50,000-year-old antelope DNA from South Africa beats prior African limits, study says

A tooth from a mountain reedbuck that lived in South Africa 50,000 years ago produced the oldest DNA ever retrieved from sub-Saharan Africa, according to a new study published online May 27 in Quaternary Science Reviews. Researchers extracted DNA from the partial molar of Redunca fulvorufula from Boomplaas Cave in southern South Africa, and the headline number matters because it pushes well beyond the previously demonstrated “oldest” animal DNA from the region.

The prior benchmark for the oldest sub-Saharan animal DNA was about 9,300 years old, from an extinct antelope in South Africa. And while human DNA from sub-Saharan Africa has been recovered to about 18,000 years from bones found in a rock shelter in Tanzania, scientists have generally treated the hot sub-Saharan climate as a DNA shredder. The new work suggests that, at least in some conditions and locations, genetic material can persist for tens of thousands of years, opening a longer window on evolution than many researchers expected.

So how did they test the idea? The team analyzed more than 300 teeth from animals that lived in the past 110,000 years, focusing on both the Late Pleistocene and the Holocene. They reported that many teeth did not yield DNA, but small amounts were detectable in remains as old as the Late Pleistocene, the latter part of the last ice age. The study then narrowed in on specific specimens: dozens of Holocene bovid specimens younger than 11,700 years old and four Late Pleistocene bovid specimens between 12,000 and 50,000 years old.

The results were a mixed bag, which is a polite way of saying: ancient DNA does not arrive on command. But the oldest “hit” came from the 50,000-year-old reedbuck tooth. The rest of the oldest DNA samples came from three extinct long-horned buffalos (Syncerus antiquus), including two individuals that died 21,000 years ago and one that died 12,000 years ago. This matters scientifically because it shows a pattern: DNA preservation can work on timescales that, until now, were usually treated as too long for sub-Saharan Africa’s climate.

There are also two reasons the lead author, Deon de Jager, a paleogenomics expert at the University of Copenhagen, says the 50,000-year-old result is exciting but not ironclad. In an email to Live Science, de Jager said he is skeptical for two reasons: first, the reedbuck DNA is significantly older than the next-oldest DNA recovered (from the long-horned buffalo). Second, the reedbuck specimen was contaminated with some human DNA, which they were able to remove. Those issues do not invalidate the study. They do, however, signal that executives and boards paying attention to research credibility should look for the next layer: independent confirmation, tighter contamination controls, and additional sampling that tests whether this is repeatable.

The study also leans on broader context pointing in the same direction. Since publication of the Quaternary Science Reviews study, the researchers have sequenced the genome of a 42,000-year-old wildebeest from Ethiopia, suggesting DNA lasts longer in Africa’s climate than experts once thought. Even de Jager, while calling the result exciting, frames the bigger picture as uncertain rather than solved. “There is of course a limit to DNA preservation in Africa, but what it is, is not clear,” he told Live Science. He adds that deep caves with stable, low temperatures could be especially good candidates, along with high-elevation sites where temperatures have been very low for a long time.

Where this gets especially interesting is the “how much is enough” question. The Late Pleistocene teeth produced very low amounts of DNA. De Jager notes that the DNA is thought to have a half-life of about 521 years, meaning half of the DNA in a specimen disappears every 521 years until none is left. Still, the amount the researchers found was sufficient for identifying evolutionary lineages. If enough data can be gathered, researchers might compare gene flow and interbreeding among species and populations across much longer periods in South Africa than before.

And yet, there are hard ceilings. De Jager says researchers may never be able to extract DNA from ancient human relatives like Homo naledi, which went extinct around 240,000 years ago, or Paranthropus robustus, which died out around 1 million years ago. He says chances of obtaining DNA from Homo naledi are very, very low, requiring an exceptionally well-preserved skull with the petrous bone still present, described as the best bone for obtaining ancient DNA. For something nearly 1 million years old in Africa, he says it would probably be impossible because conditions are too harsh.

For people in the business of research, data, and the institutional memory of science, this is more than a biology flex. It is a signal that certain geographies can change what questions are answerable at all. If DNA preservation really can span 40,000 to 50,000 years in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, then the “lost time” problem in ancient genomics gets smaller. For investors funding paleogenomics, for research institutions allocating sequencing capacity, and for boards overseeing scientific programs, the strategic stakes are clear: the timeline expands, the datasets get richer, and the credibility bar rises because spectacular claims now have a closer-to-repeatable playbook to test.