Scientists Revive 32,000-Year-Old Plant Right Out of the Pleistocene

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The oldest plant ever to be “resurrected” has been grown from 32,000-year-old seeds, beating the previous record holder by some 30,000 years.

Back in 2007, a team of scientists from Russia, Hungary and the United States recovered frozen Silene stenophylla seeds and remains from the Pleistocene, while investigating about 70 ancient ground squirrel hibernation burrows or caches, hidden in permanently frozen loess-ice deposits in northeastern Siberia, in the plant’s present-day range.

Using radiocarbon dating, the age of the seeds was estimated at between 20,000 and 40,000 years, dating the seeds to the Pleistocene epoch. Rodents would normally eat the food in their larders, but in this case a flood or some other weather event got the whole area buried. Since the rodents had placed the larders at the level of the permafrost, the material froze almost immediately, and did not thaw out at any time since. More than 600,000 fruits and seeds thus preserved were located at the site.