In 2021, researchers announced the discovery of the world’s oldest DNA. It came from mammoths that lived about a million years ago.
Now a Danish-led research group has uncovered DNA from Greenland that is roughly twice as old. The study has been published in the journal Nature.
Hereditary material from mastodons, cedar, birch, reindeer, geese and many more species reveals information about the ecosystem in Greenland in the first part of the Quaternary, the period that includes the ice ages.
“The ancient DNA samples were found buried deep in sediment that had built-up over 20,000 years. The sediment was eventually preserved in ice or permafrost and, crucially, not disturbed by humans for two million years,” says Kurt H. Kjær, a professor at the Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre who was also involved in the study.
In the samples, the researchers found fragments of DNA from an ecosystem in Greenland that was different from today’s. It used to be a greener and warmer island.
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Today, approximately 81 per cent of Greenland is covered by ice all year round, according to the Norwegian online encyclopaedia, Store Norske Leksikon.
Two million years ago, several types of trees grew on the island, the DNA analysis showed.
