The woolly mammoth. The most charismatic and culturally relevant animal of the ice age. It dominated the ecosystem that existed in what is now the temperate forests and arctic tundra in the northern hemisphere for almost 2 million years.
Woolly mammoths have been present for 98% of human history, disappearing from their last refuge approximately 4,000 years ago, when the pyramids of Egypt were nearly 600 years old. A company has already received the equivalent of almost 1 billion reais to bring this animal back to life, and it has even received money from the CIA for this. The biotechnology company Colossal, headquartered in Dallas, Texas, intends, for similar reasons, to extinguish both the woolly mammoth and the Tasmanian Wolf, the Thylacine, a marsupial carnivore endemic to Australia, extinct in 1938.
But also the Dodo, an endemic giant pigeon from Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, extinct in 1690 through a combination of human hunting and competition with invasive species. I know what you're thinking: de-extinction projects will always go wrong, and playing God with animals is unlikely to work, but maybe this video will change your opinion. This mammoth will not stop at zoos or shows to make the fortune of exotic millionaires, he can be a fundamental piece to avoid the climatic collapse.
That's why one of the coolest scientific and ecological experiments in the world needs mammoths: the Pleistocene park! How and why can the woolly mammoth be a weapon against global warming? How would it be possible to resurrect a species from extinction?
Will we be able to visit a population of free mammoths in this lifetime? We're going to answer these and many other questions today. My name is Abner and welcome to ABC Terra.
Today, there are only two species of elephants: the African and the Asian, and they are relatively distant from each other in the once much larger evolutionary family of elephants. They exist in Africa, India and parts of Oceania, but elephants until recently inhabited all continents except Australia and Antarctica. They are the last proboscideans on planet Earth, a group that is home to elephants and their closest relatives, such as mammoths, mastodons, gomphotherians, stegodons and deinotherios, to name a few.
And if we ever forget how weird elephants are, their evolutionary relatives are there to remind us. Many people think that mammoths are just hairy elephants, and well. .
. in part, they are right. Despite being completely separate species, the woolly mammoth shares 99% of its DNA with the Asian elephant, its closest relative.
Other cold adaptations besides the thick coat of fur are a layer of fat under the skin and smaller ears to reduce heat loss. So the genetic differences are small, but these are the crucial adaptations for sub-zero living, without which Asian elephants would suffer greatly and not be able to survive. There were a few species of mammoth, but we're talking about the most widely distributed and successful, Mammuthus primigenius, the woolly mammoth.
We know this species through thousands of fossils, footprints and frozen mummies that give us a good picture of what they would have been like in life. We know, for example, that their hair had two layers, a short one and a very long one, whose colors could vary from blond, through red to black. It is from this dense layer of hair that the name woolly mammoth comes.
They inhabited an immense icy savanna that extended across a good part of the temperate latitudes of the northern hemisphere, from Eurasia to North America, which at that time were connected by a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska. 26,000 years ago, at the last glacial maximum, Earth was colder and drier. Arctic glaciers covered a much larger area than they do today, making this entire region nearly uninhabitable.
Incredibly, we call a glaciation or ice age any time when the Earth has a cryosphere, or frozen poles. It means that from a geological point of view, we are living in an ice age. Or rather: interglacial!
Interglacial periods are small intervals of a few tens of thousands of years in which the Earth is warmer and wetter than in the long periods of intense glaciation. The last interglacial period began about 12,000 years ago, ending the Pleistocene and ushering in the Holocene. But something very interesting happened: in the last glaciation, the places where the temperate coniferous forests are established today were as cold as the boreal ecosystems are today, such as the tundra and the taiga.
But even with the lowest temperatures, this region received the same amount of sunlight, enabling immense productivity and plant growth, ideal for huge herds of grazing animals. These were at the time the largest and most productive savannas in the world. We call this extinct ecosystem the mammoth steppe.
Many may blame climate change for the collapse of the mammoth steppes, but we know that Earth has experienced warmer interglacial periods, such as the one we experience today, but we have no signs that this has destabilized this ecosystem. What allowed the most productive and biodiverse savannah on Earth to give way to a monotonous forest, poor in animal and plant diversity, may have been the extinction of the megafauna. Animals and plants exist responding to each other, and especially giant animals play an important role in maintaining open grazing areas.
The sudden disappearance of so many forms of life in such a short window of time may have something to do with humans. Mammoths were once so abundant that their bones were literally building material. Recently an Ice Age Temple made with the bones of 60 mammoths was discovered, located in the Russian city of Voronezh, the structure is 25 thousand years old.
Circular temples made from mammoth bones are not uncommon, and seem to have been a practice that lasted for millennia. It is very likely that it had ritualistic significance; maybe it was some kind of shrine or monument to mammoths, or whatever they valued. Mammoths may have played a spiritual role in these people's lives.
We also have a lot of evidence that human hunting was a decisive factor in the extinction of mammoths, such as bones that were clearly cut by human tools. So they were a source of food, leather, fat and probably, entities respected by ice age humans. The last mammoths lived on Wrangel Island in Siberia, and they survived until 2000 BC.
This is so recent, they were alive when the pyramids in Egypt were built. Considering that humanity left Africa about 100,000 years ago, that means that humans and mammoths lived together in Eurasia for at least 90,000 years. An archaeological remains in the city of Tultepec, Mexico, gives us a clearer view of what interactions between humans and mammoths could have been like 15,000 years ago.
Two holes were found, with holes 25 meters in diameter and 1. 70 meters deep, and inside them, more than 800 bones that belonged to at least 14 mammoths. The most accepted hypothesis is that it is a trap: perhaps humans scared the mammoths with fire into the holes, from which they never managed to get out.
This is interesting news because it depicts a direct interaction between humans and mammoths. It is not possible to say that the only cause of the extinction of mammoths is human hunting, but we already know that we were one of the reasons, and perhaps one of the strongest. So are we indebted to them?
Let's meet some of the best preserved mammoths we know. The first of them is the Addams Mammoth, discovered in 1799 by hunter Ossip Shumachov, the most complete until then, composed of the entire skeleton, pieces of leather from the head and more than 18kg of hair. As one of the first extinct animals to be mounted and publicly displayed, its historical and cultural relevance is immense.
It was from its tusks that the first ideas of what a mammoth would be were elaborated. It was slowly excavated in a time when the very idea of extinction was a novelty, it was debated whether or not Addams' beast was an elephant, and if so, what it was doing in a place as cold as Siberia. It was suggested that they were elephants that were transported there and buried by the Noah's Ark flood, but soon, Georges Cuvier, often considered the father of paleontology, convincingly argued that it was a species of elephant that does not exist .
more, adapted for the cold. It was through Cuvier's work that the mammoth and giant sloths became the first known extinct animals, years before the word "dinosaur" was coined. Much more recently, in 2010, in Siberia, the Yuka mummy was discovered, preserving leather in almost the entire body, regions with hair and internal organs.
This young female was first noticed by local residents of Yukagir, hence the name Yuka, and is considered the most complete woolly mammoth ever found. Despite the dehydrated appearance, it can give us an almost perfect idea of what these animals were like in life. She weighed 5 tons and was 3 meters long, having lived 40 millennia ago.
Significant parts of its genetic material are still preserved. The Jarkov mammoth, also found whole in Siberia, in a 23-ton block of ice made famous by the "cube mammoth" memes "Famous" Lyuba as well as most intact mammoth mummies, was also found in Siberia, on the Yamal Peninsula, in 2007. This female calf had parts of her ears and tail chewed off by dogs while she was exposed on the surface, otherwise her state of preservation is perfect.
It was even possible to ascertain that the cause of death was suffocation by mud, which got stuck in its trunk, mouth and throat, while struggling, 42,000 years ago. But who exactly would be responsible for bringing the mammoth back? With what interest?
According to the BBC, “The woolly mammoths could return to life on Earth, if it depends on a group of scientists and businessmen who have already received US$ 15 million from sponsors for this. The amount destined to the company Colossal will help in the development of genetic engineering technologies that could create a hybrid of the mammoth with the Asian elephant, getting as close as possible to the mammoths that once inhabited the planet. Having achieved this objective, the next step would be to populate parts of Siberia with these animals, seeking environmental rebalancing.
” So all this money will not be reversed “only” in the mammoth. It will finance a lot of research in the area of genetic engineering, which will be very useful in cloning the mammoth, but it could also have many medical applications, mainly cloning organs and tissues for transplantation. The economic interest involved in the technological diffusion of new techniques developed during the cloning of mammoths is immense.
It is research that draws attention and, above all, money, when taken seriously. George Church is a biologist at Harvard Medical School in the USA. He brought up the idea of resurrecting the mammoths in 2013, and has since spent over eight years trying to bring investors to the idea.
For him, the obvious starting point is the already sequenced DNA of woolly mammoths. But as good as the idea was, there were two major impediments: money and technology. Because it was a very ethically debated research, it was difficult to get the necessary funding to be successful.
And because it is a very innovative and ambitious project, it is extremely expensive. In addition, many other baseline surveys would need to be done beforehand to perfect the method. Not only on embryology, but also on the ecological and climatic effects of bringing this animal back.
In other words, an entire research and technological development ecosystem is needed to make this project viable and assess the limits and potential of its consequences. According to the BBC, “The scientist's initial ideas attracted the attention of journalists, but not of investors: he had only managed to raise $100,000 for his research. "Honestly, I was intending to work at a slow pace," Church said.
However, in 2019, he met Ben Lamm, founder of Texas AI company Hypergiant, who, Upon reading news about the project, he became interested in helping to rescue the giant animal. ” It is at this time that the biotechnology company COLOSSAL is founded. According to the company, we have finally reached the point where this is not only possible, but necessary.
But in addition to the mammoth, there is another animal that is in Colossal's de-extinction plans. Meet the Tasmanian Wolf, or Thylacine. It became extinct in the wild around 1920, and the last individual in captivity died in 1936, less than 100 years ago.
Despite the name, this animal is very far from being a wolf. It was a carnivorous marsupial endemic to Australia and Tasmania, more closely related to kangaroos, koalas and Tasmanian devils than to any placental mammal. Marsupials have an extremely short gestation period, the pup is born very small and dependent, it travels to the inside of the marsupium, a bag where it finds the mother's nipples, clings to it and continues to develop there until it no longer fits.
Placentians tend to have exhausting and lengthy pregnancies, with young being born relatively independent. This means that a wolf is closer evolutionarily to any other placental, such as cats, rabbits and elephants, than to Thylacines. Their similarities are a classic example of evolutionary convergence.
From a generalist ancestor, both placental and marsupial lineages evolved a dog-like type of predator. They were top predators in Australian and Tasmanian ecosystems until recently , and there are serious ecological consequences for their absence. Without a predator that exerts a natural limit to herbivore populations, they can expand their populations rapidly, to the point where the ecosystem no longer supports as many herbivores.
This causes a drastic decrease in vegetation and leaves the entire system much more vulnerable to fire and famine. Without their main carnivores, ecosystems face a trophic cascade that negatively impacts the entire environment. According to Colossal, it is a human responsibility not only to bring the Thylacine back, but also to reintroduce it into its former environment until the ecosystems are reestablished.
This would help curb pests, fires and droughts. In the paper. In real life, it's uncertain whether it would even be possible to clone a thylacine in a Dunnart's womb, or whether efforts to reintroduce it into the wild would have immediate benefits.
Dingoes, Australia's feral dogs, have taken their place as the largest carnivores, but they also have very fragile populations. They are not domestic dogs, but are descended from domestic dogs that arrived with the aborigines more than 4,000 years ago. Since then, they have readapted to the wild, and their introduction is seen as the main reason for the extinction of the Thylacines, even though a public policy of extermination was the last straw.
According to Colossal, “In 1888, the Tasmanian Parliament placed an official reward of £1 on thylacines, according to the Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service. These bounties led to a more lethal approach to controlling the thylacine problem , and as hunting efforts increased, numbers rapidly declined. In July 1936, the Australian government granted protection to the Thylacines.
However, this shift in public opinion and awareness of conservation came too late. On September 7, 1936, just two months after the species was given protected status , Benjamin, the last known thylacine, died from exposure at Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart. ” They also announce official plans to phase out the Dodo, but unlike Mammoth and Thylacine, they don't seem to have a good reason for it, so I won't focus on that part.
The interesting thing about this is that the technology to clone an animal that reproduces by laying eggs is totally different, and perhaps announcing the de-extinction of an animal as charismatic as the Dodo could be a brilliant marketing strategy to fund basic research that can revert back to a mountain of money in patents in the future. In a recent interview with MIT technology review, Colossal's director of cloning said the company intends to clone the first thylacine in two years, in 2025, and the first mammoth by 2027. “The main difference here is gestation time.
Elephants take about 18 to 22 months to become pregnant, while marsupials - and especially the dunnart, which will be our replacement species for the thylacine - take between 12 and 14 days. After that, it ripens in the bag. There are studies showing that marsupials can be transferred from the pouch of one species to the pouch of another species and grow very well.
But we also have a team working [on] an “exo bag”. This will be an artificial pouch that the pups can go into and have the same nutrition, the same environment, the same kind of exposure to light that they would have inside the pouch of a marsupial mother. ” But how exactly would it be possible to bring the mammoth and thylacine back to life?
Cloning mammals and marsupials involves very different gestation technologies, but the beginning is the same. The idea is to take its closest living relative - in the case of the mammoth, the Asian elephant - and simply replace the parts of the DNA that are different. This is much easier than reassembling the entire mammoth genome from scratch.
From this point of view, we would not have a pure mammoth, but a hybrid, a Mamufant, or Elemute. According to CNN “Church has been at the forefront of genomics, including the use of CRISPR, a revolutionary gene-editing tool described as rewriting the code of life to alter the characteristics of living species. the research team analyzed the genomes of 23 living species of extinct elephants and mammoths.
Scientists believe they will need to simultaneously program "more than 50 changes" into the Asian elephant's genetic code to give it the traits it needs to survive and thrive in the Arctic. The team also plans to try to make modifications so that the animal does not have tusks, so that it is not targeted by ivory poachers. ” The complete DNA of woolly mammoths was finished being sequenced in 2015, from 10 carcasses that were recovered from Wrangel Island, the last refuge of the mammoths.
If successful, this would be the first cloning of an ancient extinct animal, but not the first de-extinction. The first animal to be de-extinct only remained de-extinct for 10 minutes. The Bucardo, a type of Spanish mountain goat, was the first animal to be reborn from the grip of extinction.
The last Bucardo died in 2000, but he had his cells frozen in liquid nitrogen. A Bucardo calf was even cloned in 2003, but it lived only 10 minutes. Today, there are plans to re-extinct Bucardo, which has already been extinguished twice.
So Bucardo spawned, got extinct, de-extinct for 10 minutes, re-extinct, and will now be re-extinct, until it gets extinct a third time at some point. There's an animal that can't rest in peace. A problem involving the mass cloning of mammoths is: where will they be gestated?
There are two options and neither of them is simple. The first is to use the wombs of live female elephants, which could involve a degree of cruelty and exploitation, which Church admits. The second and most expensive would be to use artificial uteruses to generate embryos from scratch.
This technology exists, but it is still far from perfect, and needs more research and time to be considered effective. But permafrost is melting fast, and if it takes too long, it may be too late. Which makes Asian elephants still the best candidates for mothers of prehistoric hybrids.
But why exactly are these people interested in the mammoth and how can they help us stop the climate and ecological crisis? Well, if ANYONE in this world really needs a mammoth, it's Sergey and his son, Nikita Zimov. What they are doing in Russia is trying to create the ecosystem that existed there in the ice age, introducing thousands of herbivores that turn forests into grasslands.
The Pleistocene Park. All this to stop permafrost melting - an issue we should all be addressing. worry a lot more.
Permafrost is permanently frozen ground, often tens of meters deep. It is formed when successive layers of grass are layered on top of one another and are frozen before decomposing. This causes this soil to take carbon out of the atmosphere and store it in the form of frozen organic matter.
The problem is that when it thaws, it literally rots, releasing massive amounts of CO2 and methane into the atmosphere. These are precisely the gases that cause warming, which melts more soil, which releases more gases, which warms even more, and perpetuates a positive feedback, a vicious cycle of melting that can disrupt the entire Earth's climate. And today, there are an estimated 1 trillion tons of greenhouse gases stored in the form of permafrost.
To get an idea of how much this is: it is more than twice the amount of carbon stored in all the forests on the planet. Permafrost is a climate time bomb, and we may be running out of time. According to Sputinik Brasil: “The aim of the project is to replace modern low-productivity ecosystems with very productive pastures with a high-speed biological rotation cycle and greater diversity of animals.
The first animal resettlement experiments began in 1988. Currently, the park has a total fenced area of 20 square kilometers and is home to nine species of large herbivores. ” But how does the presence of megafauna keep the ground frozen?
The mammoth steppe was the largest biome in the terrestrial world before it collapsed. It occupied much of North America, Europe and Asia, where the temperate forests are today. These pine forests have a low biological diversity because few animals are able to eat the leaves of this type of tree, and as we have seen, up to 10 thousand years ago, it was very different.
Large animals trample the soil, kill tree saplings, knock down young trees, and make room for grass to grow. Grass, unlike the hard leaves of pine trees, is the preferred food for these animals. The more grass, the more herbivores, and the more herbivores, the more grass.
Grass grows very fast in summer, binding atmospheric carbon atoms into its biomass, and in winter, some of it dies and freezes instead of decomposing. A new layer of grass grows on top of the compacted organic layer, storing carbon in the form of frozen and compacted organic matter. This symbiotic relationship disappeared with the extinction of the megafauna, and since then, the forests have grown into one big “green desert”.
Precisely because this system is so efficient in trapping atmospheric carbon, it becomes a bomb when it melts and this material is decomposed. That's why a crazy idea like the Pleistocene park can work. The aim is to use animals as ecosystem engineers.
And how does this help contain the melting of frozen ground? Incredibly, snow is a great thermal insulator. Every winter, the snow forms a layer of several meters over the permafrost, this prevents the ground from freezing so deeply, as it hinders the exchanges between the soil and the air.
While the atmosphere is at -40 degrees, the ground can withstand temperatures of -5 insulated by snow. But when animals trample the snow and dig for food, they destroy the insulating layer, and allow the ground to freeze properly, delaying melting in the summer. According to Nikita Zimov: “There are two ways to reduce the insulating effect of snow, either we run a bulldozer through the entire arctic, or we leave the animals to do the work themselves.
” Soil insulated by snow melts quickly when summer comes, as what has been compacted is permanently frozen and much less vulnerable to melting. Experiments with the Pleistocene park started back in the Soviet era, when wild horses were introduced. These horses were a great first choice because they were once the most common animals in this area.
A few years later, the population was large enough to grow without help. of human beings. It is still necessary to fell a lot of trees to make room for grass, because small animals cannot fell large trees.
And that's where the mammoth comes in. In the African Savannah, it is common to see elephants cutting down trees to eat the leaves more easily. And many times, they cut down trees for no apparent reason.
This is an instinct that ends up ensuring that the next generations will have grass to eat. And the idea is to reintroduce mammoths to the park, an essential part of rebuilding the ecosystem that would be able to save the world from a catastrophic warming scenario. Mammoths would do the job of felling the big trees and trampling the snow, besides having the biggest droppings, and heavily fertilizing the pastures.
Sergey and Nikita's idea is that with the right animals, this ecosystem will grow and spread on its own. If that were to happen, it would certainly be a powerful force stopping the permafrost from collapsing and even gradually refreezing certain areas that are now heavily impacted. And perhaps, without mammoths making their way to the forest's pastures, this ecosystem cannot be self-perpetuating.
The melting and consequent decomposition of permafrost causes serious environmental disturbances, such as craters that form when the pressure of gases in the subsoil is very strong and it ends up “exploding” like a small methane volcano. But also huge landslides caused by the instability of the ground, which was much more stable frozen, and the thawing releases a lot of liquids that can form lakes that accelerate decomposition. Towns and cities supported by permafrost are at serious risk of collapse.
To make matters worse, when the soil decomposes, the biological activity is so intense that the soil ends up heating up, causing more melting. So maybe at some point, not all the animals in the world can solve the problem. This is one of the so-called points of no return in the global climate.
Imagine a chair, which is the weather on Earth. You can balance it to a certain point and come back, but beyond that, the chair falls until it reaches a new stability point. We have evidence that this has happened a few times before, but in events associated with major biological rearrangements and extinctions.
Ironically, the mummies we are finding and helping us understand what is happening to our world are only being found because their frozen tomb is crumbling. Who knew the mammoth would be so missed? Extinction is a different kind of death, it is greater.
It's the kind of law that nature has always respected, and that human beings have just gained the ability to circumvent. While de-extinction research advances, many criticize it, pointing out the irresponsibility of bringing extinct animals back to life, without knowing the consequences and denouncing the cruelty in the means of doing so. Even so, in the case of the mammoth, oddly enough, it may be a matter of necessity.
According to Sergey, “For a long time, humans have seen wild animals as threatening enemies, and now that we understand how they are part of the ecosystem, we need them. ” So there's a real possibility, that in the next few years, we'll have the chance to visit living mammoths transforming the boreal forest into a rich grassland filled with millions of herbivores. Many may rightly criticize, saying this is more of a commercial move than serious environmental action.
Could we produce herds of mammoths fast enough to significantly reverse or slow the melting of permafrost? Or would these populations grow so slowly that they would prove useless? So far, we've talked about cloning ONE mammoth, but we're going to need a few tens of thousands, at the very least, to produce the desired effect.
If it takes too long, we have to think of more immediate solutions than mammoths, amazing as they are. We do not know if these populations would be viable and their interactions with the environment can be unpredictable and cause incalculable environmental and economic damage. Is it no longer worth pouring money into projects that seek to preserve the animals we haven't lost yet?
Or is it that thinking like this is being conservative and giving up a powerful tool to protect nature? There are many questions to be answered, and the answers our time will yield will eternally impact the future of life on Earth. Should we or should we not give lost species a second chance?
Anyway, this possibility is here to stay. Historically, we have only just discovered DNA, and genome manipulation and cloning technologies can greatly benefit from gene-editing artificial intelligences that speed up the process, from months to hours. What we do with all that potential is something our generation will have to figure out, and it's not going to be simple.
We have to be careful not to resurrect supremacist ideas from the past, preaching their aspects of biological superiority. That same technology can produce a world where wealthy people edit any traits and details they want into their offspring, creating a divide between “natural” and genetically engineered people. This could also be a revolutionary resource against cancer and degenerative diseases and genetic conditions that will become preventable.
But cloning and the possibility of de-extinction will certainly remain tempting weapons in the fight against climate change. So we better talk about it. Tell me in the comments if you are for or against de-extinction, and if you liked this video, send it to someone who might be interested!
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