Hunt for the Oldest DNA explores geneticist’s motivation to grasp the previous

Hunt for the Oldest DNA
Niobe Thompson
PBS

Embracing failure results in expertise and, finally, extraordinary achievements. That is on the coronary heart of Niobe Thompson’s documentary Hunt for the Oldest DNA, which premiered on the Copenhagen Worldwide Documentary Movie Competition this yr.

The movie follows Eske Willerslev, a Danish evolutionary geneticist now on the College of Cambridge, whose staff managed to reconstruct from historic DNA the ecosystem that existed 2 million years in the past within the Kap København Formation, northern Greenland. The world at this time is Arctic desert with…