DNA Buried 7,000 Centuries Is Retrieved

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DNA Buried 7,000 Centuries Is Retrieved

Researchers have reconstructed an ancient genome that is 10 times as old as any retrieved so far, and they now say that DNA should be recoverable from animals that lived one million years ago. This would greatly extend biologists’ ability to understand the evolutionary past.

The genome was that of a horse that lived about 700,000 years ago in what is now the Yukon Territory in Canada, and its reconstruction has already led to new insights. The researchers who sequenced it then analyzed DNA from a less ancient horse, one that lived 43,000 years ago, as well as five contemporary horse breeds and a donkey named Willy that resides in the Copenhagen Zoo. They concluded that the genus that gave rise to modern horses, zebras and donkeys — Equus — arose about four million years ago, twice as far back as had been thought.

Before this work, the oldest genome that had been recovered was that of a Denisovan human who lived 70,000 years ago. The new finding, if accepted, would extend by tenfold the reach of paleogenomics, the study of ancient genomes reconstructed from fossil bones. Within the last few decades this young science has become a powerful complement to paleontology, the study of fossils, as a way of reconstructing evolutionary history.

Source

Very interesting. I could make the Jurassic Park references, but meh...The first thing this makes me think is that we should be recovering the genomes of creatures that mankind caused to go extinct. Might just be able to try undoing some of the damage we've done to our planet and ecosystem.

I saw this earlier but didn't post it.

It's interesting how they keep pushing back in time this sort of thing.
Maybe they'll start cloning some of these animals.

reply to post by grey580


Yeah, hard to believe that tech has come far enough already that it seems really possible to do so!

The tendency of man is to constantly put creatures into extinction.
We are improving in our quest of destroying all other life on earth even though we do not go out and shoot or stab them with things. :shk: We saved the whales from extinction when we restricted whaling, but we are now destroying their food chain, boosting the mutation of their parasites, and blasting them with sonic weapons. I blame most of this on the chemical and pharma industry, they are both related. The chemistry changes we add to the fuels is often worse than the fuels themselves.

well....... the advancement of scientific discovery techniques is to credit for this


now.... just what does this whole episode say about the present crisis concerning global warming?

well... the bones were in present permafrost. but the scientific indications was that the specimine bones were frozen then unthawed more than once...(during earlier global-warming episodes)
the DNA remained pretty much intact (including the suggested 'thaw' during the Biblical event known as the WorldWide Flood ---which there was NO Evidence of)


lets put it all in perspective ...
see satan didn't plant that DNA so as to discredit the WOG (word of god)

reply to post by grey580

Gee I hope not, until there is a guaranteed natural food source for them. Then move ahead a few years until someone who has illegally purchased one is overwhelmed by its needs and releases it in an inappropriate place. (thinking of the constrictors in Florida) Before you ask, yes, I am feeling a trifle sarcastic and lacking in trust in cooler heads theory at the moment.

reply to post by rickymouse


All interesting psuedo facts, but rickymouse, they only bear the merest relation to the thread subject...

Speaking of which, I find all this fascinating, and the very idea of there being an entire field called paleogenetics is pretty marvelous in and of itself. I cannot help thinking that the more connections we can make between ancient creatures, and those we know today, the better we can understand the entire biosphere, and the better we can protect it, or at least understand the damage we do to it.

Further to that, if we learn to connect the oldest known species on our own planet, to those which live today, this will give us great training and learning to use in future explorations of space, with the hunt for life, any life, intelligent or otherwise, outside our own atmosphere. Wild speculation, but valid I think.

Also, interesting factoid.... In the entire history of mankind, humanity has been responsible for a tiny mini-fragment of the carbon gas released into the atmosphere. The rest... well the planet did that by belching matter from its many volcanic eruptions.

reply to post by TrueBrit


I don't know, my post kind of fits right in with the end of the OP's opening statement. Yours on the other hand doesn't fit so well. I never mentioned carbon either, your assumption that carbon was part of my post was erred, it was about chemicals created by man destroying the foodchain of animals of the earth. My info is not Pseudo, there is plenty of evidence around, just ask someone at the sewage treatment plant about what chemistry is still in the water. I have a couple of intelligent friends that are in management at sewage treatment plants. It's interesting what doesn't get tested..