It's 1000 times older than Viking remains, and it even predates the existence of modern humans and Neanderthals.

Well, we have recovered DNA from mammoth teeth that have been buried in the Siberian permafrost for between 700,000 years and 1.2 million years.

This is the first time that anyone has recovered DNA from specimens that are more than a million years old.

This has been quite a challenge.

It has taken us several years to get the data out to analyze it.

What we have found is that one of the specimens, which we refer to as the crest of a mammoth, belonged thio previously unknown lineage or mammoth that we didn't know exist.

I think using ancient DNA like this is a bit like traveling back in time using a time machine so we can actually measure genetic changes.