SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: For centuries, the best clues to ancient life have come from

fossils,

but now, a new window on the past is opening.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: How can we travel back in time? Is there a time machine? Yes.
It’s

DNA. It’s ancient DNA.

MAANASA RAGHAVAN: These are fragile molecules that fall apart outside the body.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: How long can DNA survive?

BETH SHAPIRO: With ancient DNA, we’re trying to go back in time. But time is the
enemy.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: A dramatic breakthrough is transporting us millions of years

back into the past, to before the last Ice Age, revealing surprising creatures that thrived
when our planet was far warmer than it is today. Could ancient genes from this lost
world help us adapt to a changing planet?

ESKE WILLERSLEV: We are stealing genetic secrets of the past, so we can rescue the
future.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: Go behind the scenes, on the Hunt for the Oldest DNA, right
now, on NOVA.

Buried beneath Greenland’s ice sheet are the remains of a living world that ended when
the Ice Age began, over 2,000,000 years ago. One scientist is on a quest to reveal that
lost world with ancient DNA.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: When I look at this place, I see one huge cold-storage room for
ancient DNA. I spent my life trying to find older and older DNA. And this is the limit of
the possible. And maybe it’s impossible. What we are trying to recover is DNA millions
of years older than any DNA ever recovered. So, we are trying to reach back before the
last Ice Age.
SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: Once, fossils were our only hope of shedding light on life in
the distant past. But ever since scientists first recovered DNA from an extinct animal 40
years ago, fossil hunters have been sharing the stage with gene hunters. We’ve peered
into a fascinating world of extinct species, Ice Age beasts, even our Neanderthal
cousins.

BETH SHAPIRO: When I look back in time, the sharpest tool I have is DNA, the genes
of long dead plants and animals. This is a far more detailed record of the past than the
fossils alone can ever give us.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: But the older DNA gets, the fainter the signal. The moment a
living thing dies, its DNA starts falling apart.

BETH SHAPIRO: Of course, we are never going to stop wondering. Exactly how far
back can we go? What is the limit of DNA preservation?

ESKE WILLERSLEV: You know what people mean when they say “mission impossible,”
right? They actually mean “it might be possible.” No one has ever succeeded in getting
DNA older than 1,000,000 years, but our tools are getting better.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: And as the technology gets more powerful, these scientists
are chasing a new discovery. To everyone’s surprise, the secret to smashing the limit
could be lying right beneath our feet.

Now, we’re on the verge of recovering genetic traces of a lost world, from before the Ice
Age. This ancient DNA, forged in a hotter climate, might even help us survive our own
warming world.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: When I was in school, if you had said to my teacher, “Someday,
Eske will be a scientist,” they would have laughed. I mean, I would have laughed too. I
was a rebel, a troublemaker. I wasn’t good at the typical things that people connect to
being a scientist.

I was a school failure. That’s the truth. But I think I have one capability which has
proven super valuable. I have a very good imagination.

I used to think I was born too late, when I realized there’s no frontiers left, everything is
mapped. But there is a frontier. Our frontier is the deep past. That is where we can still
be explorers.
SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: In Iceland, Eske Willerslev’s team is pulling mud from the
bottom of frozen lakes, mud laced with DNA from a long-gone world.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: DNA is a, a blueprint, right?

It’s the code who makes you who you are. Different individuals have different DNA
codes; different species have different DNA codes. So, it means, if you can pull out a
piece of the DNA code, you can actually map it to all known DNA codes, all known
blueprints. And then you can identify, well, what organism are we talking about here?

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: On this expedition, Eske’s team is hunting for DNA from
before the Vikings settled Iceland, about 1,200 years ago.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: Twelve-hundred years is nothing in ancient DNA research,

especially in the Arctic, where it’s cold. Still, at a certain point, DNA becomes too difficult
to read, so there is a limit.

And I would say I’ve always been obsessed with this limit, to push this limit. How far can
we go? I still haven’t got an answer to that question, but I’m sure it’s further than what
we think.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: So, what is the limit? Back in the ’90s, some scientists got a
little carried away.

BETH SHAPIRO: Jurassic Park was not a documentary. The early days of ancient DNA
were a bit of a disaster, unless you were in P.R., in which case, it was fantastic!

There was a whole bunch of what we now know is complete nonsense that was
published with just abandon, just excitement and enthusiasm, rather than actual
science. I mean, everybody wants there to be dinosaur DNA. And so, somebody who
says, “Hey, I got this really well-preserved dinosaur. And guess what? There’s DNA in
it!” Of course, the media are going to be super excited about this.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: And Hollywood couldn’t resist.

BETH SHAPIRO: So, let’s reconstruct Jurassic Park. Scientists go somewhere hot,
because amber forms in hot places. And they find a really beautiful piece of amber,
inside of which they can see this fantastic insect that looks perfectly preserved. They
take a big needle, and they stick it into the insect, and they draw out blood, presumably
from a dinosaur. And then they take that blood to the lab, and they do some magic that
for some reason involves frogs, even though we already knew, at the time, that birds
were the closest living ancestor of dinosaurs. And then more magic happens, and
dinosaurs are back to life!

But we now know a lot more about DNA than we used to. And everything we know tells
us, no question about it, that this molecule just doesn’t stick around for millions and
millions of years. Dinosaurs have been extinct for more than 65-million years. We will
never get dinosaur DNA. Jurassic Park is not going to happen. I’m sorry.

Getting DNA out of things that are alive is easy. This is because modern DNA, DNA
from living organisms, is in a fantastic condition.

Long strands of DNA, if you can think of it, kind of, as party streamers; ancient DNA is
more like confetti. The reason that modern DNA party streamers get chopped up into
the confetti that is ancient DNA, is, because of random processes that happen outside
the body, mostly things like U.V. radiation from the sun. When we walk outside, U.V. hits
our skin and it gets into our cells, and it damages our DNA. But when we’re alive, we
have proofreading enzymes that will come along and fix those damages, otherwise, we
would get cancer every time we walked outside.

But proofreading and fixing DNA, this is an energy-requiring process. And after you’re
dead, there is no more energy.

MAANASA RAGHAVAN: With ancient DNA, it’s always been a needle-in-a-haystack

problem. This is a fragile molecule. So, even when we first understood that DNA could
stick around after death, the question was, how much and where?

Early on, we thought only in soft tissue, so, a human mummy or a frozen mammoth. In
about 1990, we had the huge insight that fossil bones and teeth could protect DNA like
time capsules.

But well-preserved fossils are rare. And fossils that contain DNA, they’re even rarer. So,
in our field, that has been one of the biggest challenges. We’re all chasing these
precious time capsules.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: Three decades ago, Eske was determined to join the hunt,
but the odds were against him.
ESKE WILLERSLEV: In 1995, I was a biology student and I wanted to do my research
on ancient DNA. But I had no fossils. I wasn’t famous, so nobody wanted to give me
fossils. That was a bit of a problem. You want to do ancient DNA, but you have no
fossils.

I remember I was in my flat, it was an awful day. The rain was just coming down, and
leaves were falling from the trees. And I saw this woman out walking her dog. And she
stops. The dog squats, takes a poop.

It’s funny, inspiration sometimes comes out of the strangest times. Heh. I’m looking at
that miserable wet dog, thinking, “Well, there’s DNA in that dog, so, there’s DNA in the
dog poop, right?” But will it survive? We know there’s DNA in the leaves, but we also do
know that these things will disappear. After the next rainfall, the dog poop will disappear.
After a few years, the leaves will be gone. The question I asked myself was, “What will
happen to the DNA? Will that be gone, too? Or will that be preserved in the soil?”
Because if it’s preserved in the soil, we don’t need any fossils, problem solved.

So, I remember I went into the coffee room in the Department of Zoology, where all the
professors were sitting, you know, having their lunch. And I came with this idea saying,
“Well, what about looking in, in the soil for DNA of animals and plants?” And they were
laughing. And my, my supervisor turned around, he was head of department, saying,
“Eske, jeg har aldrig hort noget sa dumt I mit liv.” “I never heard anything as stupid in my
life.”

TOM GILBERT: No one had ever thought to recover DNA from dirt. And why would it be
there? The idea is that DNA is, is kind of known to be such an unstable molecule in
general. If you’re working in a molecular biology lab and you don’t look after your DNA,
it’s gone very fast. So, yeah, it was a completely crazy idea that, that it would even be
found. I mean, that DNA enters the environment is obvious if an animal urinates or
defecates, but that DNA stays in the environment? Completely crazy.

BETH SHAPIRO: So, early on, we didn’t know how long ancient DNA could survive. But
there was a second, really big hole in our understanding: contamination, ancient DNA
getting mixed up with modern DNA. Well, the trouble is that DNA is everywhere.

My DNA is now on this chair and on my hands and on my shirt. And DNA is coming out
of my mouth, as I talk. And there is microbial DNA absolutely everywhere. So, when
people were sequencing these bones, they were getting DNA, and they were saying,
“Wow. There’s DNA in these bones. It must be dinosaur DNA.”
I think there was some dinosaur DNA that was published that they were really excited
about because it closely matched a bird. Well, turns out the field excavation team was
having a chicken dinner one night.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: In those early days, when I was still a student, we were all
struggling with the problem of contamination, which was the big downfall of the dinosaur
DNA guys of the ’90s. And I decided, well, somehow, we are going to solve that
problem.

I was working on this with another student, Anders Hansen. So, we had this room that
were, were basically our clean laboratory, but we had a problem with a mold
contamination.

And in the end, we became so desperate, we decided, okay, we will basically clean the
entire room down with very strong bleach. We knew well, it wasn’t really allowed, and
we didn’t have money for gas masks. Anders got, got dizzy and threw up. And the
security guard was just coming, saying, “What the [explicative deleted] is going on
here? It’s smelling like a swimming pool in the entire building.”

And Monday morning, we were, had to stand in front of the professor and the lab
director, and they were furious, right? I mean, “What are you guys doing? I mean, do
you know this is totally illegal?”

But the good news was even though we, we got all this heat, the fungi contamination
were gone.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: Finally, Eske had a mold-free lab. He first tried getting DNA
out of 2,000-year-old ice.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: We got ice cores from Greenland, and we showed we could
recover ancient fungi DNA trapped in the ice without contamination. And that was big.

So, then we knew, we were ready to move to the next step, searching for DNA in the
dirt. So, I really believed in this idea of environmental DNA or dirt DNA. And more than
that, that it could survive in the environment as ancient DNA, but I had to prove it. So, I
set out to retrieve ancient DNA from the dirt. And at that point, no one had done that.
SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: Eske was searching for DNA from the Ice Age, which ended
12,000 years ago. It kept our planet in a frigid grip for about two-and-a-half-million
years.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: The Ice Age, it’s an amazing period. It’s the time of the big
mammals. You have giant wolves, giant beavers, mammoth, mastodons, right? So, I
thought, imagine how much poop and urine these big mammals had been producing
over time, right? That is in the soil, in the surroundings, frozen in time in the arctic. So,
my idea was to bring back that Ice Age world by retrieving DNA directly from the
permafrost. And that permafrost, I got from Siberia.

So, while everyone else was looking for DNA in fossil bones and teeth and discovering
one species at a time. I was looking in the dirt for everything.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: It’s one thing to recover ancient DNA, but it’s a far more
daunting challenge to read those tiny fragments of genetic confetti. That is, to decode
what kind of ancient life they come from. The shorter the fragment, the harder it is to
identify.

MAANASA RAGHAVAN: A genome is like a twisted ladder. So, if you think of a long
ladder, every rung is a base pair. And a base is a single molecule, A, T, G and C. A
human genome is incredibly long. It has three-billion base pairs. So, that’s three-billion
rungs on the ladder. That’s a big number. But when we’re working with ancient DNA,
we’re working with short pieces, pieces just a few rungs long. And we have to hope that
those little pieces contain enough unique information that we can match them to known
DNA.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: Some of Eske’s Siberian permafrost was 400,000 years old.
If he could identify species from ancient DNA frozen inside it, he would set a new
record.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: So, it’s Christmas Eve, and I’m, I’m sitting alone in the lab,
everybody has already gone home, right, for, for Christmas. And I’m basically checking
the DNA sequences that we got out of the dirt and comparing those to all known DNA
sequences in the world.

And when I see the results, the hairs on my back are just rising. It was Bang, woolly
mammoth; it was bang, bison; it was bang, reindeer; it was bang, Hare; It was bang,
bang, bang, different types of plants. It worked better than I could even have imagined.
SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: Eske had matched the ancient DNA in his Siberian dirt to
known species whose genetic sequences were collected in a vast catalogue. And sure
enough, there were dozens of matches, including extinct species.

Eske was the first to show that enough DNA can survive in the dirt to paint a picture of
the past. Still a student, he’d just sparked a new field of science: ancient environmental
DNA.

BETH SHAPIRO: The reason the technique of environmental DNA works is that DNA is
everywhere. It is raining DNA. The very problem we had with DNA contaminating
samples, that DNA is falling off of me and coming out of my mouth and floating in the air
around me, that is exactly the opportunity we have with environmental DNA.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: So, I realized it’s not the scarcity of DNA that is limiting us.
Environmental DNA is everywhere. The limit is time. And this is really when I started
thinking, “Well, how far back in time can we really push this?”

BETH SHAPIRO: So, today we are in the Holocene. That’s about the last 12,000 years.
Before that, it was the Pleistocene, a period of lots of Ice Ages, more than 20, lasted
about two-and-a-half-million years. And before that was the Pliocene, when it was much
warmer than the Pleistocene.

NATALIA RYBCZYNSKI: Yeah, it was a really weird place. You would not recognize that
world. When you go back 3,000,000 years, you’re in a way warmer climate. Earth was
just hotter. And it had been that way for a very long time, since before the extinction of
the dinosaurs 65-million years ago.

I’m a vertebrate paleontologist. I study the animals that lived in the Arctic before the Ice
Age, mammals of the Pliocene Arctic. The reality is we don’t know very much. The time
before the Ice Age began, the Pliocene, it’s kind of a lost world.

We don’t have full skeletons of any Pliocene mammals. We just have fragments, shards
of bone, evidence of maybe 13 species. I still have so many questions. For a
paleontologist, like me, it’s really frustrating.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: So, where fossils are lacking, could DNA help us? Could
genetic traces really endure for millions of years? Everything we knew about DNA had
told us that was impossible.
ESKE WILLERSLEV: The oldest DNA is the coldest DNA. DNA is fragile, so it falls apart
over time, but cold slows that process down. No one has ever succeeded in getting
DNA older than 1,000,000 years, but our tools are getting better, so, I think the limits
might change.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: Twenty years ago, recovering 400,000-year-old DNA from

Siberian permafrost was an impressive leap back in time. The student was suddenly a
professor, the youngest in Denmark. But Eske’s quest to recover even older DNA had
just begun.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: So, I just happened to get this invitation, from a group of
geologists, to go up to northeastern Greenland. And this is a remarkable place. I mean,
there you have something called the Kap København Formation. And it’s a super dry
and a super cold place.

Naturally, I thought, northern Greenland would hold the answer. If really old DNA is
going to be preserved anywhere, it’s here. Northeastern Greenland, it’s one of the most
hostile places on Earth, extremely cold. But even more important, this is an arctic
desert. It was too dry for glaciers to form. No glaciers to grind away the landscape. The
sediments up there are perfectly preserved. In Kap København, you’re literally walking
on dirt from before the Ice Age.

It’s incredible this place, that it’s almost barren ground today, right? In the sediments, we
discovered chunks of trees, of wood, that are 3,000,000 years old, but is still preserved
there. I mean, you can basically take them up and use them as fuel in your campfire.

So, this told me two things. First, Kap København must have looked very different in the
past. And secondly, this must be among the best places in the world for long-term
preservation of DNA. This gave me an idea, a naughty idea. What if we could just dig in
the dirt and recover DNA millions of years old?

BETH SHAPIRO: If your goal is to get the oldest sample, then you go where that oldest
sample is likely to be. It reckons back to the age of exploration, right? I mean, think
about my, my kids are in fourth grade, so they’re learning about the explorers that went
around the world. And this is kind of, I think, how Eske sees himself a bit. He’s like, “Oh,
you know what? There’s an arctic desert. I’m going to go there and I’m going to get
DNA from that.” And he will, because he’s Eske, and that’s how Eske works.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: In 2005, I published this review paper where we basically claimed,
well, “Ancient DNA cannot survive for more than 1,000,000 years. That’s the absolute
limit.” But in the back of my head, I was still wondering, “Is that really true?” Right?
“Could DNA really survive longer than 1,000,000 years in a place like the Kap
København formation?”

So, on that same expedition I thought, “Hey! I mean, we’re here! Why not sample the
sediments? You never know, we just might be able to find DNA.”

I remember, it was pretty miserable up there. The freezing arctic desert, where it rained
anyway. Still, we cored into the frozen ground, and I got my crazy samples.

So, I took those sediment samples back to my lab in Copenhagen. And, to be honest,
this was the beginning of a very frustrating project.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: Those Greenland samples would tease and torment Eske
and his team for the next 15 years. In the early days, Astrid Schmidt was a doctoral
student in Eske’s lab. When Eske offered her the Greenland samples, she jumped on
them.

ASTRID SCHMIDT: At that time, Eske was a, a star in the scientific community, and I
was inspired by Eske’s enthusiasm. We had a hypothesis that if the environment had
been kept cold and the temperatures had not been moving up and down, fluctuated,
then we would have had at least a possibility of finding ancient DNA. So, we were being
optimistic, knowing it was a long shot, but also knowing that we could get
ground-breaking results from this.

And there was DNA in the samples. We could see it! But it was super degraded.

MAANASA RAGHAVAN: It’s not enough to see that your samples contain ancient DNA.
You have to be able to identify that DNA and to know what forms of life it came from. To
do that, the fragments need to be long enough. You need a certain number of base
pairs in a fragment. You need enough rungs on your ladder.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: When Astrid started, scientists needed at least 100 base
pairs.

ASTRID SCHMIDT: We did everything we could with the technology that existed, but we
just couldn’t overcome the central problem. The Greenland DNA was just too old, the
fragments were too short. It was very frustrating.
ESKE WILLERSLEV: The DNA, after 1,000,000 years, was just total garbage. With,
what you can say, with the technology in hand at the time, the DNA was completely
unreadable.

Well, Astrid was one of many peoples in my lab that tried the Kap København samples
and, basically, failed. In retrospect, I was probably not a very good supervisor, right?
Because I, I kind of pushed for people to do these samples every time we had
improvements of our methodology, in a hope, “Well, this time, they will work.” If that
happened, it would be a career booster. But, the, the risk associated with this project
was huge, right? So, it was failure after failure.

ALEXANDRA ROUILLARD: Kap København project was, yeah, a bit sensitive. As a

postdoc, if you decided to invest your time in this, it was the case of having only so
many years to be able to produce excellent research. If you’re not able to produce
research because the technology doesn’t allow it, not because you’re a bad researcher,
you still end up with nothing to show for it.

ASTRID SCHMIDT: In 2013, I left research science, and I didn’t pursue science since
then. I took a big risk, and I paid a price.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: But again, the, this is, just like with the…

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: In Eske’s lab, students began calling the Greenland samples
cursed. But Eske and his team kept returning to Greenland, hoping to find DNA in better
condition. Meanwhile, four more students suffered under the curse, failing to recover
DNA long enough to identify. They all changed careers. But as they left, new ones
stepped into their shoes.

MIKKEL PEDERSEN: So, you, you can imagine what I felt when this, these samples
landed on my table. So, I was a Ph.D. student in Eske Willerslev’s lab. This was my last
option also to succeed in a project that I was given as a Ph.D. student. I was coming to
the final tries of, of, of actually making this a success.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: Back in the day, we needed almost 100-base-pair fragments to

survive in a sample, in order to retrieve any DNA whatsoever. But the technology was
changing, and I had a student, Mikkel, who came to me with an idea. I was immediately
excited. I thought, “Yes. This could work.” Mikkel suggested we use a powerful
technique called shotgun sequencing.
Shotgun sequencing itself wasn’t new, but no one had ever used it on dirt DNA. I don’t
know why. In retrospect, it seemed kind of obvious.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: First, Mikkel proved that the shotgun technique could work
on dirt DNA several thousand years old.

MIKKEL PEDERSEN: It really showed us that we could actually get ancient

environmental DNA even from the very shortest reads that were preserving in the
samples. And the obvious next step would actually be to take on the most challenging
project of them all, what we, we refer to as the curse: the Kap København Formation.

MAANASA RAGHAVAN: In the early years of ancient DNA, we had to decide which part
of the genome to look at.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: Those are the giveaway parts of a genome that we call
“barcodes.” They reveal the identity of an organism. We matched those barcodes to our
reference catalog, but those barcode fragments had to be long enough.

MAANASA RAGHAVAN: We know that DNA fragments over 100 base pairs just don’t
survive millions of years, even frozen, high up in the Arctic. So, shotgun sequencing
was a revolution. Now, instead of targeting a specific part of the genome with precision,
like with a rifle, we’re using a shotgun. A shotgun hits everything.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: With the shotgun method we just sequenced all the DNA we can
find. Then we looked for matches with every genome sequence for every organism that
we know of. It takes immense computing power, billions of operations. And only now are
computers powerful enough to work with fragments down to 30 base pairs.

Imagine shredding War and Peace. All you have are short phrases, not even sentences.
And you walk into the Library of Congress, and you start looking for a match for each
one of those phrases, book, by book, by book. There’s another War and Peace in there
somewhere, but you need to work through millions of other books before you find a
match. And once you do, your job is to reconstruct as many pages of that novel as you
can.

So, we were the first to use shotgun sequencing on dirt. And when we did, man, it was
powerful! In science, moments like this actually feels like magic. I have no other way of
putting it.
It was just like that Christmas Eve, 25 years ago. As if by magic, we were seeing the
genetic signatures of these plants and animals appear. Bang, bang, bang. But it’s
different this time. Now, there’s hundreds! Fleas, lemmings, arctic hare, geese, caribou.
A whole forest ecosystem: larch, poplar, willow, spruce, ash, cedar trees. We’re looking
at a long list of organisms from a place that today is an arctic desert.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: Eske’s team had recovered the genetic fingerprints of a lost
world: nine land and sea animals, from horseshoe crabs to big mammals; over a
hundred plants, from mosses to forest trees; and nearly 2,000 other organisms, from
bacteria to plankton, some of them extinct and many of them never detected in the
Arctic.

But this incredible breakthrough created another problem. If you’re claiming to have
recovered the world’s oldest DNA, you had better be very sure about the date.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: The main text is, when, when it’s kind of, done right, can you send
a…

We knew we were going to get hammered. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary

evidence, right? We had to be very sure about the dates from Cape Copenhagen.

That took two more years of hard work. We used a whole set of different methods. We
looked for organisms in the sediments that we knew lived on Earth for a known period of
the past. We used the biological clock based on how DNA mutates over time.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: And Eske’s team used three more independent methods to
date the sediment from Greenland. When their work was done, they had made a
remarkable discovery. The Cape Copenhagen DNA is at least 2,000,000 years old.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: It’s important to understand that this is the minimum possible age.
Taking all the lines of the dating evidence as a whole, the most likely age of the Kap
København DNA is actually 2.5-million years.

MIKKEL PEDERSEN: This puts us into the late Pliocene, which is the period just before
we start having glaciations.

BETH SHAPIRO: If Eske’s DNA is that old, if it is Pliocene, then that is huge.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: Eske had his hands on DNA from before the last Ice Age!
ESKE WILLERSLEV: Finally, we are catching sight of the living world that existed in
Greenland before the world grew cold. That was the moment. That was when we knew
we had something to tell the world.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: Sixteen years after Eske began collecting dirt in Greenland,
the breakthrough was published in Nature magazine. It was covered by over 400
newspapers around the world. It even landed on the front page of The New York Times.
This was one of the biggest science stories of the year.

Until this day, the record for the oldest DNA was from a fossil of a single species, a
mammoth that lived 1,000,000 years ago, during the Ice Age. Using dirt DNA instead of
fossils, Eske’s team shattered that record, opening a window on an unknown living
world, more than twice as old as that mammoth.

BETH SHAPIRO: It feels almost magical to be able to infer such a complete picture of
an ancient ecosystem from tiny fragments of preserved DNA.

ROSS MACPHEE: American Museum of Natural History): When I first heard about the
results from Kap København, I just said to myself, “What?” What we’re talking about is
pushing the record back to at least 2,000,000 years, and I believe much longer than
that. It was a complete tour de force.

NATALIA RYBCZYNSKI: One of my feelings when I first saw this paper is stunned. I
think we just never really thought it would be possible, after years of trying, to get DNA
from these ancient ecosystems. We never thought we’d see such a rich and diverse
ecosystem in Greenland. We’re seeing the very last arctic forests, from a hotter world,
before the Ice Age. And these forests are unique. We have nothing like them today.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: I always knew that there was forest in the High Arctic. I touched
the wood of ancient trees up there. But when we looked at the sequences from
Greenland, there was one that completely shocked me, shocked everyone.

ROSS MACPHEE: To hear that there was mastodon DNA from Kap København, this
just struck me as, “Whoa. How can that be? That is so far north.”

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: Relatives of the modern elephant, mastodons were forest

creatures that died out at the end of the Ice Age. The closest to Kap København their
remains have been found is almost 3,000 miles to the south, in North America.
MIKKEL PEDERSEN: It comes completely out of the blue. And it was the first time that
we found such a large animal in Greenland.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: So, after all those years, we broke the curse of the Greenland
samples. I guess you can say, it was a breakthrough that immediately became a
problem. The big question of course is, how do such DNA survive beyond the
one-million-year-old limit? That was the mystery we had to solve.

It turns out, DNA survived such an incredible long time because of minerals in the soil.

DNA is electrically charged. And many mineral particles that you find in the soil is also
electrically charged. So, therefore, DNA fragments will basically bind itself around such
sediment particles. And this will reduce the rate of degradation, of the spontaneous
reaction that are attacking the DNA and breaking it up. So, yes, it will still be degraded,
it will still be destroyed, but the rate by which this is happening is heavily reduced.

It turned out, that particularly certain minerals of clay and quartz binds the DNA very
strong. If bound to clay and quartz, DNA is basically frozen in time.

BETH SHAPIRO: What is super cool about the Greenland breakthrough is the discovery
that certain minerals can freeze DNA in time, because this means that everything we
thought about the limits of DNA preservation are out the window.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: Not back to the age of dinosaurs, but far beyond the old
one-million-year limit.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: So, these cores that no one believed in, turned out to contain the
most amazing treasure. It just took us 15 years to find out how to get it out. To be
honest, I never really lost faith, because every limit we had ever set, we broke.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: Until now, what we knew of the living world before the Ice
Age, we learned from fossils. At the Canadian Museum of Nature, Natalia Rybczynski
only has fragments of bone to study. But with the spectacular discovery of DNA from
Greenland, finally a detailed portrait of this lost world is emerging. And it’s even stranger
than scientists expected.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: This was a really weird environment. You had a forest where half
the year it was dark. And the other half the year it was sunshine all day around. This
means that all the organisms we are uncovering had to survive half the year in
darkness.

NATALIA RYBCZYNSKI: I think the thing that really blew our minds from the Pliocene is
the camel.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: How could this camel, known only by a few fragments of
bone, survive so far north? The living world revealed by the Greenland DNA gives us
some clues.

NATALIA RYBCZYNSKI: When you think about camels today, it’s really easy to imagine
that they evolved to live in the desert. And this is where the finding of the High Arctic
camel is so mind blowing, right, because it’s not in a desert. It’s living a complete
opposite to a desert. It’s in a forest!

Ever notice how huge a camel’s eye is? Well, it turns out they have incredible vision,
including night vision. That’s pretty useful when it’s dark six months of the year.

One of the most dramatic features of the camel is the hump. It’s actually a specialized
fat deposit. And when you think about the importance of fat, energy storage, this is
something that’s also very important for animals that survive through harsh winters. The
wide feet of camels, you know, it’s listed as one of the traits that helps them walk over
sand, also would function well in soft snow.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: We haven’t found camel DNA from before the Ice Age, not yet.
But we have now recreated the forest world they were living in. And Natalia’s fossils
tells us they were there. This is a forest that stretched from Greenland to Canada on
solid land without barriers.

BETH SHAPIRO: We used to believe that ancient DNA could take you back a few
thousand years. Today, we know we can see millions of years back in time.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: Back to a hotter time, before the Ice Age, the Pliocene, a
long-lost epoch that climate scientists believe may hold a lesson for us today.

CLAIRE JASPER: One-fifty-nine

MAUREEN RAYMO: The Pliocene is a big red flashing light, right? The Pliocene was
the last time atmospheric CO2 levels were the same as today. You have to go back
3,000,000 years to find a climate equivalent to what we’re doing right now. That is a
CO2 level of about 400 parts per million in the atmosphere.

The new Pliocene has begun. It’s called the “Anthropocene.” We’ve already altered
Earth climate. We’re living in a climate that is about one degree C warmer, globally, than
it should be. The climate of the Pliocene is where we’re going. It’s like our instruction
manual for what’s coming.

NATALIA RYBCZYNSKI: When the Pliocene ended and the Ice Age began, that was a
big blow. But it didn’t end life on Earth. All life around us has its evolutionary roots in a
hotter world, including us.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: And that hotter world could hold lessons for our own survival.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: Greenland proves we can go much deeper in time than what we
thought we would. We now have the technology to go even farther back in time,
potentially many millions of years.

BETH SHAPIRO: We have access to the genetic codes of plants and animals that
survived in different climates, hotter climates, drier climates. If we can sequence the
genomes of those ancient organisms, maybe they can help us. And I think we’re going
to need help.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: The rescue effort has already started. Scientists in

Copenhagen have identified a gene from the Greenland DNA that helped poplar trees
grow in the extreme light conditions of the High Arctic. And they’ve put that gene into a
modern barley plant. One day, when our climate is much warmer, this barley might
thrive at the top of the world, just as those ancient poplar trees did.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: This is a food plant, engineered for a hot future. We are stealing
genetic secrets of the past so we can rescue the future. I want to do my part to rescue
the future.

We’re going to sequence thousands, millions of ancient genomes from sediment

samples all over the world. Because we are now using robots across the entire pipeline,
we can do 200 samples a week. We are starting an industrial revolution in ancient DNA
sequencing.
SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: Arctic barley could be just the beginning. Scientists are
gearing up to put ancient genes into rice, wheat and other foods to help them thrive in a
warming world.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: Today, we take for granted that all organisms are shedding DNA
around in the environment, but once this was a new idea. It all started with that dog
pooping in the rain, and that is why we can do this, where a little bit of dirt contains an
entire living world.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: For centuries, the best clues to ancient life have come from
fossils,

but now, a new window on the past is opening.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: How can we travel back in time? Is there a time machine? Yes.
It’s

DNA. It’s ancient DNA.

MAANASA RAGHAVAN: These are fragile molecules that fall apart outside the body.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: How long can DNA survive?

BETH SHAPIRO: With ancient DNA, we’re trying to go back in time. But time is the
enemy.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: A dramatic breakthrough is transporting us millions of years

back into the past, to before the last Ice Age, revealing surprising creatures that thrived
when our planet was far warmer than it is today. Could ancient genes from this lost
world help us adapt to a changing planet?

ESKE WILLERSLEV: We are stealing genetic secrets of the past, so we can rescue the
future.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: Go behind the scenes, on the Hunt for the Oldest DNA, right
now, on NOVA.
Buried beneath Greenland’s ice sheet are the remains of a living world that ended when
the Ice Age began, over 2,000,000 years ago. One scientist is on a quest to reveal that
lost world with ancient DNA.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: When I look at this place, I see one huge cold-storage room for
ancient DNA. I spent my life trying to find older and older DNA. And this is the limit of
the possible. And maybe it’s impossible. What we are trying to recover is DNA millions
of years older than any DNA ever recovered. So, we are trying to reach back before the
last Ice Age.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: Once, fossils were our only hope of shedding light on life in
the distant past. But ever since scientists first recovered DNA from an extinct animal 40
years ago, fossil hunters have been sharing the stage with gene hunters. We’ve peered
into a fascinating world of extinct species, Ice Age beasts, even our Neanderthal
cousins.

BETH SHAPIRO: When I look back in time, the sharpest tool I have is DNA, the genes
of long dead plants and animals. This is a far more detailed record of the past than the
fossils alone can ever give us.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: But the older DNA gets, the fainter the signal. The moment a
living thing dies, its DNA starts falling apart.

BETH SHAPIRO: Of course, we are never going to stop wondering. Exactly how far
back can we go? What is the limit of DNA preservation?

ESKE WILLERSLEV: You know what people mean when they say “mission impossible,”
right? They actually mean “it might be possible.” No one has ever succeeded in getting
DNA older than 1,000,000 years, but our tools are getting better.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: And as the technology gets more powerful, these scientists
are chasing a new discovery. To everyone’s surprise, the secret to smashing the limit
could be lying right beneath our feet.

Now, we’re on the verge of recovering genetic traces of a lost world, from before the Ice
Age. This ancient DNA, forged in a hotter climate, might even help us survive our own
warming world.
ESKE WILLERSLEV: When I was in school, if you had said to my teacher, “Someday,
Eske will be a scientist,” they would have laughed. I mean, I would have laughed too. I
was a rebel, a troublemaker. I wasn’t good at the typical things that people connect to
being a scientist.

I was a school failure. That’s the truth. But I think I have one capability which has
proven super valuable. I have a very good imagination.

I used to think I was born too late, when I realized there’s no frontiers left, everything is
mapped. But there is a frontier. Our frontier is the deep past. That is where we can still
be explorers.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: In Iceland, Eske Willerslev’s team is pulling mud from the
bottom of frozen lakes, mud laced with DNA from a long-gone world.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: DNA is a, a blueprint, right?

It’s the code who makes you who you are. Different individuals have different DNA
codes; different species have different DNA codes. So, it means, if you can pull out a
piece of the DNA code, you can actually map it to all known DNA codes, all known
blueprints. And then you can identify, well, what organism are we talking about here?

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: On this expedition, Eske’s team is hunting for DNA from
before the Vikings settled Iceland, about 1,200 years ago.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: Twelve-hundred years is nothing in ancient DNA research,

especially in the Arctic, where it’s cold. Still, at a certain point, DNA becomes too difficult
to read, so there is a limit.

And I would say I’ve always been obsessed with this limit, to push this limit. How far can
we go? I still haven’t got an answer to that question, but I’m sure it’s further than what
we think.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: So, what is the limit? Back in the ’90s, some scientists got a
little carried away.

BETH SHAPIRO: Jurassic Park was not a documentary. The early days of ancient DNA
were a bit of a disaster, unless you were in P.R., in which case, it was fantastic!
There was a whole bunch of what we now know is complete nonsense that was
published with just abandon, just excitement and enthusiasm, rather than actual
science. I mean, everybody wants there to be dinosaur DNA. And so, somebody who
says, “Hey, I got this really well-preserved dinosaur. And guess what? There’s DNA in
it!” Of course, the media are going to be super excited about this.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: And Hollywood couldn’t resist.

BETH SHAPIRO: So, let’s reconstruct Jurassic Park. Scientists go somewhere hot,
because amber forms in hot places. And they find a really beautiful piece of amber,
inside of which they can see this fantastic insect that looks perfectly preserved. They
take a big needle, and they stick it into the insect, and they draw out blood, presumably
from a dinosaur. And then they take that blood to the lab, and they do some magic that
for some reason involves frogs, even though we already knew, at the time, that birds
were the closest living ancestor of dinosaurs. And then more magic happens, and
dinosaurs are back to life!

But we now know a lot more about DNA than we used to. And everything we know tells
us, no question about it, that this molecule just doesn’t stick around for millions and
millions of years. Dinosaurs have been extinct for more than 65-million years. We will
never get dinosaur DNA. Jurassic Park is not going to happen. I’m sorry.

Getting DNA out of things that are alive is easy. This is because modern DNA, DNA
from living organisms, is in a fantastic condition.

Long strands of DNA, if you can think of it, kind of, as party streamers; ancient DNA is
more like confetti. The reason that modern DNA party streamers get chopped up into
the confetti that is ancient DNA, is, because of random processes that happen outside
the body, mostly things like U.V. radiation from the sun. When we walk outside, U.V. hits
our skin and it gets into our cells, and it damages our DNA. But when we’re alive, we
have proofreading enzymes that will come along and fix those damages, otherwise, we
would get cancer every time we walked outside.

But proofreading and fixing DNA, this is an energy-requiring process. And after you’re
dead, there is no more energy.

MAANASA RAGHAVAN: With ancient DNA, it’s always been a needle-in-a-haystack

problem. This is a fragile molecule. So, even when we first understood that DNA could
stick around after death, the question was, how much and where?
Early on, we thought only in soft tissue, so, a human mummy or a frozen mammoth. In
about 1990, we had the huge insight that fossil bones and teeth could protect DNA like
time capsules.

But well-preserved fossils are rare. And fossils that contain DNA, they’re even rarer. So,
in our field, that has been one of the biggest challenges. We’re all chasing these
precious time capsules.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: Three decades ago, Eske was determined to join the hunt,
but the odds were against him.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: In 1995, I was a biology student and I wanted to do my research

on ancient DNA. But I had no fossils. I wasn’t famous, so nobody wanted to give me
fossils. That was a bit of a problem. You want to do ancient DNA, but you have no
fossils.

I remember I was in my flat, it was an awful day. The rain was just coming down, and
leaves were falling from the trees. And I saw this woman out walking her dog. And she
stops. The dog squats, takes a poop.

It’s funny, inspiration sometimes comes out of the strangest times. Heh. I’m looking at
that miserable wet dog, thinking, “Well, there’s DNA in that dog, so, there’s DNA in the
dog poop, right?” But will it survive? We know there’s DNA in the leaves, but we also do
know that these things will disappear. After the next rainfall, the dog poop will disappear.
After a few years, the leaves will be gone. The question I asked myself was, “What will
happen to the DNA? Will that be gone, too? Or will that be preserved in the soil?”
Because if it’s preserved in the soil, we don’t need any fossils, problem solved.

So, I remember I went into the coffee room in the Department of Zoology, where all the
professors were sitting, you know, having their lunch. And I came with this idea saying,
“Well, what about looking in, in the soil for DNA of animals and plants?” And they were
laughing. And my, my supervisor turned around, he was head of department, saying,
“Eske, jeg har aldrig hort noget sa dumt I mit liv.” “I never heard anything as stupid in my
life.”

TOM GILBERT: No one had ever thought to recover DNA from dirt. And why would it be
there? The idea is that DNA is, is kind of known to be such an unstable molecule in
general. If you’re working in a molecular biology lab and you don’t look after your DNA,
it’s gone very fast. So, yeah, it was a completely crazy idea that, that it would even be
found. I mean, that DNA enters the environment is obvious if an animal urinates or
defecates, but that DNA stays in the environment? Completely crazy.

BETH SHAPIRO: So, early on, we didn’t know how long ancient DNA could survive. But
there was a second, really big hole in our understanding: contamination, ancient DNA
getting mixed up with modern DNA. Well, the trouble is that DNA is everywhere.

My DNA is now on this chair and on my hands and on my shirt. And DNA is coming out
of my mouth, as I talk. And there is microbial DNA absolutely everywhere. So, when
people were sequencing these bones, they were getting DNA, and they were saying,
“Wow. There’s DNA in these bones. It must be dinosaur DNA.”

I think there was some dinosaur DNA that was published that they were really excited
about because it closely matched a bird. Well, turns out the field excavation team was
having a chicken dinner one night.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: In those early days, when I was still a student, we were all
struggling with the problem of contamination, which was the big downfall of the dinosaur
DNA guys of the ’90s. And I decided, well, somehow, we are going to solve that
problem.

I was working on this with another student, Anders Hansen. So, we had this room that
were, were basically our clean laboratory, but we had a problem with a mold
contamination.

And in the end, we became so desperate, we decided, okay, we will basically clean the
entire room down with very strong bleach. We knew well, it wasn’t really allowed, and
we didn’t have money for gas masks. Anders got, got dizzy and threw up. And the
security guard was just coming, saying, “What the [explicative deleted] is going on
here? It’s smelling like a swimming pool in the entire building.”

And Monday morning, we were, had to stand in front of the professor and the lab
director, and they were furious, right? I mean, “What are you guys doing? I mean, do
you know this is totally illegal?”

But the good news was even though we, we got all this heat, the fungi contamination
were gone.
SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: Finally, Eske had a mold-free lab. He first tried getting DNA
out of 2,000-year-old ice.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: We got ice cores from Greenland, and we showed we could
recover ancient fungi DNA trapped in the ice without contamination. And that was big.

So, then we knew, we were ready to move to the next step, searching for DNA in the
dirt. So, I really believed in this idea of environmental DNA or dirt DNA. And more than
that, that it could survive in the environment as ancient DNA, but I had to prove it. So, I
set out to retrieve ancient DNA from the dirt. And at that point, no one had done that.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: Eske was searching for DNA from the Ice Age, which ended
12,000 years ago. It kept our planet in a frigid grip for about two-and-a-half-million
years.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: The Ice Age, it’s an amazing period. It’s the time of the big
mammals. You have giant wolves, giant beavers, mammoth, mastodons, right? So, I
thought, imagine how much poop and urine these big mammals had been producing
over time, right? That is in the soil, in the surroundings, frozen in time in the arctic. So,
my idea was to bring back that Ice Age world by retrieving DNA directly from the
permafrost. And that permafrost, I got from Siberia.

So, while everyone else was looking for DNA in fossil bones and teeth and discovering
one species at a time. I was looking in the dirt for everything.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: It’s one thing to recover ancient DNA, but it’s a far more
daunting challenge to read those tiny fragments of genetic confetti. That is, to decode
what kind of ancient life they come from. The shorter the fragment, the harder it is to
identify.

MAANASA RAGHAVAN: A genome is like a twisted ladder. So, if you think of a long
ladder, every rung is a base pair. And a base is a single molecule, A, T, G and C. A
human genome is incredibly long. It has three-billion base pairs. So, that’s three-billion
rungs on the ladder. That’s a big number. But when we’re working with ancient DNA,
we’re working with short pieces, pieces just a few rungs long. And we have to hope that
those little pieces contain enough unique information that we can match them to known
DNA.
SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: Some of Eske’s Siberian permafrost was 400,000 years old.
If he could identify species from ancient DNA frozen inside it, he would set a new
record.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: So, it’s Christmas Eve, and I’m, I’m sitting alone in the lab,
everybody has already gone home, right, for, for Christmas. And I’m basically checking
the DNA sequences that we got out of the dirt and comparing those to all known DNA
sequences in the world.

And when I see the results, the hairs on my back are just rising. It was Bang, woolly
mammoth; it was bang, bison; it was bang, reindeer; it was bang, Hare; It was bang,
bang, bang, different types of plants. It worked better than I could even have imagined.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: Eske had matched the ancient DNA in his Siberian dirt to
known species whose genetic sequences were collected in a vast catalogue. And sure
enough, there were dozens of matches, including extinct species.

Eske was the first to show that enough DNA can survive in the dirt to paint a picture of
the past. Still a student, he’d just sparked a new field of science: ancient environmental
DNA.

BETH SHAPIRO: The reason the technique of environmental DNA works is that DNA is
everywhere. It is raining DNA. The very problem we had with DNA contaminating
samples, that DNA is falling off of me and coming out of my mouth and floating in the air
around me, that is exactly the opportunity we have with environmental DNA.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: So, I realized it’s not the scarcity of DNA that is limiting us.
Environmental DNA is everywhere. The limit is time. And this is really when I started
thinking, “Well, how far back in time can we really push this?”

BETH SHAPIRO: So, today we are in the Holocene. That’s about the last 12,000 years.
Before that, it was the Pleistocene, a period of lots of Ice Ages, more than 20, lasted
about two-and-a-half-million years. And before that was the Pliocene, when it was much
warmer than the Pleistocene.

NATALIA RYBCZYNSKI: Yeah, it was a really weird place. You would not recognize that
world. When you go back 3,000,000 years, you’re in a way warmer climate. Earth was
just hotter. And it had been that way for a very long time, since before the extinction of
the dinosaurs 65-million years ago.
I’m a vertebrate paleontologist. I study the animals that lived in the Arctic before the Ice
Age, mammals of the Pliocene Arctic. The reality is we don’t know very much. The time
before the Ice Age began, the Pliocene, it’s kind of a lost world.

We don’t have full skeletons of any Pliocene mammals. We just have fragments, shards
of bone, evidence of maybe 13 species. I still have so many questions. For a
paleontologist, like me, it’s really frustrating.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: So, where fossils are lacking, could DNA help us? Could
genetic traces really endure for millions of years? Everything we knew about DNA had
told us that was impossible.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: The oldest DNA is the coldest DNA. DNA is fragile, so it falls apart
over time, but cold slows that process down. No one has ever succeeded in getting
DNA older than 1,000,000 years, but our tools are getting better, so, I think the limits
might change.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: Twenty years ago, recovering 400,000-year-old DNA from

Siberian permafrost was an impressive leap back in time. The student was suddenly a
professor, the youngest in Denmark. But Eske’s quest to recover even older DNA had
just begun.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: So, I just happened to get this invitation, from a group of
geologists, to go up to northeastern Greenland. And this is a remarkable place. I mean,
there you have something called the Kap København Formation. And it’s a super dry
and a super cold place.

Naturally, I thought, northern Greenland would hold the answer. If really old DNA is
going to be preserved anywhere, it’s here. Northeastern Greenland, it’s one of the most
hostile places on Earth, extremely cold. But even more important, this is an arctic
desert. It was too dry for glaciers to form. No glaciers to grind away the landscape. The
sediments up there are perfectly preserved. In Kap København, you’re literally walking
on dirt from before the Ice Age.

It’s incredible this place, that it’s almost barren ground today, right? In the sediments, we
discovered chunks of trees, of wood, that are 3,000,000 years old, but is still preserved
there. I mean, you can basically take them up and use them as fuel in your campfire.
So, this told me two things. First, Kap København must have looked very different in the
past. And secondly, this must be among the best places in the world for long-term
preservation of DNA. This gave me an idea, a naughty idea. What if we could just dig in
the dirt and recover DNA millions of years old?

BETH SHAPIRO: If your goal is to get the oldest sample, then you go where that oldest
sample is likely to be. It reckons back to the age of exploration, right? I mean, think
about my, my kids are in fourth grade, so they’re learning about the explorers that went
around the world. And this is kind of, I think, how Eske sees himself a bit. He’s like, “Oh,
you know what? There’s an arctic desert. I’m going to go there and I’m going to get
DNA from that.” And he will, because he’s Eske, and that’s how Eske works.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: In 2005, I published this review paper where we basically claimed,
well, “Ancient DNA cannot survive for more than 1,000,000 years. That’s the absolute
limit.” But in the back of my head, I was still wondering, “Is that really true?” Right?
“Could DNA really survive longer than 1,000,000 years in a place like the Kap
København formation?”

So, on that same expedition I thought, “Hey! I mean, we’re here! Why not sample the
sediments? You never know, we just might be able to find DNA.”

I remember, it was pretty miserable up there. The freezing arctic desert, where it rained
anyway. Still, we cored into the frozen ground, and I got my crazy samples.

So, I took those sediment samples back to my lab in Copenhagen. And, to be honest,
this was the beginning of a very frustrating project.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: Those Greenland samples would tease and torment Eske
and his team for the next 15 years. In the early days, Astrid Schmidt was a doctoral
student in Eske’s lab. When Eske offered her the Greenland samples, she jumped on
them.

ASTRID SCHMIDT: At that time, Eske was a, a star in the scientific community, and I
was inspired by Eske’s enthusiasm. We had a hypothesis that if the environment had
been kept cold and the temperatures had not been moving up and down, fluctuated,
then we would have had at least a possibility of finding ancient DNA. So, we were being
optimistic, knowing it was a long shot, but also knowing that we could get
ground-breaking results from this.
And there was DNA in the samples. We could see it! But it was super degraded.

MAANASA RAGHAVAN: It’s not enough to see that your samples contain ancient DNA.
You have to be able to identify that DNA and to know what forms of life it came from. To
do that, the fragments need to be long enough. You need a certain number of base
pairs in a fragment. You need enough rungs on your ladder.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: When Astrid started, scientists needed at least 100 base
pairs.

ASTRID SCHMIDT: We did everything we could with the technology that existed, but we
just couldn’t overcome the central problem. The Greenland DNA was just too old, the
fragments were too short. It was very frustrating.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: The DNA, after 1,000,000 years, was just total garbage. With,
what you can say, with the technology in hand at the time, the DNA was completely
unreadable.

Well, Astrid was one of many peoples in my lab that tried the Kap København samples
and, basically, failed. In retrospect, I was probably not a very good supervisor, right?
Because I, I kind of pushed for people to do these samples every time we had
improvements of our methodology, in a hope, “Well, this time, they will work.” If that
happened, it would be a career booster. But, the, the risk associated with this project
was huge, right? So, it was failure after failure.

ALEXANDRA ROUILLARD: Kap København project was, yeah, a bit sensitive. As a

postdoc, if you decided to invest your time in this, it was the case of having only so
many years to be able to produce excellent research. If you’re not able to produce
research because the technology doesn’t allow it, not because you’re a bad researcher,
you still end up with nothing to show for it.

ASTRID SCHMIDT: In 2013, I left research science, and I didn’t pursue science since
then. I took a big risk, and I paid a price.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: But again, the, this is, just like with the…

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: In Eske’s lab, students began calling the Greenland samples
cursed. But Eske and his team kept returning to Greenland, hoping to find DNA in better
condition. Meanwhile, four more students suffered under the curse, failing to recover
DNA long enough to identify. They all changed careers. But as they left, new ones
stepped into their shoes.

MIKKEL PEDERSEN: So, you, you can imagine what I felt when this, these samples
landed on my table. So, I was a Ph.D. student in Eske Willerslev’s lab. This was my last
option also to succeed in a project that I was given as a Ph.D. student. I was coming to
the final tries of, of, of actually making this a success.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: Back in the day, we needed almost 100-base-pair fragments to

survive in a sample, in order to retrieve any DNA whatsoever. But the technology was
changing, and I had a student, Mikkel, who came to me with an idea. I was immediately
excited. I thought, “Yes. This could work.” Mikkel suggested we use a powerful
technique called shotgun sequencing.

Shotgun sequencing itself wasn’t new, but no one had ever used it on dirt DNA. I don’t
know why. In retrospect, it seemed kind of obvious.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: First, Mikkel proved that the shotgun technique could work
on dirt DNA several thousand years old.

MIKKEL PEDERSEN: It really showed us that we could actually get ancient

environmental DNA even from the very shortest reads that were preserving in the
samples. And the obvious next step would actually be to take on the most challenging
project of them all, what we, we refer to as the curse: the Kap København Formation.

MAANASA RAGHAVAN: In the early years of ancient DNA, we had to decide which part
of the genome to look at.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: Those are the giveaway parts of a genome that we call
“barcodes.” They reveal the identity of an organism. We matched those barcodes to our
reference catalog, but those barcode fragments had to be long enough.

MAANASA RAGHAVAN: We know that DNA fragments over 100 base pairs just don’t
survive millions of years, even frozen, high up in the Arctic. So, shotgun sequencing
was a revolution. Now, instead of targeting a specific part of the genome with precision,
like with a rifle, we’re using a shotgun. A shotgun hits everything.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: With the shotgun method we just sequenced all the DNA we can
find. Then we looked for matches with every genome sequence for every organism that
we know of. It takes immense computing power, billions of operations. And only now are
computers powerful enough to work with fragments down to 30 base pairs.

Imagine shredding War and Peace. All you have are short phrases, not even sentences.
And you walk into the Library of Congress, and you start looking for a match for each
one of those phrases, book, by book, by book. There’s another War and Peace in there
somewhere, but you need to work through millions of other books before you find a
match. And once you do, your job is to reconstruct as many pages of that novel as you
can.

So, we were the first to use shotgun sequencing on dirt. And when we did, man, it was
powerful! In science, moments like this actually feels like magic. I have no other way of
putting it.

It was just like that Christmas Eve, 25 years ago. As if by magic, we were seeing the
genetic signatures of these plants and animals appear. Bang, bang, bang. But it’s
different this time. Now, there’s hundreds! Fleas, lemmings, arctic hare, geese, caribou.
A whole forest ecosystem: larch, poplar, willow, spruce, ash, cedar trees. We’re looking
at a long list of organisms from a place that today is an arctic desert.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: Eske’s team had recovered the genetic fingerprints of a lost
world: nine land and sea animals, from horseshoe crabs to big mammals; over a
hundred plants, from mosses to forest trees; and nearly 2,000 other organisms, from
bacteria to plankton, some of them extinct and many of them never detected in the
Arctic.

But this incredible breakthrough created another problem. If you’re claiming to have
recovered the world’s oldest DNA, you had better be very sure about the date.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: The main text is, when, when it’s kind of, done right, can you send
a…

We knew we were going to get hammered. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary

evidence, right? We had to be very sure about the dates from Cape Copenhagen.

That took two more years of hard work. We used a whole set of different methods. We
looked for organisms in the sediments that we knew lived on Earth for a known period of
the past. We used the biological clock based on how DNA mutates over time.
SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: And Eske’s team used three more independent methods to
date the sediment from Greenland. When their work was done, they had made a
remarkable discovery. The Cape Copenhagen DNA is at least 2,000,000 years old.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: It’s important to understand that this is the minimum possible age.
Taking all the lines of the dating evidence as a whole, the most likely age of the Kap
København DNA is actually 2.5-million years.

MIKKEL PEDERSEN: This puts us into the late Pliocene, which is the period just before
we start having glaciations.

BETH SHAPIRO: If Eske’s DNA is that old, if it is Pliocene, then that is huge.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: Eske had his hands on DNA from before the last Ice Age!

ESKE WILLERSLEV: Finally, we are catching sight of the living world that existed in
Greenland before the world grew cold. That was the moment. That was when we knew
we had something to tell the world.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: Sixteen years after Eske began collecting dirt in Greenland,
the breakthrough was published in Nature magazine. It was covered by over 400
newspapers around the world. It even landed on the front page of The New York Times.
This was one of the biggest science stories of the year.

Until this day, the record for the oldest DNA was from a fossil of a single species, a
mammoth that lived 1,000,000 years ago, during the Ice Age. Using dirt DNA instead of
fossils, Eske’s team shattered that record, opening a window on an unknown living
world, more than twice as old as that mammoth.

BETH SHAPIRO: It feels almost magical to be able to infer such a complete picture of
an ancient ecosystem from tiny fragments of preserved DNA.

ROSS MACPHEE: American Museum of Natural History): When I first heard about the
results from Kap København, I just said to myself, “What?” What we’re talking about is
pushing the record back to at least 2,000,000 years, and I believe much longer than
that. It was a complete tour de force.

NATALIA RYBCZYNSKI: One of my feelings when I first saw this paper is stunned. I
think we just never really thought it would be possible, after years of trying, to get DNA
from these ancient ecosystems. We never thought we’d see such a rich and diverse
ecosystem in Greenland. We’re seeing the very last arctic forests, from a hotter world,
before the Ice Age. And these forests are unique. We have nothing like them today.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: I always knew that there was forest in the High Arctic. I touched
the wood of ancient trees up there. But when we looked at the sequences from
Greenland, there was one that completely shocked me, shocked everyone.

ROSS MACPHEE: To hear that there was mastodon DNA from Kap København, this
just struck me as, “Whoa. How can that be? That is so far north.”

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: Relatives of the modern elephant, mastodons were forest

creatures that died out at the end of the Ice Age. The closest to Kap København their
remains have been found is almost 3,000 miles to the south, in North America.

MIKKEL PEDERSEN: It comes completely out of the blue. And it was the first time that
we found such a large animal in Greenland.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: So, after all those years, we broke the curse of the Greenland
samples. I guess you can say, it was a breakthrough that immediately became a
problem. The big question of course is, how do such DNA survive beyond the
one-million-year-old limit? That was the mystery we had to solve.

It turns out, DNA survived such an incredible long time because of minerals in the soil.

DNA is electrically charged. And many mineral particles that you find in the soil is also
electrically charged. So, therefore, DNA fragments will basically bind itself around such
sediment particles. And this will reduce the rate of degradation, of the spontaneous
reaction that are attacking the DNA and breaking it up. So, yes, it will still be degraded,
it will still be destroyed, but the rate by which this is happening is heavily reduced.

It turned out, that particularly certain minerals of clay and quartz binds the DNA very
strong. If bound to clay and quartz, DNA is basically frozen in time.

BETH SHAPIRO: What is super cool about the Greenland breakthrough is the discovery
that certain minerals can freeze DNA in time, because this means that everything we
thought about the limits of DNA preservation are out the window.
SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: Not back to the age of dinosaurs, but far beyond the old
one-million-year limit.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: So, these cores that no one believed in, turned out to contain the
most amazing treasure. It just took us 15 years to find out how to get it out. To be
honest, I never really lost faith, because every limit we had ever set, we broke.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: Until now, what we knew of the living world before the Ice
Age, we learned from fossils. At the Canadian Museum of Nature, Natalia Rybczynski
only has fragments of bone to study. But with the spectacular discovery of DNA from
Greenland, finally a detailed portrait of this lost world is emerging. And it’s even stranger
than scientists expected.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: This was a really weird environment. You had a forest where half
the year it was dark. And the other half the year it was sunshine all day around. This
means that all the organisms we are uncovering had to survive half the year in
darkness.

NATALIA RYBCZYNSKI: I think the thing that really blew our minds from the Pliocene is
the camel.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: How could this camel, known only by a few fragments of
bone, survive so far north? The living world revealed by the Greenland DNA gives us
some clues.

NATALIA RYBCZYNSKI: When you think about camels today, it’s really easy to imagine
that they evolved to live in the desert. And this is where the finding of the High Arctic
camel is so mind blowing, right, because it’s not in a desert. It’s living a complete
opposite to a desert. It’s in a forest!

Ever notice how huge a camel’s eye is? Well, it turns out they have incredible vision,
including night vision. That’s pretty useful when it’s dark six months of the year.

One of the most dramatic features of the camel is the hump. It’s actually a specialized
fat deposit. And when you think about the importance of fat, energy storage, this is
something that’s also very important for animals that survive through harsh winters. The
wide feet of camels, you know, it’s listed as one of the traits that helps them walk over
sand, also would function well in soft snow.
ESKE WILLERSLEV: We haven’t found camel DNA from before the Ice Age, not yet.
But we have now recreated the forest world they were living in. And Natalia’s fossils
tells us they were there. This is a forest that stretched from Greenland to Canada on
solid land without barriers.

BETH SHAPIRO: We used to believe that ancient DNA could take you back a few
thousand years. Today, we know we can see millions of years back in time.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: Back to a hotter time, before the Ice Age, the Pliocene, a
long-lost epoch that climate scientists believe may hold a lesson for us today.

CLAIRE JASPER: One-fifty-nine

MAUREEN RAYMO: The Pliocene is a big red flashing light, right? The Pliocene was
the last time atmospheric CO2 levels were the same as today. You have to go back
3,000,000 years to find a climate equivalent to what we’re doing right now. That is a
CO2 level of about 400 parts per million in the atmosphere.

The new Pliocene has begun. It’s called the “Anthropocene.” We’ve already altered
Earth climate. We’re living in a climate that is about one degree C warmer, globally, than
it should be. The climate of the Pliocene is where we’re going. It’s like our instruction
manual for what’s coming.

NATALIA RYBCZYNSKI: When the Pliocene ended and the Ice Age began, that was a
big blow. But it didn’t end life on Earth. All life around us has its evolutionary roots in a
hotter world, including us.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: And that hotter world could hold lessons for our own survival.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: Greenland proves we can go much deeper in time than what we
thought we would. We now have the technology to go even farther back in time,
potentially many millions of years.

BETH SHAPIRO: We have access to the genetic codes of plants and animals that
survived in different climates, hotter climates, drier climates. If we can sequence the
genomes of those ancient organisms, maybe they can help us. And I think we’re going
to need help.
SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: The rescue effort has already started. Scientists in
Copenhagen have identified a gene from the Greenland DNA that helped poplar trees
grow in the extreme light conditions of the High Arctic. And they’ve put that gene into a
modern barley plant. One day, when our climate is much warmer, this barley might
thrive at the top of the world, just as those ancient poplar trees did.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: This is a food plant, engineered for a hot future. We are stealing
genetic secrets of the past so we can rescue the future. I want to do my part to rescue
the future.

We’re going to sequence thousands, millions of ancient genomes from sediment

samples all over the world. Because we are now using robots across the entire pipeline,
we can do 200 samples a week. We are starting an industrial revolution in ancient DNA
sequencing.

SARIKA CULLIS-SUZUKI: Arctic barley could be just the beginning. Scientists are
gearing up to put ancient genes into rice, wheat and other foods to help them thrive in a
warming world.

ESKE WILLERSLEV: Today, we take for granted that all organisms are shedding DNA
around in the environment, but once this was a new idea. It all started with that dog
pooping in the rain, and that is why we can do this, where a little bit of dirt contains an
entire living world.