Ancient DNA in Greenland: discovery of a mastodon buried in the Kap Kbenhavn Formation, Sweden, according to a geneticist
To find out, Posth and his colleagues sequenced ancient DNA from 116 hunter-gatherers who lived in Europe and western Asia between 35,000 and 5,000 years ago, and analysed previously sequenced genome data from hundreds more.
Genetic material collected from permafrost shows northern part of the island was once a lush forest, home to poplar trees and other surprising organisms.
Even more surprise came from the detailed animal life of Kap Kbenhavn that included mammals and birds, such as rodents, geese and rabbits. According to palaeontologists, there shouldn’t have been reincarnations at that time. Mastodons were thought to have lived in North American forests, and their remains have never been found in Greenland.
Love Dalén is a geneticist at theSwedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm who was not involved in the study. The mastodon would not be expected up there in a million years.
The team of Dalén obtained partial genomes from mammoth remains, shattering the record for ancient-DNA preservation. Although DNA degrades, even older strands can be recovered if the right samples are found.
The samples had been sitting in a freezer in the capital since 2006 when Willerslev visited the island to look for ancient human remains. The team collected the mud and sand from the Kap Kbenhavn Formation, a deposit that was built up around 2 million years ago.
Using pre-ice age DNA to explain why European people were less hospitable to humans than they had been in Europe, says Willerslev
Willerslev thinks that his team’s work could tell us a lot about how the future will respond to climate change. “In these organisms is an ability to adapt in composition and in range that we don’t understand and we can’t predict,” he says.
The climate of the Iberian Peninsula was a refuge for hunter-gatherers, according to two studies. The same genetic signature that was found in Goyet 35,000 years ago pops up across western Europe, and even into Poland, after the climate warmed.
Among the trove they detail in Nature on 1 March1 are several pre-ice-age individuals from sites in France and Spain. The bones were found with a collection of objects attributed to the Gravettian material culture. The Goyet population seemed to have vanished when Posth and his team looked at these people’s genomes.
The researchers traced this ancestry to people who lived in northern Spain and southwestern France between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago. These sites are linked to another culture called the Solutrean.
Instead, they descend from people who saw out the coldest periods in southeastern Europe, probably in the Balkans, says Posth. A big empty spot on the map is left by the lack of ancient DNA from this time period.
The University of Colorado Colorado Springs says that those findings confirm that ice-age Italy was less hospitable to humans than it was to Iberians. Italy was once connected to Croatia by a now-submerged plain, so it makes sense that eastern hunter-gatherers moved in, he adds.
The studies paint a dynamic picture of European hunter-gatherer populations, which don’t always line up with cultural shifts, says Natasha Reynolds, a palaeolithic archaeologist at the University of Bordeaux, France. They also show that, for parts of Europe at least, the coldest period of the ice age wasn’t as inhospitable as it’s often made out to be. “People weren’t just huddling in caves waiting for the glaciers to retreat,” she says.