Waking the Ancient: How 41,000-Year-Old Worms Came Back to Life in Siberia
I love science because to me, it’s just magic brought to life and explained. There are moments when science feels less like a field of study and more like a séance.
In 2018, Russian scientists thawed over 300 prehistoric worms trapped in Siberian permafrost. Two of them, long presumed silent in the glacier of time, actually stirred. One had been asleep for about 32,000 years and the other for around forty-one thousand, seven hundred years.
And both of them woke up, moved, than ate (oh god, this is so relatable it’s not even funny).
This is the story of what it means to wake the ancient, and what it means for us.
The Silence Beneath the Ice
Permafrost is not just frozen soil, it’s a little time capsule. At it’s core it’s actually a library of everything the earth wanted to remember, or couldn’t quite let go of. Under layers of ice and sediment lie seeds, spores, viruses, bones, etc etc, the list goes on to incorporate basically anything that was caught in that moment of time. The breath of mammoths, the footprints of Neanderthals, the DNA of a world we never met, only inherited, the list is long and goes on and on.
In that icy darkness, these worms (nematodes, to be precise) waited. Not really dead, but certainly not alive either, somewhere in the sticky middle. They were discovered in the Yakutia region of northeastern Siberia, buried beneath 30 meters of frozen soil. One sample came from a squirrel burrow preserved since the Ice Age, another from glacial core samples older than most human civilizations.
Those worms were asleep longer than the pyramids have stood, I mean that’s longer than we’ve spoken language, even longer than we've been…us. Then, they woke up and were hungry. Understandable.
The process is called cryptobiosis…a near-magical biological state where life is suspended. It’s not just sleeping or a coma. It’s not hibernation either, although that seems the closest. It’s the closing of every system, the slowing of every function, until time becomes irrelevant. It’s what millionaires are trying and have been trying since Walt Disney days, to freeze themselves then hopefully, in the future, someone can un-freeze them and heal whatever ailments they had.
In cryptobiosis cells stop metabolizing and water leaves the body. Water needs to leave because water expands when it freezes, so if they think about water expanding inside of your cells, you can see why that would be problematic, I mean your cells would completely shred themselves. Enzymes halt as well and decay pauses at these temperatures.
The body enters a kind of molecular stasis, protected by its sugars and proteins that act like internal antifreeze. Time doesn’t touch them, not really, not in any way that matters. Then when conditions change, like when warmth returns and when moisture is restored, these organisms resume their lives as if no time passed at all.
Magic.
When thawed in petri dishes at the Institute of Physicochemical and Biological Problems in Soil Science in Russia, the two nematodes didn’t simply twitch, they moved with intention. They fed on bacteria in their new environment and exhibited motility as they squirmed around. They functioned like real worms.
Scientists were stunned, and not just by the age…but by the behavior. These weren’t partial revivals or creepy zombie fragments, these were functional organisms brought back after nearly 42 millennia. And they weren’t the only ones this has ever happened to.
Other organisms have flirted with this line when a moss sample revived after 1,500 years in Antarctic ice came back to life. There was also a 30,000-year-old virus, Pithovirus sibericum, reactivated in a lab in 2014 (why would we do this?). Tardigrades, the microscopic water bears, have survived space, radiation, and decades in suspended animation as I’ve talked about before.
But nothing rivals a 41,700-year sleep…until now.
Why Worms?
It’s easy to laugh at this whole article being written about worms, not dinosaurs or mammoths or lost kings in golden tombs, just worms, but these creatures are survivors. Simple, yeah, but perfect in their function. Worms are adaptable and resilient, they feel almost engineered by evolution to last.
Life doesn’t just cling, it waits. The smallest bodies often hold the biggest mysteries, and nature has written instructions for pausing time, and is now revealing them to us.
What if those instructions could be adapted to preserve species or to protect astronauts, to push past death and into the unknown future.
Home Worm Growing Kit
These worms are not older than language, but it's a pretty cool place to start! I got them and tossed them (lovingly) into my garden bed.
What does it mean to disturb something that has rested for 40,000 years? That nematode didn’t ask to be revived or consent to this new world of plastic and microchips and fluorescent light. We brought it back for curiosity, for data. Are we playing god with frozen time? Or are we simply decoding a language the earth left us, syllable by icy syllable?
Eh, those are some of the arguments I saw on the interwebs when looking into this piece, but the truth is, they would’ve thawed eventually without us anyway. As the icecaps around the world melt, honestly, who knows how many worms, viruses, other bits of life have already crawled out and we didn’t notice it yet.
What Could Go Wrong?
We love stories of revival, but every resurrection has risk, and I’m the queen of finding things that might go wrong. Just ask my husband.
Bringing back ancient organisms (especially bacteria and viruses) poses enormous biohazard potential. What if the next thawed microbe isn’t a worm but a pathogen our immune systems have never seen, one that predates antibodies? With global warming accelerating permafrost melt, we’re not just digging these creatures up…we’re accidentally unleashing them.
A 2016 anthrax outbreak in Siberia was linked to a reawakened spore from a thawing reindeer carcass, and that was just the beginning.
Some scientists call this “the biological Pandora’s box,” once opened, it may not close.
When these worms fell asleep, Neanderthals still roamed Eurasia and Homo sapiens were just learning to use bone needles. The Last Glacial Maximum hadn’t happened yet and dogs weren’t domesticated (I write this as my tiny Yorkie-Poo sits on my lap). Cave paintings were still 20,000 years in the future when these worms snuggled in for a nap.
And yet…here they are, wriggling in a lab dish, fully alive in 2025. What does it mean when the past literally crawls into the present? It means that nothing is ever truly gone, extinction and preservation are not binary, and that the world finds ways to remember. Sometimes even in worms.
What Else Is Waiting?
This is the question that haunts glaciologists, virologists, and dreamers alike. If worms can wait 41,000 years…what else might be buried and what else might wake? A story that rewrites what we think life is is what I’m personally hoping for.
The permafrost is melting around the world, and the past is rising. The earth, it seems, is not done speaking, and I’m ready to listen.
In a world moving too fast every day day without any pauses, this story is a reminder to slow down a little. Not everything living is visible and not everything buried stays gone.
We revived worms, not because they’re useful (even though worms are super important, and not because they’re beautiful, but because they were there waiting patiently in the ice. In their small, silent little way, they remind us how to endure and hunker down when things get to be more than we can handle. They went still to protect the core of themselves and waited for a world kind enough (or curious enough) to bring them back.
Other Reads You May Enjoy:
Airborne Seeds and Invisible Roots: The Poetry of Floating Agriculture
The Wild Side of AI: From Resurrecting Direwolves to Talking with Plants
The Tiny Living Robots That Can Reproduce: Welcome to the World of Xenobots
NASA Found a “Spider Web” on Mars, and It Might Be Hiding Clues to Alien Life
Quantum Biology Explained Simply: What Happens When Life Breaks the Rules
