A 2-million-year-old ecosystem in Greenland uncovered by environmental DNA
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Late Pliocene and Early Pleistocene epochs 3.6 to 0.8 million years ago1 had climates resembling those forecasted under future warming2. Palaeoclimatic records show strong polar amplification with mean annual temperatures of 11–19 °C above contemporary values3, 4. The biological communities inhabiting the Arctic during this time remain poorly known because fossils are rare5. Here we report an ancient environmental DNA6 (eDNA) record describing the rich plant and animal assemblages of the Kap København Formation in North Greenland, dated to around two million years ago. The record shows an open boreal forest ecosystem with mixed vegetation of poplar, birch and thuja trees, as well as a variety of Arctic and boreal shrubs and herbs, many of which had not previously been detected at the site from macrofossil and pollen records. The DNA record confirms the presence of hare and mitochondrial DNA from animals including mastodons, reindeer, rodents and geese, all ancestral to their present-day and late Pleistocene relatives. The presence of marine species including horseshoe crab and green algae support a warmer climate than today. The reconstructed ecosystem has no modern analogue. The survival of such ancient eDNA probably relates to its binding to mineral surfaces. Our findings open new areas of genetic research, demonstrating that it is possible to track the ecology and evolution of biological communities from two million years ago using ancient eDNA.
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Acknowledgements: Acknowledgements: We acknowledge support from the Carlsberg Foundation for logistics to carry out two expeditions to Kap København in 2006 and 2012 (S. Funder, principal investigator for Carlsberg foundation grant to LongTerm and Kap København—the age). The fieldwork in 2016 was supported by a grant to N.K.L. from the Villum Foundation. We highly appreciate the collaborative support by Illumina Inc. that was crucial for the success of the project. E.W. and K.H.K. thank the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF) and the Lundbeck Foundation (R302-2018-2155) for providing long-term funds to develop the necessary DNA technology that eventually made it possible to retrieve environmental DNA from these ancient deposits in the Kap København Formation. E.W. also acknowledges the Wellcome Trust (UNS69906), the Carlsberg Foundation (CF18-0024), Novo Foundation (NNF18SA0035006), Leverhume (RPG-2016-235) and GRF EXC CRS Chair - Cluster of Excellence (44113220) for their support. M.W.P. acknowledges support from the Carlsberg Foundation (CF17-0275). K.K.S. and S.J. acknowledge support from VILLUM FONDEN (00025352). I.G.A. and E.C. have received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 819192). B.D.S. acknowledges support from the Wellcome Trust programme in Mathematical Genomics and Medicine (WT220023). J.Å.K. was supported by the Carlsberg Foundation (CF20-0238). C.B. acknowledges ERC Advanced Award Diatomic (grant agreement no. 835067). J.C.G. was supported by Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada–Discovery Grant 06785 and Canada Foundation for Innovation grant 21305. M.J.C. acknowledges support from the Danish National Research Foundation DNRF128. We thank G. Yang for cosmogenic isotope AMS target chemistry; S. Funder for introducing us to the Kap København Formation and generating much of the platform that enabled us to conduct our research; T. O. Delmont for providing data and guidance on the SMAGs analysis; Minik Rosing for providing talc minerals; T. B. Zunic for providing tremolite, orthoclase and chlorite; Z. Vardanyan for help with the DNA extractions and library build; and L. B. Levy and D. Skov for their help collecting samples in 2016. This work was prepared in part by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under contract DE-AC52-07NA27344; LLNL-JRNL-830653. E.W. thanks St Johns College, Cambridge for providing him with a stimulating environment for scientific thoughts and discussion.
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1476-4687
