Elephants are plagued by the same deadly bacteria that infected mammoths, genetic experts have found.
A study of mammoth teeth, dating back 1.1 million years, uncovered the remains of microbes that lived inside the extinct creatures.
It is the world’s oldest microbial DNA ever recovered and shows ancient species battled the same bacteria that troubles animals today.
Among the bugs found in mammoths from the late Pleistocene era was a type of Pasteurella bacteria, similar to Bisgaard taxon 45, which was recently identified as the cause of death of six African elephants in Zimbabwe.
Since African and Asian elephants are the closest living relatives of mammoths, the findings raise questions about whether mammoths may also have been vulnerable to similar infections.
“This work opens a new chapter in understanding the biology of extinct species,” said Dr Love Dalen, professor of evolutionary genomics at Stockholm University.
“Not only can we study the genomes of mammoths themselves, but we can now begin to explore the microbial communities that lived inside them.”
Mammoths roamed Europe, Asia and North America, but began dying out roughly 10,000 years ago as the Ice Age came to an end. They eventually became extinct approximately 4,000 years ago.
Mammoth teeth were studied to uncover the ancient microbes – Peter Mortensen
The animals lived at the same time as early humans, who recorded the creatures in cave paintings and carvings, and used their bones, tusks and skins to make art, tools and dwellings.
Humans also hunted them for food, which may have hastened their decline when they were dying out as the climate warmed.
For the study, researchers analysed microbial DNA from 483 mammoth specimens, of which 440 were sequenced for the first time.
Among them was a steppe mammoth that lived about 1.1 million years ago. Using advanced genomic and bioinformatic techniques, the team distinguished microbes that once lived inside the mammoths from those that invaded their remains after death.
Six microbial groups were consistently associated with mammoth hosts, including relatives of Actinobacillus, Pasteurella, Streptococcus and Erysipelothrix.
“Imagine holding a million-year-old mammoth tooth,” said Dr Benjamin Guinet, a fellow at Stockholm University.
“What if I told you it still carries traces of the ancient microbes that lived together with this mammoth?
“Our results push the study of microbial DNA back beyond a million years, opening up new possibilities to explore how host-associated microbes evolved in parallel with their hosts.”
The team said the results suggest that some families of bugs coexisted with mammoths for hundreds of thousands of years. This spans both wide geographic ranges and evolutionary timescales, from over one million years ago to the extinction of woolly mammoths on Wrangel Island about 4,000 years ago.
“As microbes evolve fast, obtaining reliable DNA data across more than a million years was like following a trail that kept rewriting itself,” researcher Tom van der Valk added.
“Our findings show that ancient remains can preserve biological insights far beyond the host genome, offering us perspectives on how microbes influenced adaptation, disease, and extinction in Pleistocene ecosystems.”