The effects of the melting polar ice caps may one day be felt well beyond the poles, though. As the polar ice caps shrink, sea levels begin to rise, creating serious problems for coastal areas around the globe. Fortunately, we can do our part to slow down and prevent the environmental changes causing the polar ice caps to melt.
Paabo and colleagues used a new method for sequencing ancient, degraded genetic material to put together the 400,000-year-old specimen's mitochondrial genome. It is the oldest DNA ever found outside permafrost conditions -- in other words, it was not permanently frozen.
DNA testing on 24,000-year-old skeleton reveals that Native Americans could be partly descended from EUROPEANS. 1  The genome of the four-year-old boy is the oldest sequenced to date. 2  DNA from the remains, discovered in Siberia in the 1920s, are thought to contain a third of Native American ancestry's gene pool.