Documentary explores a geneticist’s motivation to understand the past

Hunt for the Oldest DNA
Niobe Thompson
PBS

Embracing failure leads to experience and, ultimately, extraordinary achievements. This is at the heart of Niobe Thompson’s documentary Hunt for the Oldest DNA, which premiered at the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival this year.

The film follows Eske Willerslev, a Danish evolutionary geneticist now at the University of Cambridge, whose team managed to reconstruct from ancient DNA the ecosystem that existed 2 million years ago in the Kap København Formation, northern Greenland. The area today is Arctic desert with…