Million-year-old mammoth genomes set a record for ancient DNA

Teeth from mammoths buried in the Siberian permafrost for more than a million years have led to the world’s oldest known DNA being sequenced, according to a study that shines a genetic searchlight on the deep past.

Researchers said the three teeth specimens, one roughly 800,000 years old and two more than a million years old, provided important insights into the giant ice age mammals, including into the ancient heritage of, specifically, the woolly mammoth.

The genomes surpass the oldest previously sequenced DNA, that of a horse dating from 560,000 to 780,000 years ago.

Love Dalén, professor of evolutionary genetics at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm, was the senior author of the study, published in Nature. He said: “This DNA is incredibly old. The samples are a thousand times older than Viking remains, and even pre-date the existence of humans and Neanderthals.”

The mammoths were originally discovered in the 1970s in Siberia and had been kept at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.

Researchers first dated the specimens geologically, using comparisons with other species, such as small rodents, known to be unique to particular time periods and found in the same sedimentary layers.

This suggested that two of the mammals were ancient steppe mammoths more than a million years old. The youngest of the trio is one of the earliest woolly mammoths yet found.

The team also extracted genetic data from tiny samples of powder from each mammoth tooth, “essentially like a pinch of salt you would put on your dinner plate”, Dalén told a press briefing.

While the material had degraded into very small fragments, the scientists were able to sequence tens of millions of chemical base pairs – which make up the strands of DNA – and conduct age estimates from the genetic information.

This suggested that the oldest mammoth, named Krestovka, was even older than thought, at approximately 1.65m years, while the second, Adycha, was about 1.34m years old, and the youngest, Chukochya, was 870,000 years old.

Dalén said that, regarding the oldest mammoth, the DNA dating process could indicate the creature was probably about 1.2m years old, as suggested by the geological evidence. But it was possible the specimen was older than that and had thawed out of the permafrost at one point and then become wedged in a more recent layer of sediment.

Tom van der Valk, of the Science for Life Laboratory, Uppsala University, in Sweden, said the DNA fragments were like a puzzle with millions of tiny pieces “way, way, way, smaller than you would get from modern high-quality DNA”.

Using a genome from an African elephant, a modern relative of the mammoth, as a blueprint for their algorithm, the researchers were able to reconstruct parts of the mammoth genomes.

The study found that the mammoth named Krestovka represented a previously unrecognised genetic lineage, which researchers estimated diverged from other mammoths around two million years ago and was ancestral to those that colonised North America.

The study also traced the lineage from the million-year-old Adycha steppe mammoth to Chukochya and other more recent woolly mammoths.

Researchers also found gene variants associated with life in the Arctic, such as hairiness, thermoregulation, fat deposits and cold tolerance in the older specimen, suggesting mammoths were already hairy long before the woolly mammoth emerged.

Siberia has alternated between dry and cold ice age conditions and warm, wet periods. Now climate change is causing the permafrost to melt and reveal more specimens, Dalén said. There was a risk that amid more rainfall, remains could be washed away, however.

Dalén said new technologies could allow the sequencing of even older DNA from remains found in the permafrost, which dates back 2.6m years.

Researchers are keen to look at creatures such as the ancestors of moose, musk ox, wolves and lemmings, to shine a light on the evolution of modern species.

“Genomics has been pushed into deep time by the giants of the ice age – the wee mammals that surrounded them might soon also have their day,” said Alfred Roca, a professor at the department of animal sciences at the University of Illinois, US, in a comment piece published in Nature.

Ice Age DNA shows dog ancestry from 2 separate gray wolf populations – study

Where and when dogs were initially domesticated by our ancestors is one of the most puzzling unresolved questions of human prehistory. We know that modern dog breeds originated from the grey wolf (Canis lupus) and were domesticated sometime during the last Ice Age – at least 15,000 years ago.

But exactly where it happened, and if it were in one single location or multiple places, is still undetermined. In a new study published in Nature, researchers used the DNA of ancient wolves to further delve into the evolution of dogs and found that their ancestry could be traced back to two different populations of wolves.

“Through this project we have greatly increased the number of sequenced ancient wolf genomes, allowing us to create a detailed picture of wolf ancestry over time, including around the time of dog origins,” says co-first author Dr Anders Bergström, a post-doctoral researcher in the Ancient Genomics lab at the Francis Crick Institute, England.

“By trying to place the dog piece into this picture, we found that dogs derive ancestry from at least two separate wolf populations – an eastern source that contributed to all dogs and a separate more westerly source, that contributed to some dogs.”

Two distinct populations of ancient wolves

The grey wolf has been present across most of the northern hemisphere for the past few hundred thousand years. An international group of geneticists and archaeologists has sequenced the genomes of 72 ancient wolves excavated from Europe, Siberia and North America.

They also used data from the genomes of 68 modern wolves, and 169 modern and 33 ancient dogs, so that the total dataset spanned the past 100,000 years.

By analysing these genomes, the team found that early dogs in Siberia, the Americas, East Asia and Europe appear to have a single, shared origin from an eastern Eurasian species of wolf.

Whereas early dogs from the Middle East, Africa, and southern Europe appear to have developed (in addition to the eastern Eurasian species) up to half of their ancestry from a distinct population related to modern southwest Eurasian wolves.

So, either wolves underwent domestication more than once and the different populations subsequently mixed together, or domestication occurred only once (in the eastern Eurasian species) and these early dogs than mixed with wild wolves.

Tracing natural selection in action

Because the 72 ancient wolf genomes studied spanned about 30,000 generations, it was also possible to look back and build a timeline of how wolf DNA has changed over time.

“This is the first time scientists have directly tracked natural selection in a large animal over a timescale of 100,000 years, seeing evolution play out in real-time rather than trying to reconstruct it from DNA today,” explains senior author Dr Pontus Skoglund, group leader of the Ancient Genomics lab at the Francis Crick Institute.

“We found several cases where mutations spread to the whole wolf species, which was possible because the species was highly connected over large distances.

“This connectivity is perhaps a reason why wolves managed to survive the Ice Age while many other large carnivores vanished.”

Mutations in one gene, in particular, went from being very rare to present in every wolf over a period of about 10,000 years (30,000 to 40,000 years ago) and are still present in all wolves and dogs today.

The variants affect a gene called IFT88 on chromosome 25, which is involved in the development of bones in the skull and jaw.

The rapid spread of these mutations in the population may have been driven by a change in the types of prey available during the Ice Age, giving an advantage to wolves with a certain head shape. But the gene could also have other unknown functions in wolves.

The team is continuing to hunt for a close ancient wolf ancestor of dogs, to hopefully reveal more precisely where domestication most likely took place. It is now focusing on genomes from other locations not included in this study, including more southerly regions.

250-Million-Year-Old Stone With Microchip Print Discovered

It looks like researchers from Russia have found a 250 million-year-old microchip. Researchers have made another incredible discovery in Labinsk, Russia. According to scholars, this discovery marks the beginning of a completely new history, one that many ancient alien theorists have been talking about for years.

The object that researchers have found is believed to be some sort of ancient microchip and according to researchers, these ancient microchips date back millions of years.

After countless tests, researchers have come to the conclusion that this antique piece was used as some sort of microchip in ancient times.

The problem is its age, according to tests, the artefact is believed to be between 225 and 250 million years old.

Some researchers believe that the dating of the artefact is not entirely accurate given the fact that you cannot date rock, and the tests were based on traces of organic material found around the mystery “chip”.

The million-dollar question is, who and what used a microchip that dates back 250 million years? Is there a possibility that this is in fact the remains of ancient technology? Technology that belonged to a highly advanced civilization that inhabited Earth millions of years ago?

Or is there a possibility that this artefact did not originate from Earth, but on another planet, belonging to an extraterrestrial species?

Better yet, what makes Russia so unique is that numerous artefacts, like the one we see here, have been discovered over the years.

This “ancient microchip” was discovered in the Krasnodar region, and ufologists have already tagged this discovery as a fragment of technology previously unknown to science.

Like many other discoveries, this remarkable artefact was found by chance by a local fisherman by the name of Viktor Morozov who donated his curious finding to scholars from the University of Southern Polytechnic Nowoczerkaskiej who performed several tests and concluded that embedded into the rock, is a strange “device” which strangely resembles modern-day microchips.

Researchers have not tried removing the alleged microchip from the rock for fear that the might damage it.

Geologists and researchers cannot explain the origin of this fantastic finding and there are numerous possibilities that explain what this object is.

Extraterrestrial technology, evidence of sophisticated ancient societies, or just one of those strange rocks made by mother nature.

Some researchers point out that this might actually be part of a stem plant, such as lillies, skeptics have already “debunked” this finding suggesting that it is noting worth the while, just like many other discoveries which couldn’t be explained, so the best guess was… “its nothing important”, however, the origin of this artefact and many others also discovered in Russia have not been explained.

40,000-Year-Old Bracelet Made With Advanced Technology — The Evidence

Dating back to the Denisovan species of early humans, scientists have confirmed that a bracelet found in Siberia is 40,000 years old. This makes it the oldest piece of jewellery ever discovered.

The bracelet is discovered in a site called the Denisova Cave in the Altai region of Siberia in 2008 and after detailed analysis, Russian experts now accept that the bracelet’s age is as correct.

Scientists conclude it was made by our prehistoric human ancestors, the Denisovans, an extinct species of humans genetically distinct from Neanderthals and modern humans, and shows them to have been far more advanced than ever realized.

But what made the discovery especially striking was that manufacturing technology is more common in a much later period, such as the Neolithic era.

Indeed, it is not clear yet how the Denisovans could have made the bracelet.

Writing in the Novosibirsk magazine, Science First Hand, Dr Derevyanko said:

“There were found two fragments of the bracelet of a width of 2.7cm and a thickness of 0.9 cm.

The estimated diameter of the find was 7cm. Near one of the cracks was a drilled hole with a diameter of about 0.8 cm.”

“Studying them, scientists found out that the speed of rotation of the drill was rather high, fluctuations minimal, and that was there was applied to drill with an implement – technology that is common for more recent times”, Dr. Derevyanko told the Siberiantimes.

It is known that the Denisovans migrated out of Africa and branched away from other humanoid ancestors some 1 million years ago.

Genetic studies confirm that skeletal remains of Denisovans, that dated back as early as 600,000 years ago were quite different to both Neanderthals and modern man and the studies confirm that they did coexist not only with modern humans and the Neanderthals, prior to becoming extinct, but as DNA evidence suggests, the Denisovans also must have interbred with an as yet unknown and undiscovered species of humans beings… or maybe an Extraterrestrial species?

50,000-Year-Old Needle Discovered By Researchers Excavating Siberian Cave

Researchers excavating a Siberian cave have made yet another fascinating discovery as they have found a 50,000-year-old needle that was not made by Homo Sapiens.

In previous excavations, archaeologists excavated a bracelet which dates back some 40,000 years made with a precision worthy of the best jewellers today. The 7-centimetre-long needle was excavated in the Denisova Cave located in the Altai Mountains in Siberia. The enigmatic needle is believed to have belonged to our long-extinct Denisovan ancestors.

The enigmatic needle is believed to have belonged to our long-extinct Denisovan ancestors. It seems that ancient people had in their possession much more advanced technologies than what we ever imagined.

The discovery was made during the annual summer archaeological dig.

The Denisova cave is considered by many as an archaeological gold mine that holds the secrets of mankind’s origins. Strangely, even though the needle was created over 50,000 years ago it’s in excellent condition and still usable TODAY.

Speaking in an interview with the Siberian Time, Professor Mikhail Shunkov, head of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography in Novosibirsk said:

“It is a unique find of this season, which can even be called sensational. It is a needle made of bone. As of today, it is the most ancient needle in the world. It is about 50,000 years old.”

Interestingly, before the 50,000-year-old needle was excavated in the Denisova Cave, the oldest known needle was discovered in Potok Cave in the Eastern Karavanke, Slovenia, and is believed to have been created some 47,000 years ago.

Artefacts recovered from the Denisova cave indicate that the ancient Denisovans were far more advanced than researchers thought possible.

Previously, researchers uncovered fragments of jewellery and a fascinating modern-looking bracelet made of chlorite.

After analysis, researchers concluded that one of the holes seen in the bracelet was made with such precision that it could only have been created with a high-rotation drill similar to what we use today.

According to researchers, the newly discovered needle predates the bracelet by some 10,000 years.

You can read more about the bracelet HERE.

Professor Shunkov added:

“We can confidently say that Altai was one of the cultural centres, where the modern human was formed.”

The piece of jewellery has been catalogued as the oldest piece of jewellery ever found on Earth. The bracelet was found with other objects such as extinct animal bones and another artefact that according to researchers, date back 125.000 years.

READ ALSO: IN A SIBERIAN CAVE, A 60,000-YEAR-OLD NEANDERTHAL ‘SWISS ARMY KNIFE’ WAS DISCOVERED

This incredible item was discovered in 2008, and after extensive analysis and tests, experts have been able to confirm its age. Speaking about the bracelet previously discovered, researchers said that:

“The skills of its creator were perfect. Initially, we thought that it was made by Neanderthals or modern humans, but it turned out that the master was Denisovan.”

The enigmatic cave is believed to have been inhabited by different ancestors including Homo Sapiens, Neanderthals, and Denisovans. Experts estimate that the cave is at least 288,000 years old.

Dr. Maksim Kozlikin, head of the excavations at Denisova Cave said in an interview with the Siberian Times:

“It is the longest needle found in Denisova cave. We have found needles, but in younger (archeological) layers.”

24,000-Year-Old Siberian Boy Sheds New Light on Origins of Native Americans

Results from a DNA study of a young boy’s skeletal remains believed to be 24,000 years old could turn the archaeological world upside down — it’s been demonstrated that nearly 30 per cent of modern Native American’s ancestry came from this youngster’s gene pool, suggesting First Americans came directly from Siberia, according to a research team that includes a Texas A&M University professor.

Kelly Graf, assistant professor in the Center for the Study of First Americans and Department of Anthropology at Texas A&M, is part of an international team spearheaded by Eske Willerslev and Maanasa Raghaven from the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark and additional researchers from Sweden, Russia, United Kingdom, University of Chicago and the University of California-Berkeley.

Their work, funded by the Danish National Science Foundation, Lundbeck Foundation, and the National Science Foundation, is published in the current issue of Nature magazine.

Graf and Willerslev conceived the project and travelled to the Hermitage State Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, where the remains are now housed to collect samples of ancient DNA.

The skeleton was first discovered in the late 1920s near the village of Mal’ta in south-central Siberia, and since then it has been referred to as “the Mal’ta child” because until this DNA study the biological sex of the skeleton was unknown.

“Now we can say with confidence that this individual was a male,” says Graf.

Graf helped extract DNA material from the boy’s upper arm and “the results surprised all of us quite a bit,” she explains.

“It shows he had close genetic ties to today’s Native Americans and some western Eurasians, specifically some groups living in central Asia, South Asia, and Europe. Also, he shared close genetic ties with other Ice-Age western Eurasians living in European Russia, the Czech Republic and even Germany.

We think these Ice-Age people were quite mobile and capable of maintaining a far-reaching gene pool that extended from central Siberia all the way west to central Europe.”

Another significant result of the study is that the Mal’ta boy’s people were also ancestors of Native Americans, explaining why some early Native American skeletons such as Kennewick Man were interpreted to have some European traits.

“Our study proves that Native Americans ancestors migrated to the Americas from Siberia and not directly from Europe as some have recently suggested,” Graf explains.

The DNA work performed on the boy is the oldest complete genome of a human sequenced so far, the study shows. Also found near the boy’s remains were flint tools, a beaded necklace and what appears to be pendant-like items, all apparently placed in the burial as grave goods.

The discovery raises new questions about the timing of human entry in Alaska and ultimately North America, a topic hotly debated in First Americans studies.

“Though our results cannot speak directly to this debate, they do indicate Native American ancestors could have been in Beringia — extreme northeastern Russia and Alaska — any time after 24,000 years ago and therefore could have colonized Alaska and the Americas much earlier than 14,500 years ago, the age suggested by the archaeological record.”

“What we need to do is continue searching for earlier sites and additional clues to piece together this very big puzzle.”

Valley of the Kings archaeologists unearth treasures in Siberia dating back 2,500 years

Archaeologists have discovered a large burial mound in the Siberian “Valley of the Kings” dating to more than 2,500 years ago.

The ancient tomb holds the remains of five people, including those of a woman and a toddler who was buried with an array of grave goods, such as a crescent moon-shaped pendant, bronze mirror and gold earrings.

The mounds were made by the Scythians — a term used to describe culturally-related nomadic groups that lived on the steppes between the Black Sea and China from about 800 B.C. to about A.D. 300.

The burial mound, known as a kurgan, is located near a previously excavated kurgan belonging to a Scythian chief. Given the proximity of the woman’s burial mound to the chief’s — only 656 feet (200 meters) away — and the valuable artefacts buried with her, “I think that she was a person of great importance in the society of nomads,” said Łukasz Oleszczak, an archaeologist at the Institute of Archaeology at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, who led the Polish team, which worked alongside Russian archaeologists at the site.

The crescent pendant stood out immediately, he added. “She was buried with this artefact that we had believed to be a sign of male burials,” because similarly shaped pendants had previously been found in men’s burials in kurgans in southern Siberia, Oleszczak told Live Science.

Archaeologists have known about the “Valley of the Kings” (a phrase coined by a journalist years ago, harkening to Ancient Egypt’s Valley of the Kings) for more than a century. This vast valley, known as Touran-Uyuk in Tuva, a Russian republic, is replete with numerous Scythian royal burials. 

One of the previously excavated kurgans, dating to the eighth or ninth century B.C., holds the earliest known elite Scythian burial ever found. Most of these kurgans, however, have yet to be formally excavated, Oleszczak said.

At the invitation of Russian archaeologists, Oleszczak and his team conducted excavations in the valley during the 2019 and 2021 field seasons.

The kurgan, detected by aerial laser scanning, is about 82 feet (25 m) in diameter and has a destroyed, flattened centre, according to Science in Poland, a news site coordinated by the Polish government and independent journalists.

The kurgan is relatively short today — just 12 inches (30 centimetres) high, Oleszczak added.

During excavations, the archaeologists found the burials of five people. In one chamber, at the centre of the kurgan, the researchers found a looted burial chamber with weapons, including arrows, suggesting that a warrior had been buried there.

The team found the remains of the woman and child in an unlooted wooden burial chamber with three layers of beams.

The sheer amount of wood was likely a symbol of wealth, as “there are not many trees in that area,” Oleszczak said. “Wood is quite valuable.”

According to an anatomical analysis, the woman died at about age 50, and the child was 2 to 3 years old. Along with the crescent pendant, the woman was buried with a number of other grave goods, including gold ornaments near her head that were possibly part of a hat, an iron knife and an engraved wooden comb tied with a leather loop to a bronze mirror.

This comb-mirror duo had been placed in a leather bag. It’s not yet clear how the woman and toddler died, Oleszczak added.

Another burial in the kurgan held the remains of a young male warrior buried with weapons, including a knife, a whetstone and gold ornaments. The fifth burial was found in a pit on the kurgan’s outskirts.

This grave held the remains of a teenager. “Graves of children on the perimeter or just outside the ditch surrounding the barrow are a typical part of the funeral rites of this early Scythian culture,” Oleszczak told Science in Poland.

Using a metal detector, the archaeologists discovered evidence of bronze objects that were left around the kurgan’s perimeter, including dozens of horse-riding equipment pieces, a bronze axe and a goat-shaped ornament. These objects likely became scattered due to deep ploughing from a farm collective that existed in the area in the 20th century.

Discovery of “unique” burial containing 140 pieces of amber jewellery

A team of archaeologists from Petrozavodsk State University in Russia have unearthed the burial site of a Copper Age “amber man” who was painted with ocher upon his death and laid to rest with more than 100 pieces of jewellery.

The expedition took place on the western shore of Lake Onega, the second-largest lake in Europe, where archaeologist Alexander Zhulnikov led a team of students on the dig, according to a press release issued by the university.

The students discovered what a research paper describes as a “unique burial” surrounded by amber jewellery and flint objects.

Inside the narrow chamber, the man was painted with ocher, a red pigment often used to mark a grave so it wouldn’t be disturbed, and surrounded by about 140 pieces of amber jewellery from the Baltic region.

The man buried in the chamber was almost certainly of high social standing and may have been a trader himself from the Eastern Baltic States.

The objects included pendants, discs, and amber buttons “arranged in rows face down” and sewn onto a covering made of leather and placed over the body.

Another two tiers of amber buttons were found along the edges of the small grave.

The flint chips found are likely from tools placed over the body and “are clearly so-called votive items—offerings apparently symbolizing whole knives and arrowheads,” researchers said in their paper.

The unique aspect of this particular burial, they said, is that it is an individual grave.

Other burials dating to the Mesolithic era and found in the forest belt of Europe are large cemeteries.

Burials with such a large number of jewels were previously unheard of in this area of Karelia, nor have they been uncovered in nearby northwestern regions.

Flint deposits are also unknown in the region, indicating that ancient people must have obtained them through the exchange.

In a statement, Zhulnikov said the discovery “testifies to the strong ties of the ancient population of Karelia with the tribes that lived on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea” and to the “formation of the so-called ‘prestigious’ primitive economy” among those living in Northern Europe, where high-value objects like jewellery and tools helped create and maintain social hierarchies.