2 million-year-old DNA reveals ancient Greenland ecosystem

North Greenland is known as “the land of the midnight sun and dog sledding” as it is a polar desert with large icebergs. But that wasn’t always the case – 2 million years ago there was a “wild ecosystem unlike any now found on Earth”.

The historic and “extraordinary” discovery and new study published in Nature this week show just how much the glacial landscape has changed. Researchers have found 2 million-year-old DNA – the oldest ever found – buried in clay and silt that has been preserved by permafrost at the northernmost point in Greenland.

“A new chapter of one hundred years of history has finally opened and for the first time we can directly look at the DNA of ecosystems from the distant past,” said one of the researchers, Eske Willerslev from the University of Cambridge. says Aenean sometimes. “DNA can degrade quickly, but we’ve shown that under the right circumstances, it can now go back further in time than anyone would dare to imagine.”

Willerslev, together with Kurt H. Kjær from the University of Copenhagen, discovered 41 samples, each a few millionths of a millimeter long, but with an invaluable amount of information. Those small patterns revealed the frozen region that was once the ancient home of many more animalsplants and microorganisms than they are today, rabbits and lemmings.

But the most surprising of the discoveries were the tracks of animals that were never thought to be on earth at all – reindeer and mastodons. The area where the DNA was found is usually only known for the smallest plants, rabbit and cow moss, depending on the nature.

“Reindeers, according to paleontologists, should not have survived,” Willerslev told the nature of the animal, which lives in the wild west of the country. “They did not exist at that time.”

Mastodons, according to the San Diego Museum of Natural History, were large Ice Age mammals similar in size and features to today’s elephants. The animals, which became extinct 13,000 years ago, were thought to live mostly across North and Central America.

The researchers also found evidence that the present relatively empty environment was once a “woody ecosystem unlike any found on Earth” according to nature, filled with trees, spruces and taxicans, which do not grow properly, which are far north.

“No one predicted this ecosystem in the north Greenland this time,” Willerslev said.

Additional discoveries of sole crabs and green algae support scientists’ belief that the climate in northern Greenland 2,000 years ago was warmer than it is today.

As incredible as the findings are, researchers are just as excited about what they can mean in future studies that use ancient DNA.

“Similarly detailed flora and vertebrate DNA records may survive in other areas,” the study says. “If validated, these findings will advance our understanding of climate variability and biotic interactions during the warmer Early Pleistocene epochs across the High Arctic.”