Siberian raspberry teeth have contributed to the discovery of the world’s oldest DNA, the scientific journal Nature recitation Wednesday.
Prior to the latest findings, the oldest DNA sequences were believed to have come from the 700,000-year-old horse’s leg bone from Canada in 2013.
Geneticists have now discovered DNA as large as 1.2 million years ago from molar samples of northeastern Siberian mammals excavated by Russian paleontologist Andrei Sher in the 1970s.
Two other samples are believed to have come from 1 million and 700,000 years ago.
“It’s a symbolic hurdle that I hope will inspire and motivate other groups who have ideas about a really deep series,Study author and bioinformatician Tom van der Valk said.
The findings suggest that the Siberian species may have entered North American Columbian mammals up to half a million years ago, according to Nature.
National Geography recitation that work on extracting the raspberry DNA began in 2017, when the Swedish Center for Paleogenetics received the samples from the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Former DNA researchers are now training their insights on other species found from the rapid freezing of Siberia, including musk stags, moose and lemmings.
“We saw the data we have, and I think it would be relatively easy to go beyond 2 million [years old], if we only had a good sample, ”said evolutionary geneticist Love Dalén, whose team was following the DNA of the Siberian mammoth.
The opportunity is not to give elderly people old million-year-old relatives in well-preserved conditions, although Dalén left the opportunity to hide samples in the “right environment, such as a deep cave.”