Reply to: When did mammoths go extinct?

Since the inception of ancient environmental DNA (eDNA) research, considerable attention has been paid to the depositional and diagenetic processes of DNA molecules in different sediments and settings1. Understanding those processes is critical to determine whether the recovered DNA is of the same age as the deposit in which it is found. It is therefore not unreasonable to ask, as Miller and Simpson have2 in response to our recently published eDNA study of 50,000 years of Arctic ecosystem changes3, whether remains of long-dead megafauna might have contributed older DNA to younger deposits. They propose that this may account for our finding that mammoths persisted into the Holocene epoch in the continental Arctic.