ever Found Reveals Secrets of the Ancient ArcticPublished: December 7, 2022Narrator: Scientists announced they sequenced the oldest DNA to date—two-million-year-old DNA found in Greenland, revealing an ancient ecosystem, unlike anything existing today. Natalia Rybczynski: Finding DNA in the deep time context is amazing. It's really important for how this field is going to advance.Ross MacPhee: It's really the most remarkable new thing. Since I've been working in this area, it's come along the pike.Narrator: The movie Jurassic Park made the idea of recovering old DNA popular, but successfully sequencing really ancient DNA has proved elusive. Eske Willerslev: The irony is that in 2005, I did a review paper on ancient DNA and how long time DNA can survive. And I said, well, it's it's not possible that, you know, you can survive more than 1 million years. Right? Narrator: The latest work by Eske Willerslev and his team extends the record of ancient DNA by about another million years. To find the DNA, researchers drilled in the Kap København formation in Greenland to collect soil samples. They found evidence of ancient living things—including horseshoe crabs, caribou, and even mastodon—using DNA found in soil.Eske Willerslev: Every single cell contains DNA, right? And even if a mastodon urinates or put feces on the ground, you know, it's DNA. Narrator: It’s likely that the ancient DNA was uniquely preserved by a combination of the cold and some minerals in the two-million-year-old sediment. Eske Willerslev: DNA is electrically charged and many sediment particles are also electrically charged. So certain sediment particles such as clay will bind DNA. I mean, the DNA will basically stick to it.Tom Gilbert: The binding basically protects the DNA from the enzymes that would otherwise chop it up. Narrator: That bond may have kept that DNA intact for far longer than scientists—including Willerslev—had thought possible. But to retrieve the DNA from the soil and separate it from everything else in it required state of the art technology, and techniques developed over many years of trial and error.Eske Willerslev: I mean, I don't even know how to describe it, right? I mean, you had been sitting, working on something for 15 years that doesn't work. And suddenly there's a breakthrough. It's like you said, “Oh, my God” right? “Oh, my God.”Tom Gilbert: Sounds very boring to many people at first, but this is the fundamental thing that changes everything because you can suddenly have samples that you thought had no DNA at all because there's nothing happening. It turns out they did have DNA, but it stuck. And what you're doing is releasing it.Narrator: The next challenge was to compare the DNA to vast libraries of all other known DNA to identify close relatives. The plants and animals they found in this ancient ecosystem do not exist together today.Eske Willerslev: So, for example, we find a horseshoe crab, which is a crab that is found way, way to the south today, and also suggests that the ocean at that time was way warmer than what we see today. Narrator: Unlike the polar desert that exists there today, this forest ecosystem could have been considerably warmer. But like Greenland today existed in extreme seasonality—months of summer sun and complete darkness in the winter months. Natalia Rybczynski: So just finding that a forest existed is giving you an indication of climate. And yeah, I think I think that's really stunning. Still stunning to me to think of how warm it is and that you have life over time that has adapted to the extreme seasonality. Narrator: Understanding the lineage of these ancient living things could help researchers understand how those that exist today evolved and how they might adapt to a changing climate.Natalia Rybczynski: If it works, it's going to change everything for us in terms of thinking about how ecosystems respond to climate change. Ross MacPhee: All of this is like building blocks. You get one building block, you don't have the structure to get two. You still don't have the structure. You have ten and you can start building something.

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Oldest DNA Ever Found Reveals Secrets of the Ancient Arctic

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Support Provided By

Explore More

Polar Extremes

2-million-year-old DNA reveals surprising Arctic ecosystem

How Earth’s Climate Changed Over the Past 500 Million Years