North Greenland was much warmer two million years ago. Now the area’s ancient soil has been excavated and DNA extracted.

The ancient genes revealed that there were many plants and animals, relatives of the elephant, living in the area of ​​Northeast Greenland National Park.

Researchers found in dna namely signs of mastodons. They were relatives of the modern elephant.

The geneticists studied the soil of the Cape København formation in particular. It is located in the northeastern parts of Greenland.

Genetic traces of reindeer and geese were also found in the area. They lived in a landscape that could resemble a modern birch or poplar forest.

Traces of seafood, i.e. DNA of horseshoe crabs and algae, were also found at the mouth of the fjord.

Two million years ago, northern Greenland was about 11–19 degrees Celsius warmer than it is now.

The discovery is also genetically revolutionary. A new chapter in genetics now spans back an extra million years.

“For the first time, we can look at the DNA of a past ecosystem going back two million years,” said the evolutionary geneticist Eske Willerslev BBC:n the tree.

He is an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Copenhagen and a professor of ecology at the University of Cambridge.

Willerslev and his team worked with samples from Greenland for years. They sequenced DNA from 41 samples and identified ancient genes from them.

DNA samples were found deep in the Kap København formation, an almost hundred meter layer of sediments.

It has been formed over 20,000 years. The deposit is at the mouth of a fjord that opens to the Arctic Ocean.

No one has previously found elephant relatives in Greenland.

“The only fossils that have ever been found in the Cape København area before were from a hare’s tooth and a dung beetle,” explains Willerslev newspaper of The Guardian by.

They also found a forest ecosystem in DNA. Arctic bushes, herbs, ferns and mosses grew among the trees. The researchers speculated that bears, wolves or saber-toothed tigers might also have lived in the area.

New the material was found in environmental dna, i.e. e-dna.

It is genetic material that is released into the environment from plants and animals, for example from their cells or feces. DNA accumulates in different parts of their habitat.

In Greenland, the team used samples taken from soil clay and quartz. With them, it examined the biology of the early Pleistocene.

Willerslev’s group went through a total of 16 billion DNA sequences. It was a big job to separate the old episodes from the others, says Willerslev science journal Nature’s news section.

When extracting and analyzing DNA, parts of the genetic material had to be combined.

Found The parts of the DNA are a million years older than, for example, the DNA obtained from the bones of Siberian mammoths.

Before this, the oldest isolated episodes were about a million years old and derived from mammoths. A study on them was published last year.

”I argued in 2005 that dna cannot survive more than a million years. Here we are now, with more than two million years of DNA,” he said, according to the BBC.

Willerslev believes that chemical reactions between the DNA and the soil slowed down the degradation of the DNA.

Dna can bind to solid minerals. Then it reduces DNA degradation.

“Many of the minerals in the soil are also electrically charged, as is DNA,” says Willerslev.

“The findings tell us that biological organisms adapt to their environment better than we have assumed.”

He reminds that it was much darker in the region during the winter months than in the lower latitudes of the Earth.

New DNA technology can be used as a tool for nature conservation.

The news and research from ancient North Greenland was published by the scientific journal Nature.