Million-year-old DNA sheds light on the genomic history of mammoths

Date

2021-2-17

Author

van der Valk, Tom
Pečnerová, Patrícia
Díez-del-Molino, David
Bergström, Anders
Oppenheimer, Jonas
Hartmann, Stefanie
Xenikoudakis, Georgios
Thomas, Jessica A.
Dehasque, Marianne
Sağlıcan, Ekin
Fidan, Fatma Rabia
Barnes, Ian
Liu, Shanlin
Somel, Mehmet
Heintzman, Peter D.
Nikolskiy, Pavel
Shapiro, Beth
Skoglund, Pontus
Hofreiter, Michael
Lister, Adrian M.
Götherström, Anders
Dalén, Love

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Temporal genomic data hold great potential for studying evolutionary processes such as speciation. However, sampling across speciation events would, in many cases, require genomic time series that stretch well back into the Early Pleistocene subepoch. Although theoretical models suggest that DNA should survive on this timescale1, the oldest genomic data recovered so far are from a horse specimen dated to 780–560 thousand years ago2. Here we report the recovery of genome-wide data from three mammoth specimens dating to the Early and Middle Pleistocene subepochs, two of which are more than one million years old. We find that two distinct mammoth lineages were present in eastern Siberia during the Early Pleistocene. One of these lineages gave rise to the woolly mammoth and the other represents a previously unrecognized lineage that was ancestral to the first mammoths to colonize North America. Our analyses reveal that the Columbian mammoth of North America traces its ancestry to a Middle Pleistocene hybridization between these two lineages, with roughly equal admixture proportions. Finally, we show that the majority of protein-coding changes associated with cold adaptation in woolly mammoths were already present one million years ago. These findings highlight the potential of deep-time palaeogenomics to expand our understanding of speciation and long-term adaptive evolution.

Subject Keywords

Multidisciplinary, Evolutionary genetics, Genetic variation, Genomics, Palaeontology

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/89112

Journal

Nature

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03224-9

Collections

Department of Biology, Article

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Citation Formats

T. van der Valk et al., “Million-year-old DNA sheds light on the genomic history of mammoths,” Nature, 2021, Accessed: 00, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/89112.