The oldest genome to date has been sequenced from a 700,000 year old horse found in permafrost.
Ancient horse is oldest creature to reveal DNA sequence - latimes.com
Ancient horse is oldest creature to reveal DNA sequence - latimes.com
700,000 year old horse genome sequenced
- Thread starter DavidBrown
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that's an exciting article.
A bit of a misleading sentence in there though, where it says "Dating techniques revealed that the animal lived in an epoch when woolly mammoths, saber-toothed cats and giant beavers shared turf with ancestral humans."
A casual reading would take that to mean that humans were in the Yukon - where the horse skeletal remains were unearthed - 700,000 years ago, which of course they weren't (that's at least 670,000 years too early for humans in the Americas). But even the other interpretation is misleading, because Homo sapiens weren't anywhere near entering Eurasia (to coexist with mammoths etc) that far back in time - it's probably about 500,000 years before H. sapiens even existed!
Earlier hominids were in Eurasia at that time, but I think the article could have worded it better.
A bit of a misleading sentence in there though, where it says "Dating techniques revealed that the animal lived in an epoch when woolly mammoths, saber-toothed cats and giant beavers shared turf with ancestral humans."
A casual reading would take that to mean that humans were in the Yukon - where the horse skeletal remains were unearthed - 700,000 years ago, which of course they weren't (that's at least 670,000 years too early for humans in the Americas). But even the other interpretation is misleading, because Homo sapiens weren't anywhere near entering Eurasia (to coexist with mammoths etc) that far back in time - it's probably about 500,000 years before H. sapiens even existed!
Earlier hominids were in Eurasia at that time, but I think the article could have worded it better.