Connecting is what our ancestors were doing thousands of years ago when they gathered around the fire to eat woolly mammoth steaks or stitch together the latest animal-hide fashions.

Picture it in your mind. Woolly mammoths eating grass around the places we are living in right now.

First find the key to the museum, then get the mammoth tusk from the natural history wing.

But scientists are dying to see real mammoths.

The year saw a flurry of genomes published, from that of the woolly mammoth to individual cancer patients, a feat aided by a surge in new genetic sequencing techniques, which also made the top ten.