700,000-Year-Old Horse Becomes Oldest Creature With Sequenced Genome 69
sciencehabit writes "Scientists have sequenced the oldest genome to date—and shaken up the horse family tree in the process. Ancient DNA derived from a horse fossil that's between 560,000 and 780,000 years old suggests that all living equids—members of the family that includes horses, donkeys, and zebras—shared a common ancestor that lived at least 4 million years ago, approximately 2 million years earlier than most previous estimates. The discovery offers new insights into equine evolution and raises the prospect of recovering and exploring older DNA than previously thought possible."
Re:Is the science repeatable? (Score:5, Informative)
You have to not only recover it, but to read it as well. And the fine article from the post indicates they were able to actually conduct genetic analysis on it. That pulls the maximum viability date in quite a bit. The jump in age over previous finds in which they've been able to extract viable information is pretty significant, going from 130,000 years to between 560,000 and 780,000. And note that the figures I show from the story I quoted were under ideal preservation. Maybe it is all correct, but it seems a bit of a longshot to pull that information from such an old bone. I suppose they could just have been lucky.
Re:Bible is truth not false science (Score:2, Informative)
You do....