Authors
Xiao-Le Lei, Jiaoyang Ruan, Xueyuan Liang, Raquel Teixeira, Jiangyue Zhang, Alexandre Gilardet, Xu Zhou, Yu Han, Zhihan Zhao, Hai-Yan Yue, Maxim Kozlikin, Sergey Vasiliev, Stanislav Medvedev, Sergei Kruskop, Song Xing, Ting Wang, Vera Basova, Lijuan Ma, Bohua Shi, Qingfeng Shao, Katerina Douka, Michael Shunkov, Alexandra Buzhilova, Love Dalén, He Yu
Published in
Science (New York, N.Y.). Volume 393. Issue 6816. Pages 1122-1127. Sep 10, 2026. Epub Sep 10, 2026.
Abstract
The woolly rhinoceros was a prominent Ice Age megafaunal species, and there is limited knowledge regarding its origin and responses to past glacial cycles. We sequenced 29 mitochondrial and 14 nuclear genomes from Pleistocene specimens across Eurasia and modeled the species' habitats over the past 500,000 years. Our results suggest that its maternal genetic diversity mainly evolved in temperate Eurasia around 460 thousand to 420 thousand years ago during a prolonged glacial-interglacial transition. We found that a ~170-thousand-year-old East Asian individual was ancestral to all later populations, indicating East Asia as one possible origin of Late Pleistocene ancestry. We also identified the Altai region as a major climatic refugium. These findings highlight the crucial role of temperate Eurasia in the evolution of woolly rhinoceroses and the diversification of cold-adapted megafauna.
PMID:
42721240
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 11 Sep 2026.
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