Jakarta –
The scientist has found DNA oldest in the world. DNA from 2 million years ago was recovered from sediments in Greenland, Denmark.
This DNA broke the previous record for oldest DNA, at 1 million years old, set in 2021.
“The DNA is about double what has been taken before,” Eske Willerslev of the University of Cambridge told News Scientist quoted on Tuesday (13/12/2022).
Thanks to this discovery, Willerslev and his colleagues were able to reconstruct the ecosystem that existed in northern Greenland 2 million years ago. At that time, Greenland had a warmer climate than it does today. Today the area is an arctic wasteland and has few organisms.
Scientists suspect that the Greenland region was once a forest that was home to rabbits, reindeer and possibly even mastodons, elephant-like animals that once lived in North America.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be north [Arktik]we can go twice as far back in time,” Willerslev said.
Willerslev and his team got it DNA comes from the Kap København Formation, a series of layers of sand, silt and silt over 90 meters thick. So, what creature does this DNA come from?
The oldest DNA origin in the world
As it turned out, this DNA did not come from fossilized organisms, but was bound to mineral particles in the sediment layers. This environmental DNA comes from the full range of organisms that live in the area.
The team found 102 plant genera. Some still grow in northern Greenland today, such as dryas bush and vaccinium. But others no longer live there, such as the cypress (picea), the hawthorn (crataegus) and the populus.
Fewer animal species have been identified from this DNA. However, DNA revealed that there was an arctic hare (Lepus arcticus), a rodent related to lemmings and muskrats, geese and wildebeest.
There is also DNA from an extinct relative of the elephant, which the team has tentatively identified as a mastodon, not a mammoth. Mastodons have lived in the Americas for several million years, but have never been found in Greenland.
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(nir/nwk)