British Columbia-based documentary HUNT FOR THE OLDEST DNA has won an Emmy at the 46th annual News & Documentary Emmy Awards. Announced during a ceremony in New York City on June 26, 2025, the film took home the award for Outstanding Science and Technology Documentary, standing out among nominees from Netflix and National Geographic.
HUNT FOR THE OLDEST DNA is a feature from Victoria-based Handful of Films written and directed by founder Niobe Thompson. The film tells the story of a maverick gene hunter, Danish biologist Eske Willerslev, who was the first to obtain ancient DNA samples from ice cores. His single-minded pursuit of an improbable scientific vision teased and tormented him before ending with a stunning triumph: a lost world recovered from a spoonful of dirt.
Two decades ago, Willerslev had a radical idea: Could DNA, the fragile chemical code of life, survive intact in frozen sediment for millennia? Fellow scientists called him crazy. But the Danish biologist set out to prove everybody wrong, and his perseverance paid off with a landmark breakthrough–with massive implications for how we understand the deep past.
After many years of failure, Willerslev recovered the genetic traces of a lush forest ecosystem from before the Ice Age, more than two million years ago. The species identified from their DNA lived during the last hot epoch on Earth. Signaling a new era in DNA research, scientists can now use DNA to travel back millions of years and piece together vanished ecosystems. Today, they are poised to harvest the genetic secrets of these ancient worlds to help us adapt to our own climate future.
Learn more about the documentary and filmmakers on the website. Watch the trailer below or on YouTube.
