A horse has just taken us further back in time than ever before. The genome of a 700,000-year-old fossil has been sequenced, suggesting we could do the same with other long-extinct creatures - including early hominins like Homo erectus. Small DNA fragments have survived up to 500,000 years, but until now, the oldest complete genome had come from 110,000-year-old polar bear remains. Pushing that back to 700,000 years is a big jump, says Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. "It's by far the oldest vertebrate genome we have so far," says Johannes Krause of the University of Tubingen, Germany, who was not involved in the study.
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