Here’s something almost unbelievable. In the frozen ground of Siberia, near the Kolyma River, scientists in Russia found a plant seed.
It wasn’t just any seed. This one, had been buried in permafrost since the Pleistocene (the Ice Age). An Arctic ground squirrel had hidden it away in a burrow, along with nuts and fruit, and then the burrow froze.
When the researchers tested it with radiocarbon dating, the answer made them stop: 31,800 years old. A seed older than farming. Older than writing. Older than pyramids.
It seemed impossible. But then, they did something even more impossible than that: they brought it back to life. The flower called Silene stenophylla, bloomed again after 32,000 years. The study appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, but the story sounds more like magic than science.
The squirrel’s forgotten pantry
Back in 2007, the team broke through the frozen soil and found the burrow. Everything inside was still there; seeds, nuts, and frozen fruit.
Sadly, the squirrel that made it never came back. But without knowing it, it had created a time capsule. A tiny, perfect freezer that preserved life from the Ice Age.
And inside that frozen pantry sat the seed that would change everything.
How do you revive a seed from the Ice Age?
Planting it straight into soil didn’t work. Which is not a surprise because after so long, the seed itself couldn’t grow.
So the scientists tried another path. They took tissue from the fruit around the seed, placed it in a lab dish, and gave it the gentlest start with in vitro methods. It was basically plant cloning, a careful attempt to nudge the cells awake.
And it worked, beautifully!
One seed turned into thirty-six plants. Yes, six times more than the originally dead seed that was found. And each one was alive and blooming. Their petals were small and white, a little fragile but beautiful. Even more amazing, the plants produced seeds of their own, and those seeds had a 100% germination rate.
This was no accident. It was species regeneration. Life reborn after 32,000 years.
This flowers are teaching us so much today. It looked familiar but not identical to modern Silene stenophylla still found in Siberia. The ancient ones had petals that were longer, more open.
That detail says a lot. It’s a glimpse into biological evolution—into how plants adapt to their world, and how those traits change and evolution as the centuries roll on. Maybe longer petals helped the plant survive the cold and low light of the Pleistocene. Over time, that trait was lost.
And it leaves you wondering: if one flower can wait in permafrost for 32,000 years, what else is hiding there? Seeds. Microbes. Maybe things we’ve never seen before. As the ice melts, more of the past may return.
A bloom all the way from the past
It all began a long, long… very long time ago with a preventive squirrel that was hungry. Just a small animal burying food, never knowing it was saving a piece of history. That plant carries a story longer than all of human history.
Many discoveries have been made since the freezing epoch, and hopefully so many more are still left to come, because thirty-two thousand years later, that seed opened again. And a white flower from the Ice Age is now alive in our time.
The scientists wrote about it in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, but beyond the data, the truth feels simple:
Life can wait, and apparently life can also return.
And sometimes, a flower carries a story longer than all of human history.