Ancient sediments from caves have already been proven to preserve DNA for thousands of years. The amount of recovered sequences from environmental sediments, however, is generally low, which confounds the analyses performed with these sequences. A study led by Ron Pinhasi and Pere Gelabert of the University of Vienna and published in Current Biology successfully retrieved three mammalian environmental genomes from a single 25,000-year-old soil sample obtained from the cave of Satsurblia in the Caucasus (Georgia).