The horse paper [1] is not a refutation of the DNA half-life paper [2]: It's worth remembering that the half-life paper dealt with samples that had "an effecti

The horse paper [1] is not a refutation of the DNA half-life paper [2]: It's worth remembering that the half-life paper dealt with samples that had "an effective burial temperature of 13.1°C", while the horse sample was obtained from the permafrost. The half-life paper even talks about DNA obtained from ice-core samples in that age-range: > The rate of depurination is influenced by temperature, among other factors, which explains why the most extreme survival of DNA was documented in approximately 450–800 kyr ice cores. And if you look at Table 1 in the half-life paper, you'll find estimated half-lifes for a range of temperatures, with an estimated half-life of 9.5k years for a 500bp DNA fragment at -5C and 47k years for a shorter 100bp fragment at the same temperature: > Still, the results indicate that under the right conditions of preservation, short fragments of DNA should be retrievable from very old bone (e.g. greater than 1 Myr). The horse paper also cites the half-life paper, but not as a refutation. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12323 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12323 [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23055061/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23055061/