Russia’s war in Ukraine is disrupting studies of ancient life

Russia has been at the centre of major palaeontological finds including the Denisovans, but its brutal war is threatening the research that uncovers the past.

Siberia is a treasure trove for palaeontologists. For more than a decade, Love Dalén, an evolutionary geneticist at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, has travelled to Russia every couple of years to hunt for the remains of mammoths and other ice-age creatures preserved in permafrost. Earlier this year, after two years of pandemic restrictions, Dalén and his team were preparing to leave on a long-delayed research expedition to the Russian wilds.But in February, Russia invaded Ukraine. Since then, “everything has changed”, he says. Amid travel restrictions and sanctions, Dalén was forced to cancel the expedition. His situation is far from unique.On top of devastating tens of millions of lives, the war has plunged many scientists with ties to Russia into a state of uncertainty about the future of their research and their relationships with Russian colleagues. Between sanctions, collapsing collaborations and cancelled fieldwork, the study of the past through Russia’s often exquisitely preserved palaeontological specimens has become an unexpected casualty of war.What exactly the conflict will mean for the field is still unclear. But Dalén says one thing is certain: “We will know less about the past because of this war.”

Pleistocene park

Russia has been at the centre of some of the century’s biggest archaeological and palaeontological finds — including the discovery of Denisovans, an ancient hominin group found in a Siberian cave and described in 2010¹. Siberia has also yielded a vast array of other remains from the Pleistocene epoch, which lasted from around 2.5 million years ago to 11,700 years ago and is colloquially called the ice age.The quality and quantity of these remains is what makes Russian specimens so special. Up to 90% of all known mammoth fossils come from Yakutia, a region in eastern Siberia. Permafrost is so good at preserving organic material that Dalén and his colleagues have been able to sequence DNA from a 1.6-million-year-old mammoth tooth — the oldest genome on record — as they reported last year².At the heart of many of these discoveries are decades-long relationships between Russian and foreign researchers. But the war — and the response from the West — has made these collaborations “near impossible”, says Dalén. Many Western countries and universities cut ties with Russian institutions after the invasion. The United States announced in June that it will wind down research ties with Russia.Most of these provisions don’t ban collaborations with individual scientists in Russia. But uncertainty has brought projects to a standstill. Olga Potapova, a palaeontologist at the Mammoth Site in Hot Springs, South Dakota, was planning to publish research on woolly rhinos and cave lions that included researchers in Russia. But after the invasion, she received e-mails from some Western colleagues, explaining that they couldn’t work with these research groups anymore. “Everything is delayed and I don’t know what to do,” she says.For Western researchers, the war has brought on a crisis of conscience that has been simmering since Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. The peninsula is home to important Neanderthal sites, and since it was annexed, researchers have had to ask Russia for permission to access them.Now, with stories about Ukrainian colleagues hiding in bomb shelters, fleeing their homes and in some cases fighting on the front lines, many Western palaeontologists are reluctant to ask the Russian government for anything. “It feels dirty,” says a researcher who asked to remain anonymous to protect the identities of people they work with. One colleague, they say, stayed in Kyiv to safeguard the city’s archaeological collections. “It’s horrible,” they say. “All you can hope is that you will never be in a situation where you have to put your life on the line to save your collection.”At the same time, Western researchers are avoiding contacting Russian colleagues out of concern about scrutiny from the Kremlin. More than 8,000 Russian scientists and science journalists have signed a letter denouncing the war, and Western researchers say that their colleagues in Russia are being monitored closely for anti-war sentiment.“The fact that one e-mail address is from the US and another is Russian could attract attention,” says another researcher who asked to stay anonymous to protect colleagues in Russia. “We are on the precipice that something could go terribly wrong if we aren’t careful.”

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