Parasite–host relationships are a nightmare for creationists. Their usual escape hatch is “The Fall”, but that undermines the Discovery Institute’s claim that intelligent design is science rather than Bible-literalist dogma in a lab coat. It also raises the obvious question: if parasites only appeared 6,000–10,000 years ago, how did they spread so quickly—and why do we find fossil evidence of parasitism millions of years old?
Creationists cope by dismissing science as a conspiracy, waving away radiometric dating, or pushing myths such as dinosaur fossils being “carbon-dated” [sic] to a few thousand years old. So creationism persists, despite the vast amount of evidence against it, by a combination of wilful ignorance, disinformation and a lack of critical thinking skills.
Now creationists must also ignore new research from Stockholm University, where scientists isolated bacterial DNA from the teeth of woolly and steppe mammoths. They showed these bacteria evolved into the ancestors of those infecting modern elephants—evidence of parasites a million years before “Creation Week”, and of co-evolution continuing right up to today’s elephants, the descendants of those mammoths.
Incidentally, neither mammoths nor modern elephants are mentioned in the Bible, reflecting the parochial ignorance of its authors - a fact often overlooked in depictions of animals boarding Noah's Ark, which usually includes a pair of elephants!
Background^ Mammoths and Ancient Parasites. Mammoth EvolutionThe findings of the Stockholm University team are published open access in Cell and explained in this Stockholm University news item.
- Mammoths (Mammuthus spp.) were close relatives of modern elephants, evolving in Africa around 5 million years ago before spreading into Eurasia and North America.
- The best-known species are the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) and the steppe mammoth (Mammuthus trogontherii).
- Mammoths adapted to Ice Age environments with long hair, thick fat layers, and specialised teeth for grazing tough grasses.
- They went extinct about 4,000 years ago, with small populations surviving on Wrangel Island long after mainland extinction.
Parasites in the Teeth
- Researchers at Stockholm University analysed dental remains of woolly and steppe mammoths up to 1.2 million years old.
- They recovered fragments of bacterial DNA directly from the teeth—the oldest host-associated bacterial DNA ever identified.
- The bacteria were shown to be evolutionary ancestors of those infecting modern elephants, demonstrating long-term host–parasite co-evolution.
- This discovery confirms that parasitic relationships existed well before humans appeared, directly contradicting creationist claims that parasites only arose after a mythical “Fall”.
Why It Matters
- The study provides a rare glimpse into the deep history of host–parasite interactions.
- It also highlights how ancient DNA can reveal not only the story of extinct animals like mammoths, but also the evolutionary histories of the microorganisms that lived with them.
Ancient mammoth remains yield the world's oldest host-associated bacterial DNA
An international team led by researchers at the Centre for Palaeogenetics, has uncovered microbial DNA preserved in woolly and steppe mammoth remains dating back more than one million years. The analyses reveal some of the world's oldest microbial DNA ever recovered, as well as the identification of bacteria that possibly caused disease in mammoths. The findings are published in Cell.
Researchers at the Centre for Palaeogenetics, a collaboration between Stockholm University and the Swedish Museum of Natural History, analyzed 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 alongside the mammoths from those that invaded their remains after death.
Imagine holding a million-year-old mammoth tooth. 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.
Dr. Benjamin Guinet, lead author
Centre for Palaeogenetics, Stockholm, Sweden.
Six microbial clades persisted across time and space
The analyses identified six microbial groups consistently associated with mammoth hosts, including relatives of Actinobacillus, Pasteurella, Streptococcus, and Erysipelothrix. Some of these microbes may have been pathogenic. For instance, one Pasteurella-related bacterium identified in the study is closely related to a pathogen that has caused fatal outbreaks in African elephants. Since African and Asian elephants are the closest living relatives of mammoths, these findings raise questions about whether mammoths may also have been vulnerable to similar infections.
Remarkably, the team reconstructed partial genomes of Erysipelothrix from a 1.1-million-year-old steppe mammoth, representing the oldest known host-associated microbial DNA ever recovered. This pushes the limits of what researchers can learn about the interactions between ancient hosts and their microbiomes.
As microbes evolve fast, obtaining reliable DNA data across more than a million years was like following a trail that kept rewriting itself. 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.
Tom van der Valk, senior author.
Centre for Palaeogenetics, Stockholm, Sweden.
A new window into ancient ecosystems
Although the exact impact of the identified microbes on mammoth health is difficult to determine due to DNA degradation and limited comparative data, the study provides an unprecedented glimpse into the microbiomes of extinct megafauna. The results suggest that some microbial lineages coexisted with mammoths for hundreds of thousands of years, spanning 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.This work opens a new chapter in understanding the biology of extinct species. Not only can we study the genomes of mammoths themselves, but we can now begin to explore the microbial communities that lived inside them.
Professor Love Dalén, co-author.
Centre for Palaeogenetics, Stockholm, Sweden.
Publication:
Highlights
- Analysis of microbial DNA in 483 mammoths, dated from >1 million years ago to near-extinction
- Six microbial clades persisted across diverse regions and extended time periods
- Partial Erysipelothrix genome recovered from a 1.1-million-year-old steppe mammoth
Summary
Ancient genomic studies have extensively explored human-microbial interactions, yet research on non-human animals remains limited. In this study, we analyzed ancient microbial DNA from 483 mammoth remains spanning over 1 million years, including 440 newly sequenced and unpublished samples from a 1.1-million-year-old steppe mammoth. Using metagenomic screening, contaminant filtering, damage pattern analysis, and phylogenetic inference, we identified 310 microbes associated with different mammoth tissues. While most microbes were environmental or post-mortem colonizers, we recovered genomic evidence of six host-associated microbial clades spanning Actinobacillus, Pasteurella, Streptococcus, and Erysipelothrix. Some of these clades contained putative virulence factors, including a Pasteurella-related bacterium that had previously been linked to the deaths of African elephants. Notably, we reconstructed partial genomes of Erysipelothrix from the oldest mammoth sample, representing the oldest authenticated host-associated microbial DNA to date. This work demonstrates the potential of obtaining ancient animal microbiomes, which can inform further paleoecological and evolutionary research.
IntroductionGraphical abstract
The sequencing of mammoth (Mammuthus) DNA has enabled comprehensive studies on mammoth evolution, biogeography, and ecology.1,2,3,4,5 However, past interactions between microbes and extinct megafauna remain largely unexplored. Investigating these relationships could provide insights into the role of microbes in adaptation to extreme environments, the impact of population size fluctuations on the microbiome during glacial and interglacial periods, dietary shifts over time, and the potential role of microbes in megafaunal extinction. For example, Asian elephants, Elephas maximus, the closest living relatives to mammoths, suffer from pathogens including a virus with high mortality in calves (endotheliotropic herpesvirus) and a bacterium causing anthrax disease (Bacillus anthracis),6,7,8,9 prompting consideration of whether similar microbes were affecting their extinct mammoth cousins. Ancient remains such as teeth and bones can preserve not only the host’s DNA, but also the DNA of microbes that co-occurred at the individual’s time of death.10 These data have now emerged as a valuable resource for understanding pandemics, lifestyle patterns, and population dynamics.11,12,13 Here, we aimed to explore past interaction between mammoths and co-occurring microbes along a timespan from over 1 million years ago until the extinction of mammoths on Wrangel Island 4,000 years ago. We analyzed a total of 483 genomic datasets generated from various tissues including teeth, molars, skulls, and skin tissue of mammoths, of which 440 are newly sequenced and unpublished samples, including new sequence data obtained from a 1.1-million-year-old steppe mammoth (Mammuthus trogontherii) sample (Figure S1; Table S1).
Figure S1 Distribution of mammoth samples worldwide, related to STAR Methods
The map illustrates the locations of mammoth samples used in this study, and the size of the corresponding pie charts represents the number of samples found in each area. Each pie chart displays color proportions representing the estimated age of the samples.
Guinet, Benjamin; Oskolkov, Nikolay; Moreland, Kelsey; Dehasque, Marianne; Chacón-Duque, J. Camilo; Angerbjörn, Anders; Arsuaga, Juan Luis; Danilov, Gleb; Kanellidou, Foteini; Kitchener, Andrew C.; Muller, Héloïse; Plotnikov, Valerii Protopopov, Albert; Tikhonov, Alexei; Termes, Laura; Zazula, Grant; Mortensen, Peter; Grigorieva, Lena; Richards, Michael; Shapiro, Beth; Lister, Adrian M.; Vartanyan, Sergey; Díez-del-Molino, David; Götherström, Anders; Pečnerová, Patrícia; Nikolskiy, Pavel; Dalén, Love; van der Valk, Tom
Cell (2025) DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2025.08.003
Copyright: © 2025 The authors.
Published by Elsevier. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
The Stockholm University team’s work once again shows how science uncovers the deep connections that bind life together across vast spans of time. The discovery of ancient bacterial DNA in mammoth teeth not only illuminates the evolutionary history of parasites, but also demonstrates the power of modern molecular techniques to retrieve evidence of life millions of years in the past.
For creationists, however, such discoveries are an inconvenience to be ignored or denied. They cannot be reconciled with a literalist interpretation of Genesis without resorting to special pleading, ad hoc explanations, or outright dismissal of the evidence. Yet the reality remains: parasites existed long before humans, and their evolutionary history is written in both the fossil record and the genomes of their hosts.
Science offers a coherent, testable, and evidence-based account of these relationships. Creationism, by contrast, offers only dogma that collapses under scrutiny. Each new finding like this pushes the superstition further into irrelevance, while reinforcing the simple truth that life on Earth is the product of evolution, not design.
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