Kind: captions
Language: en
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for centuries the best Clues to ancient
life have come from fossils but now a
new window on the past is
opening how can we travel back in time
is that time
machine yes it's
DNA it's ancient DNA
these are fragile molecules that fall
apart outside the body how long can DNA
survive with ancient DNA we're trying to
go back in
time but
time is the
enemy 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
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planet we are stealing genetic secrets
of the
past so we can rescue the
future go behind the scenes on the hunt
for the oldest
DNA right now on
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Nova buried beneath Greenland's ice
sheet are the remains of a living world
that ended when the ice age began over 2
million years years
ago one scientist is on a quest to
reveal that lost world with ancient
DNA 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're trying to reach
back before the last ice
AG 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 genan Hunters
we've peered into a fascinating world of
extinct species Ice Age beasts even our
Neanderthal cousins 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 but the older DNA gets the
fainter the
signal the moment a living thing dies
its DNA starts falling AP part of course
we are never going to stop wondering
exactly how far back can we go what is
the limit of DNA
preservation 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 million years but our tools
are getting
better 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
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when I was in school if you said to my
teacher someday es 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
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explorers in Iceland Esa Willers lv's
team is pulling mud from the bottom of
frozen
lakes mud laced with DNA from a long
gone
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World DNA is a a blueprint right it's
the code who makes you who you
are different individuals have different
DNA codes different spe at 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 on this Expedition esa's team is
hunting for DNA from before the Viking
settled Iceland about 12200 years
ago 1200 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 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 so what is the limit back in the
'90s some scientists got a little
carried away Jurassic Park was not a
documentary the early days of ancient
DNA were a bit of a disaster unless
you're in PR 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 other
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
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this and Hollywood couldn't
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resist 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 uh 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
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 it's
because of random processes that happen
outside the
body mostly things like UV radiation
from the sun when we walk outside UV
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 this is an energy
requiring process and after you're dead
there is no more
energy with ancient DNA it's always been
a needle in the Hast stack
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 frozen
mammoth in about 1990 we had the huge
Insight that fossil bones and teeth
could protect de like time capsules but
well-preserved fossils are rare and
fossils that contain DNA they're even
rarer so in our field that's been one of
the biggest challenges we're all chasing
these precious time capsules
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three decades ago Esa was determined to
join the hunt but the odds were against
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him in 1995 I was a biology student and
I wanted to do my research on Ancient
DNA but I had no
fossiles I wasn't famous so nobody
wanted to give me
fossiles that was a bit of a problem you
want to do ancient DNA but you have no
fossiles
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 strange
times I'm looking at this miserable wet
dog thinking well there's DNA in the
dark so there's DNA in the dark 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 next rainfall the dark poop will
disappear after a few years the leaves
will be gone the question I asked myself
what because what will happen to the DNA
will that be gone to or will that be
preserved in the soil because if it's
preserved in the
soil we don't need any fossiles problem
solved so I remember I went into uh the
coffee room in 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 was head of the
apartment
saying I never heard anything as stupid
in my
life no one had ever thought to recover
DNA from dirt why would it be there the
idea is that DNA is it's 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 was
a completely crazy idea that it would
even be found I mean that DNA enters the
environment is obvious if an animal
urinates or defecates but the DNA stays
in the environment completely
crazy 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
but 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 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're going to
solve that
problem I was working on this with an
another student H
Hansen so we had this room that were
basically our clean laboratory but we
had a problem with a M
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 G
ass
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masks anas got got dizzy and threw
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up and the security God was coming say
what the 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
legal but the good news was even though
we we got all this heat the fungi
contamination were
gone finally Esa had a mold-free
lab he first tried getting DNA out of
2,000-year-old ice we got ice CA 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 Esa was searching for DNA from the
Ice Age which ended 12,000 years
ago it kept our planet in a frigid grip
for about 2 and 1 half million
years 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 have been producing
over time right that is in the soil in
the surrounding 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 per Frost I
got from
Siberia so while everyone else was
looking for DNA in fossile bone and
teeth and discovering one species at a
time I was looking in the dirt for
everything 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 a genome is like a twisted
ladder so if you think of a long lad
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 3 billion base pairs so that's 3
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 Su of esa'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 so it's Christmas Eve and I'm I'm
sitting alone in the lab everybody have
already gone home right for for
Christmas and I'm I'm basically checking
the DNA sequences that we got out of the
dirt I'm 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 woly Mammoth it was
bang bison it was bang reindeer it was
bang hair it was bang bang
bang different types of
plants it worked better than I could
even have
imagine Esa had matched the ancient DNA
in his Siberian dirt to known species
whose genetic sequences were collected
in a vast catalog and sure enough he
found dozens of matches including
extinct species ese was the first to
show that enough DNA can survive in the
dirt to paint a picture of the
past still a student he just sparked a
new field of science ancient
environmental DNA 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 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
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this so today we are in the
hallene that's about the last 12,000
years before that it was the plene a
period of lots of ice ages more than 20
lasted about 2 and 1/2 million
years and before that was the pene when
it was much warmer than the
pine yeah it was a really weird place
you would not recognize that
world when you go back 3 million 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 dinosaur 65 million
years
ago I'm a vertebrate paleontologist I
study the animals that live in the
Arctic before the Ice Age mammals of the
pine
Arctic the reality is we don't know very
much the time before the Ice Age began
the pene it's kind of a lost
world we don't have full skeletons of
any p 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 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 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 million
years but our tool are getting better so
I think the limits might
change 20 years ago recovering 400,000
yearold DNA from Siberian permafrost was
an impressive leap back in
time the student was suddenly a
professor the youngest in
Denmark but's Quest had just
begun so I just happened to get this
invit ation from a group of geologists
to go up to Northeastern Greenland and
uh this is a remarkable place I mean
there you have something called the cup
Copenhagen 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
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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
served and cap Copenhagen you're
literally walking on dirt from before
the Ice
Age it's incredible this place that is
almost Barren ground today right in the
sediments we discovered chunks of trees
of wood that are 3 million 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 C
Copenhagen 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
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idea what if we could just stick in the
dirt dirt and recover DNA millions of
years
old 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 or so they're learning about the
explorers that went around the world and
this is kind of I think how Esa 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 Esa and that's
how Esa
Works in 2005 I published this review
paper where we basically claimed well
ancient DNA cannot survive for more than
1 million years that's the absolute
limit but in the back of my head I was
still wondering is that really true
right could DNA survive longer than 1
million years in a place like the cap
Goen ha information
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 we working in a freezing Arctic
desert or it rained
anyway still we caught into the frozen
ground and I got my crazy
samples so I took the camon samples back
to my lab in Copenhagen and uh to be
honest this was the beginning of a very
frustrating
project those Greenland samples would
tease and torment Esa and his team for
the next 15
years in the early days Astrid Schmidt
was a doctoral student in esa's
lab when Esa offered her the Greenland
samples she jumped on
them at that time is was a a star in the
scientific community and I was inspired
by is's
enthusiasm we had a hypothesis that if
the environment had been kept cold and
the temperatures had not been moving up
and down and fluctuated then we would
have had at least a possibility of
finding ancient
DNA so we were being uh optimistic
knowing it was a long shot but also
knowing that we could get groundbreaking
results from
this and there was DNA in the samples we
could see it but it was super
degraded it's not enough to see that
your sample is contain ancient DNA you
have to be able to identify that DNA and
to know what forms of life it came from
to 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 when astd started scientists
needed at least 100 base
pairs 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 the DNA
after 1 million year was just total
garbage with you can say the technology
in hand at the time the DNA was
completely unreadable well astd uh was
one of many people in my lab that tried
the cap Copenhagen samples and basically
failed in
retrospect I was probably not a very
good supervisor right because I I kind
of push
for people to do these samples every
time we had improvements of our
mythology in a hope while this time they
will work if that happened it would be a
career booster but uh the risk
associated with this project was huge
right so it was failure after failure C
Cen Hound project was um yeah a bit
sensitive as opposed to 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 in 2013 I left research science and I
I didn't pursue science um since then I
took a big risk and I paid a price
but again but the thing is just like
with the police in esa's lab students
began calling the Greenland samples
cursed but Esa 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 one stepped into
their
shoes so you you can imagine what I felt
when this these samples landed on my
table so I was a PhD student in es lab
this was my last option also to succeed
in a project that I was given as a PhD
student I was coming
to the final tries of of of actually
making this a success 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 Migel who
came to me with an
idea I was immediately excited I thought
yes this could
work EXC migle suggested we use a
powerful technique called shotgun
sequencing
shotgun sequencing itself was new but no
one had ever used it on dirt DNA I don't
know why in retrospect it seemed kind of
obvious scared first ml proved that the
shotgun technique could work on dirt DNA
several thousand years
old it really showed us that we could
actually get ancient environmental DNA
even from the very shortest greets that
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 refer to as the
curse the C Copenhagen
formation in the early years of ancient
DNA we had to decide which part of the
genome to look at those are the giveaway
parts of the genome that we call
barcodes they reveal the identity of an
organism we match those barcodes to our
reference catalog but those barcode
fragments had to be long
enough we know that DNA fragments over
100 base Bears 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 with the shotgun method we
just see all the DNA we can find then we
look for matches with every genome
sequence for every organism that we know
of it takes immense computing power
billions of operations and only now our
computers powerful enough to work with
fragments down to 30 base
pairs imagine shredding one piece 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 one
piece in there somewhere but you need to
work through millions of other books
before you find the 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
lemings Arctic hair geese Caribou a
whole forest ecosystem large po Willow
Spruce Ash cedar trees we're looking at
a long list of organisms from a place
that
today is an Arctic desert
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esa's team had recovered the genetic
Fingerprints of a lost world nine land
and sea animals from horseshoe crabs to
Big mammals over a 100 plants from
mosses to forest trees and nearly 2,000
other organisms including bacteria and
Plankton some of them extinct and many
of them never detected in the the
Arctic but this incredible breakthrough
created another
problem if you're claiming to have
recovered the world's oldest DNA you'd
better be very sure about the
date we knew we were going to get
hammered extraordinary claims demand
extraordinary evidence right we had to
be very sure about the dates from cap
Copenhagen that took two more years of
hard
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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 anca'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 million years old 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 cup Copenhagen
DNA is actually 2.5 million years this
puts us into the late P scene which is
the period just before we start having
glaciations if esa's DNA is that old if
it is Pine then that is huge Esa had his
hands on DNA from before the last ice
age 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 16 years after Esa 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 single fossil a
mammoth that lived just over a million
years ago during the Ice Age using dirt
DNA instead of fossils esa's team
shattered that record opening a window
on an unknown Living World more than
twice as old as that
Mammoth it feels almost magical to be
able to infer such a complete picture of
an ancient ecosystem from Tiny frag
ments of preserved
DNA when I first heard about the results
from cop
kopenhaven I just said to myself what
what we're talking about is pushing the
record back to at least 2 million years
and I believe much longer than that it
was a complete tour to force one of my
feelings when I first saw this paper is
uh 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 forest from a hotter world before
the Ice Age and these Force are unique
we have nothing like them
today I always knew that there was
forest in the haak
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
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everyone to hear that there was Mastodon
DNA from cap koven Haven this just
struck me as whoo how can that be that
is so far north
relatives of the modern elephant
mastadons were Forest creatures that
died out at the end of the Ice Age the
closest to Cape Copenhagen their remains
have been found is almost 3,000 m to the
south in North America it comes
completely out of the bloom and it was
the first time that we found such a
large animal in Greenland
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 survived beyond the 1
million year old
limit that would is 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 these 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 strongly bound to
Clay and quartz DNA is basically Frozen
in
Time 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 not back to the age of dinosaurs
but far beyond the old 1 million year
limit so these calls 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
amazing journey right has to be honest I
never really lost faith because every
limit we have ever set we
broke until now what we knew of the
Living World before the Ice Age we
learned from fossils at the Canadian
Museum of Nature Natalia rinsky 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 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
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I think the thing that really blew our
minds from the ply
scene is the
camel 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 when
you think about camels today it's really
easy to imagine that they evolv to live
in the desert and this is where the
finding of the hierarchic 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 6
months of the
year one of the uh most dramatic
features of the camel it's 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 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
F eyes tells us they were
there this is a forest that stretched
from Greenland to Canada on solid land
without
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barriers 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 back to a hotter time before the
Ice Age the pia
scene a long lost Epoch that climate
scientists believe May hold a lesson for
us
today the Pia's a big red flashing light
right the pene was the last time
atmospheric CO2 levels were the same as
today you have to go back 3 million
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 Pine has begun it's
called the anthropos scene we've already
altered Earth's climate we're living in
a a climate that is about 1° seed warmer
globally than it should
be the climate of the pene is where
we're going it's like our instruction
manual for what's
coming when the ply scene 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 and that hotter world could hold
lessons for our own
Survival Greenland proves we can go much
deeper in time than what we thought we
would we now have the technology to go
even further back in time potentially
many millions of
years 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 the
rescue effort has already started
scientists in Copenhagen have identified
a gene from the Greenland DNA that
helped pop 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 popler trees
did this is a food plant engineered for
hot
future we stealing genetic secrets of
the
past so we can rescue the
future I want to do my part to rescue
the
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future we are going to sequence
thousands millions of ancient genomes
from cinnamon samples all 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 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 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 contain contains an
entire living world
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