Scientists decode the genome of million-year-old mammoths

IN THE 1966 science-fiction movie “One Million Years B.C.”, Raquel Welch and John Richardson traverse a primitive landscape inhabited by dinosaurs and early humans. The film was low on science and high on fiction: by then dinosaurs were long dead and humans—at least, ones resembling Ms Welch and Mr Richardson—were hundreds of millennia away.

A more accurate picture of Earth’s inhabitants at the time is now being revealed. In research published in Nature, a team of scientists led by Anders Gotherstrom, at the University of Stockholm, and Love Dalen at the Centre for Palaeogenetics, also in Sweden, describe sequencing DNA samples from mammoths that lived and died in north-eastern Siberia around a million years ago.