These prehistoric viruses are thought to be up to 400,000 years old and have remained dormant in the frozen remains of woolly mammoths found in Yakutia, Russia, where temperatures can plummet to -55C. This research is being conducted by the Russian Research Centre of Virology and Biotechnology.
The Russian lab, also known as Vector aims to understand how viruses evolve by studying such diseases.
The project is being overseen at a former bioweapons lab in Russia’s Novosibirsk region, but Vector hosts 59 maximum security biolabs around the world.
Russian researchers hope to identify the ice age viruses, also named paleoviruses, and revive them.
However, experts have raised concerns over the research, describing it as “risky” and confessing to a lack of confidence in the research facility.
Professor Jean-Michel Claverie, from the National Centre of Scientific Research at the University of Aix-Marseille recently spoke with the Times to express his alarm.
He said: “[Vector’s research] is terrible. I’m totally against it.
“[It] is very, very risky. Our immune systems have never encountered these type of viruses. Some of them could be 200,000 or even 400,000 years old.
“But ancient viruses that infected animals or humans could still be infectious.”
As for trusting Vector’s biosecurity, the scientist added: “I would not be very confident that everything is up to date.”
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The World Health Organization found no significant concern during their most recent inspection of the facility in 2019, but the facility has had incidences in the past.
In 2019, a gas explosion caused a fire at a Vector facility, which caused one worker to be left with third-degree burns from the blast.
It also caused windows to shatter, but at the time Vector said: “no work with biological materials was going on”.
Another incident at a Vector lab happened in 2014 when a researcher died after accidentally pricking herself with a needle containing the Ebola virus.
During the Soviet era in 1979, one of Vector’s military research facilities accidentally released spores of anthrax bacteria in the city of Sverdlovsk (now named Yekaterinburg).
The deadly outbreak killed at least 66 people, although Soviet authorities denied for years that such an incident had taken place and blamed the deaths on the consumption of tainted meat.
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Filippa Lentzos, a biosecurity expert at King’s College London, has warned that even the most secure laboratories can be breached.
She said: “Many of us who are analysing and following what they’re doing aren’t convinced that the potential benefits, which are in the far distant future, are necessarily outweighing the very real risks that are in the present.
“Even with generally safe practices, accidents can still happen.”
The CIA is funding research into resurrecting extinct animals — including the woolly mammoth and tiger-like thylacine — according to news reports.
Via a venture capital investment firm called In-Q-Tel, which the CIA funds, the American intelligence agency has pledged money to the Texas-based tech company Colossal Biosciences. According to Colossal’s website, the company’s goal is to “see the woolly mammoth thunder upon the tundra once again” through the use of genetic engineering — that is, using technology to edit an organism’s DNA.
Colossal has also stated an interest in resurrecting the extinct thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger — a wolf-like marsupial that went extinct in the 1930s — as well as the extinct dodo bird.
For their part, the CIA is less interested in thundering mammoths and roaring thylacines than it is in the underlying genetic engineering technology that Colossal intends to develop, according to an In-Q-Tel blog post.
“Strategically, it’s less about the mammoths and more about the capability,” In-Q-Tel’s senior officials wrote.
De-extinction may sound like science fiction — and, to an extent, it is. There is no way to bring back the woolly mammoth as it was ten thousand years ago; however, by using DNA editing tools, scientists can insert cold-resistant characteristics into the DNA sequences of modern elephants, making them genetically similar to woolly mammoths. The resulting creature wouldn’t be a mammoth, per se; rather, it would be a proxy animal that’s more like an elephant with mammoth-like characteristics.
The foundation of this process is a gene editing method called CRISPR — genetic “scissors” that scientists can use to cut, paste and replace specific gene sequences into an organism’s DNA. (Several of the researchers behind CRISPR won the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry).
According to the In-Q-Tel blog post, investing in this project will help the U.S. government to “set the ethical, as well as the technological, standards” for genetic engineering technology, and keep the U.S. a step ahead of competing nations that may also be interested in reading, writing and altering genetic code.
Not everyone is so optimistic about using genetic engineering tools to revive extinct animals. Critics have warned that, even if a company is able to engineer a healthy proxy mammoth, the mammoth’s natural habitat no longer exists — and, even if it did, genetic code cannot teach an animal how to thrive in an unfamiliar ecosystem, according to Gizmodo. Some scientists also argue that money spent on de-extinction projects could go much further if applied to the conservation of living animals.
And what hairy beast, its hour come at last, slouches towards a laboratory to be born?
Some 3,900 years ago, on mainland Siberia, the last known woolly mammoth breathed its last. Since then, humans have known mammoths only through their remnants: scattered bones and a small number of frozen carcasses, complete with the tatty remnants of once-shaggy fur. These remains have, for centuries, provoked our curiosity – curiosity that might one day be sated. Colossal Biosciences, a Texas-based start-up, is using genetic engineering in its quest to bring the species back to life.
“The woolly mammoth was the custodian of a healthier planet,” the company says. Using salvaged mammoth DNA, Colossal will genetically edit Asian elephants, the species’ closest extant cousin. If its plans are successful, then it will produce a woolly mammoth – or as close as possible a replica – six years from now. This year, the company has raised $75m from investors.
Thus, about 3,906 years after it thought it had seen the back of us, the woolly mammoth might be reacquainted with humans – a species that has never seen a large mammal that it didn’t like the idea of eating. Their extinction wasn’t solely our responsibility – the end of the ice age massively reduced the size of their potential habitat – but, as some palaeontologists argue, pre-history is littered with the bodies of megafauna we’ve eaten to extinction. Giant sloths, giant armadillos, dire wolves… whoever was presenting Planet Earth in those days would have had to stay on their toes.
Given the apparent progress in the field of reconstituting the mammoth, we might as well answer the obvious question: should we eat them? Colossal has made no mention of this prospect, focusing instead on the environmental benefits of mammoth restoration: the animal’s heavy gait thickens permafrost, or the permanently frozen layer of soil, gravel and sand under the Earth’s surface, preventing it from melting and releasing greenhouse gases. “If the Mammoth Steppe ecosystem could be revived,” the company argues, “it could help in reversing the rapid warming of the climate and more pressingly, protect the Arctic’s permafrost – one of the world’s largest carbon reservoirs.”
Still, one wonders whether people will be tempted to have a taste, just as their ancestors did. We will have to decide at some point whether we, too, want to eat woolly mammoth – and indeed any other species we choose to resurrect. Would you eat them?
Holly Whitelaw, director of Regenerative Food and Farming, says she’d be up for it. “I would eat anything that was holistically grazed,” says Whitelaw. Roaming animals, she says, are healthy for soil; they distribute seeds and microbes as they wander. The healthier the Arctic soil, the more grassland it supports, and the more carbon is removed from the atmosphere. “It’s like bringing the wolves back,” Whitelaw says. “You get that whole tier of the system working better again.”
It would be a great tragedy if we were to heave these majestic individuals into our time just to use and exploit them for our own benefit
Victoria Herridge, a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum and an expert on woolly mammoths, has called for caution. In carrying out this kind of environmental project, Dr Herridge told The Telegraph, “you are carrying out a bio-engineering experiment which, if your goal is [met], will create change at a global scale. It becomes a question of: who gets to tamper with the climate system of the planet?”
Speaking to The Independent, Dr Herridge expressed additional concerns about the provenance of these mammoths. “I have a problem with anything to do with surrogate mothers,” she says. The genetically modified mammoth amalgams will gestate within Asian elephants, risking them significant pain and medical risk.
These are objections to the project itself, rather than to the idea of eating mammoth meat at the end of it. Dr Herridge sees this scenario as unlikely, but poses a hypothetical scenario in which she would consider eating mammoth meat. “Fast-forward 100 years. Imagine that Siberia isn’t a bog, there’s a place for woolly elephants to roam, they’re not wading through mosquito-infested swamp. Let’s say they’ve managed to breed 20,000 woolly elephants at this point. They’ve wandered across to Banff and they’re causing havoc, and to maintain that population they had to have an annual cull. Would I turn it down? No. But there are so many caveats.”
Whitelaw says that pasture-raised mammoth would have a good ratio of omega:3 to omega:6 fats, making it a good dietary choice. With this in mind, it’s easy to imagine Paleo enthusiasts providing consumer demand. Dr Herridge, though, is again sceptical. “The idea that you can have a diet that harks back to this ancient way is really problematic,” she says. “There’s this naive idea that there’s a lost Eden. Our vision of it is based on nothing but wishful thinking and stereotypes.”
Tonight’s dinner? Woolly mammoths in the 2016 film ‘Ice Age: Collision Course’
(Shutterstock)
There are other ways of looking at this question. Thinkers such as Brian Tomasik, author of the blog Essays on Reducing Suffering, argue that if you’re going to eat animals, “it’s generally better to eat larger ones so that you get more meat per horrible life and painful death. For example, a beef cow yields over 100 times as much meat per animal as a chicken, so switching from eating all chicken to all beef would reduce the number of farmed animals killed by more than 99 per cent.”
Considering the question of eating woolly mammoths, Tomasik says: “A woolly mammoth would weigh roughly 10 times as much as a beef cow, so eating mammoths rather than smaller animals would reduce the number of animal deaths even more.”
We should also consider the manner of the mammoth’s death. “Whether death by hunting would be better or worse than a natural death in the wild,” Tomasik says, “depends on how long it would take for the mammoth to die after being shot, and how painful the gunshot wound was until the point of death.” Wild deer, he says, can take 30-60 minutes to die after being shot in the lungs or heart. Their brains are considered too small a target, though that could be different for mammoths.
There are many competing considerations here. Although the rejuvenation of Arctic grasslands would probably be good for the climate, it might also entail higher numbers of wild animals. Tomasik views this as bad news. “Almost all wild animals are invertebrates or small vertebrates that produce vast numbers of offspring, most of whom die painfully not long after being born.”
I think it’ll be a bit like pork
More trenchant opposition to the idea comes from Elisa Allen, PETA’s vice-president of programmes. Arguing that we ought to focus on protecting existing species, whose habitats are fast disappearing, rather than resurrect species whose habitats are already lost, Allen says: “If anything distinguishes humans from the rest of the animal kingdom, it is the selfish desire to eat the other members of it when we don’t have to.” Allen says that “the future of the meat industry lies in lab-grown or 3D-printed meat”.
Jacy Reese Anthis, co-founder of the Sentience Institute, sees the application of this technology to woolly mammoths as ethically preferable to hunting them. “One of humanity’s most pressing challenges for the 21st century is to end the unethical, unsustainable industry of factory farming,” he says. “Cultured meat is one of the most promising substitutes, so if mammoth meat is what gets people excited about that, then I’m excited about it. It would be extremely wasteful to breed and farm live mammoths when we could sustainably grow meat tissue in bioreactors.”
This would avoid what Anthis sees as the inherent wrongness of killing, for our own pleasure, a creature that can think and feel. He is all for technology, he says, but stresses that it is important “to maintain boundaries of respect and bodily integrity for sentient beings. One of the most fruitful boundaries has been the right to not be owned and exploited for another’s benefit. This applies to humans but increasingly we recognise it for animals, and it is a crucial pillar in responsible stewardship of our fellow creatures.
“It would be a great tragedy if we were to reach our technological arm back into the Pleistocene and heave these majestic individuals into our time just to use and exploit them for our own benefit.”
For our ancestors, who made buildings out of the bones of mammoths, this issue wouldn’t have been half so hairy. But let’s imagine a mammoth-based dish derived not from hunting but from a bioreactor. How might it taste? Whitelaw has a guess. “I think it’ll be a bit like pork. You’ll have to cook it long and slow to render that fat down to make it. Or maybe you could make it nice and crispy.”
And what hairy beast, its hour come at last, slouches towards a laboratory to be born?
Some 3,900 years ago, on mainland Siberia, the last known woolly mammoth breathed its last. Since then, humans have known mammoths only through their remnants: scattered bones and a small number of frozen carcasses, complete with the tatty remnants of once-shaggy fur. These remains have, for centuries, provoked our curiosity – curiosity that might one day be sated. Colossal Biosciences, a Texas-based start-up, is using genetic engineering in its quest to bring the species back to life.
“The woolly mammoth was the custodian of a healthier planet,” the company says. Using salvaged mammoth DNA, Colossal will genetically edit Asian elephants, the species’ closest extant cousin. If its plans are successful, then it will produce a woolly mammoth – or as close as possible a replica – six years from now. This year, the company has raised $75m from investors.
Thus, about 3,906 years after it thought it had seen the back of us, the woolly mammoth might be reacquainted with humans – a species that has never seen a large mammal that it didn’t like the idea of eating. Their extinction wasn’t solely our responsibility – the end of the ice age massively reduced the size of their potential habitat – but, as some palaeontologists argue, pre-history is littered with the bodies of megafauna we’ve eaten to extinction. Giant sloths, giant armadillos, dire wolves… whoever was presenting Planet Earth in those days would have had to stay on their toes.
Given the apparent progress in the field of reconstituting the mammoth, we might as well answer the obvious question: should we eat them? Colossal has made no mention of this prospect, focusing instead on the environmental benefits of mammoth restoration: the animal’s heavy gait thickens permafrost, or the permanently frozen layer of soil, gravel and sand under the Earth’s surface, preventing it from melting and releasing greenhouse gases. “If the Mammoth Steppe ecosystem could be revived,” the company argues, “it could help in reversing the rapid warming of the climate and more pressingly, protect the Arctic’s permafrost – one of the world’s largest carbon reservoirs.”
Still, one wonders whether people will be tempted to have a taste, just as their ancestors did. We will have to decide at some point whether we, too, want to eat woolly mammoth – and indeed any other species we choose to resurrect. Would you eat them?
Holly Whitelaw, director of Regenerative Food and Farming, says she’d be up for it. “I would eat anything that was holistically grazed,” says Whitelaw. Roaming animals, she says, are healthy for soil; they distribute seeds and microbes as they wander. The healthier the Arctic soil, the more grassland it supports, and the more carbon is removed from the atmosphere. “It’s like bringing the wolves back,” Whitelaw says. “You get that whole tier of the system working better again.”
It would be a great tragedy if we were to heave these majestic individuals into our time just to use and exploit them for our own benefit
Victoria Herridge, a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum and an expert on woolly mammoths, has called for caution. In carrying out this kind of environmental project, Dr Herridge told The Telegraph, “you are carrying out a bio-engineering experiment which, if your goal is [met], will create change at a global scale. It becomes a question of: who gets to tamper with the climate system of the planet?”
Speaking to The Independent, Dr Herridge expressed additional concerns about the provenance of these mammoths. “I have a problem with anything to do with surrogate mothers,” she says. The genetically modified mammoth amalgams will gestate within Asian elephants, risking them significant pain and medical risk.
These are objections to the project itself, rather than to the idea of eating mammoth meat at the end of it. Dr Herridge sees this scenario as unlikely, but poses a hypothetical scenario in which she would consider eating mammoth meat. “Fast-forward 100 years. Imagine that Siberia isn’t a bog, there’s a place for woolly elephants to roam, they’re not wading through mosquito-infested swamp. Let’s say they’ve managed to breed 20,000 woolly elephants at this point. They’ve wandered across to Banff and they’re causing havoc, and to maintain that population they had to have an annual cull. Would I turn it down? No. But there are so many caveats.”
Whitelaw says that pasture-raised mammoth would have a good ratio of omega:3 to omega:6 fats, making it a good dietary choice. With this in mind, it’s easy to imagine Paleo enthusiasts providing consumer demand. Dr Herridge, though, is again sceptical. “The idea that you can have a diet that harks back to this ancient way is really problematic,” she says. “There’s this naive idea that there’s a lost Eden. Our vision of it is based on nothing but wishful thinking and stereotypes.”
Tonight’s dinner? Woolly mammoths in the 2016 film ‘Ice Age: Collision Course’
(Shutterstock)
There are other ways of looking at this question. Thinkers such as Brian Tomasik, author of the blog Essays on Reducing Suffering, argue that if you’re going to eat animals, “it’s generally better to eat larger ones so that you get more meat per horrible life and painful death. For example, a beef cow yields over 100 times as much meat per animal as a chicken, so switching from eating all chicken to all beef would reduce the number of farmed animals killed by more than 99 per cent.”
Considering the question of eating woolly mammoths, Tomasik says: “A woolly mammoth would weigh roughly 10 times as much as a beef cow, so eating mammoths rather than smaller animals would reduce the number of animal deaths even more.”
We should also consider the manner of the mammoth’s death. “Whether death by hunting would be better or worse than a natural death in the wild,” Tomasik says, “depends on how long it would take for the mammoth to die after being shot, and how painful the gunshot wound was until the point of death.” Wild deer, he says, can take 30-60 minutes to die after being shot in the lungs or heart. Their brains are considered too small a target, though that could be different for mammoths.
There are many competing considerations here. Although the rejuvenation of Arctic grasslands would probably be good for the climate, it might also entail higher numbers of wild animals. Tomasik views this as bad news. “Almost all wild animals are invertebrates or small vertebrates that produce vast numbers of offspring, most of whom die painfully not long after being born.”
I think it’ll be a bit like pork
More trenchant opposition to the idea comes from Elisa Allen, PETA’s vice-president of programmes. Arguing that we ought to focus on protecting existing species, whose habitats are fast disappearing, rather than resurrect species whose habitats are already lost, Allen says: “If anything distinguishes humans from the rest of the animal kingdom, it is the selfish desire to eat the other members of it when we don’t have to.” Allen says that “the future of the meat industry lies in lab-grown or 3D-printed meat”.
Jacy Reese Anthis, co-founder of the Sentience Institute, sees the application of this technology to woolly mammoths as ethically preferable to hunting them. “One of humanity’s most pressing challenges for the 21st century is to end the unethical, unsustainable industry of factory farming,” he says. “Cultured meat is one of the most promising substitutes, so if mammoth meat is what gets people excited about that, then I’m excited about it. It would be extremely wasteful to breed and farm live mammoths when we could sustainably grow meat tissue in bioreactors.”
This would avoid what Anthis sees as the inherent wrongness of killing, for our own pleasure, a creature that can think and feel. He is all for technology, he says, but stresses that it is important “to maintain boundaries of respect and bodily integrity for sentient beings. One of the most fruitful boundaries has been the right to not be owned and exploited for another’s benefit. This applies to humans but increasingly we recognise it for animals, and it is a crucial pillar in responsible stewardship of our fellow creatures.
“It would be a great tragedy if we were to reach our technological arm back into the Pleistocene and heave these majestic individuals into our time just to use and exploit them for our own benefit.”
For our ancestors, who made buildings out of the bones of mammoths, this issue wouldn’t have been half so hairy. But let’s imagine a mammoth-based dish derived not from hunting but from a bioreactor. How might it taste? Whitelaw has a guess. “I think it’ll be a bit like pork. You’ll have to cook it long and slow to render that fat down to make it. Or maybe you could make it nice and crispy.”
Bones from a mammoth butchering site record how humans shaped pieces of their long bones into disposable blades to break down their carcasses, and rendered their fat over a fire.
But, a key detail sets this site apart from others from this era. It’s in New Mexico – a place where most archaeological evidence places the first human activity tens of thousands of years later.
A recent study led by scientists with The University of Texas at Austin suggests that the site offers some of the most conclusive evidence for humans settling in North America much earlier than conventionally thought.
The researchers revealed a wealth of evidence rarely found in one place. It includes fossils with blunt-force fractures, bone flake knives with worn edges, and signs of controlled fire. And thanks to carbon dating analysis on collagen extracted from the mammoth bones, the site also comes with a settled age of 36,250 to 38,900 years old, making it among the oldest known sites left behind by ancient humans in North America.
“What we’ve got is amazing,” said lead author Timothy Rowe, a palaeontologist and a professor in the UT Jackson School of Geosciences. “It’s not a charismatic site with a beautiful skeleton laid out on its side. It’s all busted up. But that’s what the story is.”
Rowe does not usually research mammoths or humans. He got involved because the bones showed up in his backyard, literally. A neighbour spotted a tusk weathering from a hillslope on Rowe’s New Mexico property in 2013. When Rowe went to investigate, he found a bashed-in mammoth skull and other bones that looked deliberately broken. It appeared to be a butchering site. But suspected early human sites are shrouded in uncertainty. It can be notoriously difficult to determine what was shaped by nature versus human hands.
This uncertainty has led to debate in the anthropological community about when humans first arrived in North America.
Although the mammoth site lacks clearly associated stone tools, Rowe and his co-authors discovered an array of supporting evidence by putting samples from the site through scientific analyses in the lab.
Among other finds, CT scans taken by the University of Texas High-Resolution X-ray Computed Tomography Facility revealed bone flakes with microscopic fracture networks akin to those in freshly knapped cow bones and well-placed puncture wounds that would have helped in draining grease from ribs and vertebral bones.
“There really are only a couple efficient ways to skin a cat, so to speak,” Rowe said. “The butchering patterns are quite characteristic.”
In addition, chemical analysis of the sediment surrounding the bones showed that fire particles came from a sustained and controlled burn, not a lightning strike or wildfire. The material also contained pulverized bone and the burned remains of small animals – mostly fish (even though the site is over 200 feet above the nearest river), but also birds, rodents and lizards.
Based on genetic evidence from Indigenous populations in South and Central America and artefacts from other archaeological sites, some scientists have proposed that North America had at least two founding populations: the Clovis and a pre-Clovis society with a different genetic lineage.
The researchers suggest that New Mexico site, with its age and bone tools instead of elaborate stone technology, may lend support to this theory. Collins said the study adds to a growing body of evidence for pre-Clovis societies in North America while providing a toolkit that can help others find evidence that may have been otherwise overlooked.
“Tim has done excellent and thorough work that represents frontier research,” Collins said. “It’s forging a path that others can learn from and follow.”
Co-authors include Jackson School professor Richard Ketcham and research scientists Romy Hanna and Matthew Colbert, as well as scientists from the Gault School of Archaeological Research, the University of Michigan, Aarhus University, and Stafford Research.
The University of Texas at Austin
Header Image Credit: Timothy Rowe / The University of Texas at Austin
The bones of a mammoth and calf recently uncovered in New Mexico show signs of butchering, an exciting find that could help refine estimates of when humans first populated the Americas.
The specimens date to between 36,250 and 38,900 years ago, according to carbon dating analysis of the bones’ collagen. The paleontological team found blunt-force fractures on the bones. What appear to be flake-knives made from mammoth bones and evidence of a controlled fire were also at the site—signs that humans were involved in the mammoths’ demise. The team’s research appeared last month in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.
“It’s not a charismatic site with a beautiful skeleton laid out on its side,” said Timothy Rowe, a paleontologist at The University of Texas at Austin and lead author of the recent paper, in a UT release. “It’s all busted up. But that’s what the story is.”
At first glance, Rowe thought the bone pile looked like a butchering site. But with no complex stone tools nearby—a telltale sign of humankind—he couldn’t be sure.
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But running CT scans on several samples from the site revealed 32 bone flakes with noticeable fractures that the team argued could not be explained by geological processes or scavenging. About half of the bone flakes had sharp edges suitable for cutting.
The CT scans also revealed that several of the mammoths’ ribs and vertebrae had punctures, invisible to the naked eye due to how bone-colored sediment filled them in. The team believes these punctures may have been to hasten the draining of grease from the bones.
“There really are only a couple efficient ways to skin a cat, so to speak,” Rowe said in the release. “The butchering patterns are quite characteristic.” (I can only assume that killing and butchering a mammoth required more effort than a cat.)
Besides the mammoth bones, the site also contained evidence of smaller burned animals: birds, rodents, lizards, and fish, despite the fact that the nearest river is 200 feet from the site. The condition of the burned remains indicates they were heated with a controlled fire, rather than flash lightning or other naturally induced fires, according to the researchers.
If all these clues are indeed the remnants of human activity, it would be yet another nail in the coffin for the old Clovis First theory, which held that the first people reached North American around 13,000 years ago. Last year, fossilized human footprints in New Mexico pushed back humankind’s presence in North America by 10,000 years. The newly discovered mammoth site is about 15,000 years older than those footprints. Previous research has suggested that some indigenous Americans in the Amazon are more genetically similar to indigenous Australians and other groups in Oceania than to modern Native American populations, an indicator that multiple populations of humans entered North America from Asia in the ancient past.
More: Footprints Suggest Humans Migrated Deep Into North America Earlier Than Previously Known
The remains of two mammoths discovered in New Mexico show that humans lived in North America much earlier than thought. Credit: NPS.
About 37,000 years ago, a mother mammoth and her calf met their end at the hands of human beings.
Bones from the butchering site record how humans shaped pieces of their long bones into disposable blades to break down their carcasses, and rendered their fat over a fire. But a key detail sets this site apart from others from this era. It’s in New Mexico—a place where most archaeological evidence does not place humans until tens of thousands of years later.
A recent study led by scientists with The University of Texas at Austin finds that the site offers some of the most conclusive evidence for humans settling in North America much earlier than conventionally thought.
The researchers revealed a wealth of evidence rarely found in one place. It includes fossils with blunt-force fractures, bone flake knives with worn edges, and signs of controlled fire. And thanks to carbon dating analysis on collagen extracted from the mammoth bones, the site also comes with a settled age of 36,250 to 38,900 years old, making it among the oldest known sites left behind by ancient humans in North America.
“What we’ve got is amazing,” said lead author Timothy Rowe, a paleontologist and a professor in the UT Jackson School of Geosciences. “It’s not a charismatic site with a beautiful skeleton laid out on its side. It’s all busted up. But that’s what the story is.”
Credit: University of Texas at Austin
The findings were published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.
Rowe does not usually research mammoths or humans. He got involved because the bones showed up in his backyard, literally. A neighbor spotted a tusk weathering from a hillslope on Rowe’s New Mexico property in 2013. When Rowe went to investigate, he found a bashed-in mammoth skull and other bones that looked deliberately broken. It appeared to be a butchering site. But suspected early human sites are shrouded in uncertainty. It can be notoriously difficult to determine what was shaped by nature versus human hands.
This uncertainty has led to debate in the anthropological community about when humans first arrived in North America. The Clovis culture, which dates to 16,000 years ago, left behind elaborate stone-wrought tools. But at older sites where stone tools are absent, the evidence gets more subjective, said retired Texas State University Professor Mike Collins, who was not involved with this paper and who oversaw research at Gault, a well-known archaeological site near Austin with an abundance of Clovis and pre-Clovis artifacts.
Close up of the bone pile during excavation. This random mix of ribs, broken cranial bones, a molar, bone fragments, and stone cobbles is a refuse pile from the butchered mammoths. It was preserved beneath the adult mammoth’s skull and tusks. Credit: Timothy Rowe / The University of Texas at Austin.
Although the mammoth site lacks clearly associated stone tools, Rowe and his co-authors discovered an array of supporting evidence by putting samples from the site through scientific analyses in the lab.
Among other finds, CT scans taken by the University of Texas High-Resolution X-ray Computed Tomography Facility revealed bone flakes with microscopic fracture networks akin to those in freshly knapped cow bones and well-placed puncture wounds that would have helped in draining grease from ribs and vertebral bones.
“There really are only a couple efficient ways to skin a cat, so to speak,” Rowe said. “The butchering patterns are quite characteristic.”
In addition, chemical analysis of the sediment surrounding the bones showed that fire particles came from a sustained and controlled burn, not a lightning strike or wildfire. The material also contained pulverized bone and the burned remains of small animals—mostly fish (even though the site is over 200 feet above the nearest river), but also birds, rodents and lizards.
The excavation site mostly holds broken bones from the mammoths’ ribs and spine. The most prominent fossil is a portion of the adult mammoth’s skull. Credit: Timothy Rowe / The University of Texas at Austin.
Butchering marks on mammoth ribs. The top rib shows a fracture from blunt force impact; the middle rib shows a puncture wound, probably made by a tool; the bottom rib shows chopping marks. Credit: Timothy Rowe et al. / The University of Texas at Austin.
Based on genetic evidence from Indigenous populations in South and Central America and artifacts from other archaeological sites, some scientists have proposed that North America had at least two founding populations: the Clovis and a pre-Clovis society with a different genetic lineage.
The researchers suggest that New Mexico site, with its age and bone tools instead of elaborate stone technology, may lend support to this theory. Collins said the study adds to a growing body of evidence for pre-Clovis societies in North America while providing a toolkit that can help others find evidence that may have been otherwise overlooked.
“Tim has done excellent and thorough work that represents frontier research,” Collins said. “It’s forging a path that others can learn from and follow.”
Gault site research pushes back date of earliest North Americans
More information:
Timothy B. Rowe et al, Human Occupation of the North American Colorado Plateau ∼37,000 Years Ago, Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution (2022). DOI: 10.3389/fevo.2022.903795
Provided by
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Dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, mammoths 4,000 years ago, and the Christmas Island Rat 119 years ago. Since becoming a popular concept in the 1990s, de-extinction efforts have focused on grand animals with mythical stature, but in a paper published March 9, 2022, in the journal Current Biology, a team of paleogeneticists turn their attention to Rattus macleari, and their findings provide insights into the limitations of de-extinction across all species.
De-extinction work is defined by what is unknown. When sequencing the genome of an extinct species, scientists face the challenge of working with degraded
Maclear’s rat (Rattus macleari) is an extinct large rat endemic to Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean. Credit: Joseph Smit, Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 1887
After the DNA has been sequenced as well as possible and the genome is matched up against the reference genome of the living species, the scientists identify the parts of the genomes that don’t match up and, in theory, would then use CRISPR technology to gene edit the DNA of the living species to match that of the extinct one. The brown-rat-to-Christmas-Island-rat scenario is a particularly good test case because the evolutionary divergence is similar to that of the elephant and the mammoth.
Though the sequencing of the Christmas Island rat was mostly successful, a few key genes were missing. These genes were related to olfaction, meaning that a resurrected Christmas Island Rat would likely be unable to process smells in the way as it would have originally. “With current technology, it may be completely impossible to ever recover the full sequence, and therefore it is impossible to ever generate a perfect replica of the Christmas Island rat,” says Gilbert.
“It is very, very clear that we are never going to be able to get all the information to create a perfect recovered form of an extinct species,” he says. “There will always be some kind of hybrid.” Though a replica will never be perfect, the key is that scientists are able to edit for the DNA that makes the extinct animal functionally different from the living one.
Gilbert says that in order to make an ecologically functional mammoth, for example, it might be enough to edit elephant DNA to make the animal hairy and able to live in the cold. “If you’re making a weird fuzzy elephant to live in a zoo, it probably doesn’t matter if it is missing some behavioral genes,” he says. “But that brings up a whole lot of ethical questions.”
Gilbert plans to try doing the actual gene editing on rats but would like to start with species that are still living. He intends to begin by doing CRISPR edits on a black rat genome to change it to a Norway brown rat before attempting to resurrect the Christmas Island rat. Though he is excited about his future research, the whole process still gives him pause. “I think it’s a fascinating idea in technology, but one has to wonder if that’s the best use of money as opposed to keeping the things alive that are still here,” he says.
Reference: “Probing the genomic limits of de-extinction in the Christmas Island rat” by Jianqing Lin, David Duchêne, Christian Carøe, Oliver Smith, Marta Maria Ciucani, Jonas Niemann, Douglas Richmond, Alex D. Greenwood, Ross MacPhee, Guojie Zhang, Shyam Gopalakrishnan and M. Thomas P. Gilbert, 9 March 2022, Current Biology. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.02.027
This work was supported by the European Research Council and the Danish National Research Foundation.
Washington (AFP) – Ever since the movie Jurassic Park, the idea of bringing extinct animals back to life has captured the public’s imagination — but what might scientists turn their attention towards first?
Instead of focusing on iconic species like the woolly mammoth or the Tasmanian tiger, a team of paleogeneticists have studied how, using gene editing, they could resurrect the humble Christmas Island rat, which died out around 120 years ago.
Though they did not follow through and create a living specimen, they say their paper, published in Current Biology on Wednesday, demonstrates just how close scientists working on de-extinction projects could actually get using current technology.
“I am not doing de-extinction, but I think it’s a really interesting idea, and technically it’s really exciting,” senior author Tom Gilbert, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Copenhagen, told AFP.
There are three pathways to bringing back extinct animals: back-breeding related species to achieve lost traits; cloning, which was used to create Dolly the sheep in 1996; and finally genetic editing, which Gilbert and colleagues looked at.
The idea is to take surviving DNA of an extinct species, and compare it to the genome of a closely-related modern species, then use techniques like CRISPR to edit the modern species’ genome in the places where it differs.
The edited cells could then be used to create an embryo implanted in a surrogate host.
Gilbert said old DNA was like a book that has gone through a shredder, while the genome of a modern species is like an intact “reference book” that can be used to piece together the fragments of its degraded counterpart.
His interest in Christmas Island rats was piqued when a colleague studied their skins to look for evidence of pathogens that caused their extinction around 1900.
It’s thought that black rats brought on European ships wiped out the native species, described in an 1887 entry of the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London as a “fine new Rat,” large in size with a long yellow-tipped tail and small rounded ears.
Key functions lost
The team used brown rats, commonly used in lab experiments, as the modern reference species, and found they could reconstruct 95 percent of the Christmas Island rat genome.
That may sound like a big success, but the five percent they couldn’t recover was from regions of the genome that controlled smell and immunity, meaning that the recovered rat might look the same but would lack key functionality.
“The take home is, even if we have basically the perfect ancient DNA situation, we’ve got a really good sample, we’ve sequenced the hell out of it, we’re still lacking five percent of it,” said Gilbert.
The two species diverged around 2.6 million years ago: close in evolutionary time, but not close enough to fully reconstruct the lost species’ full genome.
This has important implications for de-extinction efforts, such as a project by US bioscience firm Colossal to resurrect the mammoth, which died out around 4,000 years ago.
Mammoths have roughly the same evolutionary distance from modern elephants as brown rats and Christmas Island rats.
Teams in Australia meanwhile are looking at reviving the Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, whose last surviving member died in captivity in 1936.
Even if gene-editing were perfected, replica animals created with the technique would thus have certain critical deficiencies.
“Let’s say you’re bringing back a mammoth solely to have a hairy elephant in a zoo to raise money or get conservation awareness — it doesn’t really matter,” he said.
But if the goal is to bring back the animal in its exact original form “that’s never going to happen,” he said.
Gilbert admitted that, while the science was fascinating, he had mixed feelings on de-extinction projects.
“I’m not convinced it is the best use of anyone’s money,” he said. “If you had to choose between bringing back something or protecting what was left, I’d put my money into protection.”
Rats like these, in India, serve as a useful genetic blueprint for their extinct comrades.Photo: AFP PHOTO/ SANJAY KANOJIA (Getty Images)
A team of scientists recently modeled the likelihood of hauling a species back from dead, using the Christmas Island rat, a large rodent that went extinct between 1902 and 1908, as their hypothetical subject.
The researchers sequenced the long-gone rat’s DNA and mapped it to some of the animal’s closest living relatives. They managed to recover 95% of the rat’s genome, though they believe the missing 5% significantly complicates any future attempts to resurrect the species in a process called de-extinction. The research was published today in Current Biology.
“I’m interested in how easy or hard will de-extinction by editing be. And in our article, we computationally come up with an idea of what we think might go wrong,” said Tom Gilbert, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Copenhagen and a co-author of the paper, in an email to Gizmodo.
Christmas Island rats (Rattus macleari, also known as Maclear’s rat) were one of two rat species endemic to Christmas Island, a 52-square-mile landmass about 200 miles southwest of Indonesia. (The other species, the bulldog rat or Rattus nativitatis, went extinct around the same time.)
Theories abound as to what drove the rats to extinction; one of the more recent is that black rats (Rattus rattus) introduced by European settlers had fleas that themselves carried a pathogen, Trypanosoma lewisi, which caused mass die-offs of the native rodents in the early 20th century.
In the paper, the researchers note the three most touted methods for de-extinction: back-breeding (the selective breeding of ancestral traits in modern animals), cloning, and gene editing. There are many ethical concerns with bringing back extinct species, chief among them that the money could be spent on conservation of the creatures still with us.
The team was focused on showing how de-extinction via gene editing would work—but they don’t actually intend to bring back any rats. (“I certainly have no goal of reintroducing a Xmas rat,” Gilbert said. “Seems like not the best use of money.”)
The researchers sequenced ancient DNA from two skin samples of the Christmas Island rat collected between 1900 and 1902 and currently held in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Comparing the genome of the extinct rat to several modern counterparts—most importantly the Norway brown rat (Rattus norvegicus), its closest living relative—the researchers were able to identify traits of the extinct rat they were confident they could replicate.
A resurrected animal wouldn’t be genetically identical to the extinct group it represents. But in this case study, genes involving keratin and proteins associated with keratin, vital ingredients in hair and whiskers, were well covered across the two rat genomes. So two were genes involved in the shape of the Christmas Island rat’s ears. Combined, the researchers posited that if they edited the Norway rat’s genome, they could replicate the fur color and ear shape of the Christmas Island rat.
The genes involved in the Christmas Island rat’s sense of smell, however, were different enough that the Norway rat’s olfactory genes don’t make a good basis for reconstructing them, according to the study. Genes related to immune response were also not covered by the Norway rat. But as the researchers point out in their paper, given the running theory about the Christmas Island rat’s extinction, any resurrected version of the species could theoretically benefit from using the immune genes of the Norway rat.
This was a proof-of-principle model, meaning the researchers were showing how one could go about de-extinction (if they intended to) using the gene editing of an extant species to bring back a related one, like the woolly mammoth or the thylacine.
“We aren’t actually planning to do it, as probably the world doesn’t need any more rats, and probably the money it would take to do the best job possible could be spent on better things, e.g., conserving living things,” Gilbert said.
More: Scientists Could Soon Resurrect the Woolly Mammoth—but Should They?
