There were reindeer running around, lemmings, mastodons (mammoth-like animals), but also horseshoe crabs and black geese. And there were trees such as poplars and various types of conifers. These are just some of the more than 100 animal and plant species that scientists could identify in more than two-million-year-old genetic material brought to the surface from the soil of an area in northern Greenland. The soil in the area is not covered by the giant ice sheet and therefore lies free – not because it’s not cold enough, but because the air is too dry for snow. In late 2022, the discovery made the cover of Nature, which read that the scientists had discovered a «lost world». This was because the genetic material – DNA – testified to a time when the area, as well as the rest of Greenland, was much warmer than today. The many animals and plants whose DNA was recovered lived in a lush, green coastal landscape – a huge contrast to the desolate polar desert the area is today. That landscape disappeared, along with its inhabitants, when Greenland ended up in the freezer of the Pleistocene, the age of ice ages separated by short warmer periods, which partly explains why the DNA was preserved for so long – though it is far from intact. With its age of at least two million years, it is, for now, the oldest preserved DNA.
