According to Live Science, "The oldest living thing has been discovered in the form of 600,000-year-old bacteria extracted from ice cores":
The trick, the discovery suggests, is for organisms to keep some metabolism going over the millennia, so that they can keep their DNA in repair while awaiting a more favorable environment in which to multiply. The other approach, complete dormancy, would cause DNA to be damaged and perhaps destroyed over such long periods of time.
The scientists isolated long chains of active DNA from the bacteria.
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