Ancient DNA research concentrates overwhelmingly on high latitudes, where cold and dry conditions preserve genetic material best, and that sampling bias shapes what the field believes about Ice Age megafauna. A team led from the School of Life Sciences at Peking University, with collaborators at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and other institutions, deliberately targeted mid-latitude Eurasia to reconstruct the history of the woolly rhinoceros.
The dataset comprises 29 mitochondrial genomes and 14 nuclear genomes recovered from remains at ten sites or regions across Eurasia, dating from roughly 230,000 to 18,000 years ago. Alongside the genomic work the team modelled habitat suitability from 500,000 years ago until the species went extinct, allowing genetic divergence to be read against the environmental conditions that may have produced it.
The most recent common ancestor lived about 460,000 years ago during a major glacial period, and the main mitochondrial lineages diverged between roughly 460,000 and 420,000 years ago, around the transition into a warmer interval. Suitable habitat contracted and fragmented across Eurasia during that transition, which may have driven the genetic separation. The analyses identify distinct lineages in East Asia, the Altai and Europe, with northeastern Siberian populations apparently formed through admixture between Altai and East Asian groups.
Regional histories differ sharply in ways the habitat models help explain. The Altai remained suitable for at least 160,000 years across multiple glacial cycles, while eastern European habitat did not recover until about 70,000 years ago, consistent with that region's lower nuclear genome diversity. The broader conclusion, published in Science, is that temperate Eurasia served as a long-term reservoir of diversity rather than a temporary refuge.