Geneticists have sketched out the woolly mammoth's family tree using ancient DNA found preserved in Siberia.

The extinct beasts are more closely related to Asian elephants than to African elephants, the researchers found, and the three species diverged within a surprisingly short period of time.

Michael Hofreiter of the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, and his colleagues used bone fragments to reconstruct the mitochondrial genome of the mammoth.

Mitochondrial DNA is passed from mother to offspring, which makes it useful for tracing the lineage of a species.

The DNA revealed that woolly mammoths had more genetic similarities to modern Asian elephants than to the African species, though not by much, Hofreiter's team reports.

The DNA also showed that elephant species split from each other