Scientists Reincarnating the Woolly MammothTheCrimsonMonkey – Getty Images
Colossal recently added $60 million in funding to move toward a 2027 de-extinction of the woolly mammoth.
The Dallas-based company is now working to edit the genes for the reincarnation of the mammal.
Colossal planned to reintroduce the woolly mammoth into Russia, but that may shift.
The long-dead woolly mammoth will make its return from extinction by 2027, says Colossal, the biotech company actively working to reincarnate the ancient beast.
Last year, the Dallas-based firm scored an additional $60 million in funding to continue the, well, mammoth gene-editing work it started in 2021. If successful, not only will Colossal bring back an extinct species—one the company dubs a cold-resistant elephant—but it will also reintroduce the woolly mammoth to the same ecosystem in which it once lived in an effort to fight climate change, according to a recent Medium post.
Colossal calls the woolly mammoth’s vast migration patterns an active part of preserving the health of the Arctic, and so bringing the animal back to life can have a beneficial impact on the health of the world’s ecosystem. While Colossal originally hoped to reintroduce the woolly mammoth into Siberia, the company may explore other options based on the current political framework of the world.
The woolly mammoth’s DNA is a 99.6 percent match of the Asian elephant, which leads Colossal to believe it’s well on its way toward achieving its goal. “In the minds of many, this creature is gone forever,” the company says. “But not in the minds of our scientists, nor the labs of our company. We’re already in the process of the de-extinction of the Woolly Mammoth. Our teams have collected viable DNA samples and are editing the genes that will allow this wonderful megafauna to once again thunder through the Arctic.”
Through gene editing, Colossal scientists will eventually create an embryo of a woolly mammoth. They will place the embryo in an African elephant to take advantage of its size and allow it to give birth to the new woolly mammoth. The eventual goal is to then repopulate parts of the Arctic with the new woolly mammoth and strengthen local plant life with the migration patterns and dietary habits of the beast.
If Colossal proves successful on reincarnating the woolly mammoth—ditto the thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian tiger—expect a variety of new ethical questions to arise on how to handle the creature and potential reintroduction issues.
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.”
Researchers used DNA capture-enrichment technology developed at McMaster to isolate and rebuild the fluctuating animal and plant communities during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition. Credit: Julius Csotonyi
Mere spoonsful of soil pulled from Canada’s permafrost are opening vast windows into ancient life in the Yukon, revealing rich new information and rewriting previous beliefs about the extinction dynamics, dates, and survival of megafauna like mammoths, horses, and other long-lost life forms.
In a new paper, published in the journal Nature Communications, researchers from McMaster University, the University of Alberta, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Yukon government present a 30,000-year
Cored permafrost sediments are extracted from the Klondike region of central Yukon. Credit: Tyler Murchie
They reconstructed the ancient ecosystems using tiny soil samples which contain billions of microscopic genomic sequences from animal and plant species.
The analysis reveals that mammoths and horses were already in steep decline prior to the climatic instability, but they did not immediately disappear due to human overhunting as previously thought. In fact, the DNA evidence shows that both the woolly mammoth and North American horse persisted until as recently as 5,000 years ago, bringing them into the mid-Holocene, the interval beginning roughly 11,000 years ago that we live in today.
Through the early Holocene the Yukon environment continued to experience massive change. Formerly rich grasslands—the “Mammoth Steppe”—were overrun with shrubs and mosses, species no longer held in check by large grazing herds of mammoths, horses, and bison. Today, grasslands do not prosper in northern North America, in part because there are no megafaunal “ecological engineers” to manage them.
Tyler Murchie is a postdoctoral researcher in McMaster’s Department of Anthropology and a lead author of the study. Credit: Georgia Kirkos
“The rich data provides a unique window into the population dynamics of megafuana and nuances the discussion around their extinction through more subtle reconstructions of past ecosystems,” says evolutionary geneticist Hendrik Poinar, a lead author on the paper and director of the McMaster Ancient DNA Centre.
This work builds on previous research by McMaster scientists who had determined woolly mammoths and the North American horse were likely present in the Yukon approximately 9,700 years ago. Better techniques and further investigation have since refined the earlier analysis and pushed forward the date even closer to contemporary time.
Hendrik Poinar is an evolutionary geneticist, a lead author on the paper and director of the McMaster Ancient DNA Center. Credit: Georgia Kirkos
“Now that we have these technologies, we realize how much life-history information is stored in permafrost,” explains Tyler Murchie, a postdoctoral researcher in McMaster’s Department of Anthropology and a lead author of the study.
“The amount of genetic data in permafrost is quite enormous and really allows for a scale of ecosystem and evolutionary reconstruction that is unparalleled with other methods to date,” he says.
“Although mammoths are gone forever, horses are not,” says Ross MacPhee of the American Museum of Natural History, another co-author. “The horse that lived in the Yukon 5,000 years ago is directly related to the horse species we have today, Equus caballus. Biologically, this makes the horse a native North American mammal, and it should be treated as such.”
Scientists also stress the need to gather and archive more permafrost samples, which are at risk of being lost forever as the Arctic warms.
Reference: “Collapse of the mammoth-steppe in central Yukon as revealed by ancient environmental DNA” by Tyler J. Murchie, Alistair J. Monteath, Matthew E. Mahony, George S. Long, Scott Cocker, Tara Sadoway, Emil Karpinski, Grant Zazula, Ross D. E. MacPhee, Duane Froese and Hendrik N. Poinar, 8 December 2021, Nature Communications. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-27439-6
Woolly mammoths persisted in Siberia until the mid-Holocene. Credit: Mauricio Anton
New research shows that humans had a significant role in the extinction of woolly mammoths in Eurasia, occurring thousands of years later than previously thought.
An international team of scientists led by researchers from the University of Adelaide and University of Copenhagen, has revealed a 20,000-year pathway to extinction for the woolly mammoth.
“Our research shows that humans were a crucial and chronic driver of population declines of woolly mammoths, having an essential role in the timing and location of their extinction,” said lead author Associate Professor Damien Fordham from the University of Adelaide’s Environment Institute.
“Using computer models, fossils, and ancient
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A trio of woolly mammoths trudges over snow covered hills. Behind them, mountains with snow covered peaks rise above dark green forests of fir trees. Credit: Daniel Eskridge
New
Modern Arctic landscape. Credit: Inger Greve Alsos
The hairy cousins of today’s elephants lived alongside early humans and were a regular staple of their diet – their skeletons were used to build shelters, harpoons were carved from their giant tusks, artwork featuring them is daubed on cave walls, and 30,000 years ago, the oldest known musical instrument, a flute, was made out of a mammoth bone.
Now the hotly debated question about why mammoths went extinct has been answered – geneticists analyzed ancient environmental DNA and proved it was because when the icebergs melted, it became far too wet for the giant animals to survive because their food source – vegetation – was practically wiped out.
The 10-year research project, published in Nature on October 20, 2021, was led by Professor Eske Willerslev, a Fellow of St John’s College, University of Cambridge, and director of The Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre, University of Copenhagen.
The team used DNA shotgun sequencing to analyze environmental plant and animal remains – including urine, feces, and skin cells – taken from soil samples painstakingly collected over a period of 20 years from sites in the Arctic where mammoth remains were found. The advanced new technology means scientists no longer have to rely on DNA samples from bones or teeth to gather enough genetic material to recreate a profile of ancient DNA. The same technique has been used during the pandemic to test the sewage of human populations to detect, track, and analyze Covid-19.
A mammoth tusk on Logata River bank. Credit: Johanna Anjar
Professor Willerslev said: “Scientists have argued for 100 years about why mammoths went extinct. Humans have been blamed because the animals had survived for millions of years without climate change killing them off before, but when they lived alongside humans they didn’t last long and we were accused of hunting them to death.
“We have finally been able to prove was that it was not just the climate changing that was the problem, but the speed of it that was the final nail in the coffin – they were not able to adapt quickly enough when the landscape dramatically transformed and their food became scarce.
“As the climate warmed up, trees and wetland plants took over and replaced the mammoth’s grassland habitats. And we should remember that there were a lot of animals around that were easier to hunt than a giant woolly mammoth – they could grow to the height of a double-decker bus!”
The woolly mammoth and its ancestors lived on earth for five million years and the huge beasts evolved and weathered several Ice Ages. During this period, herds of mammoths, reindeer, and woolly rhinoceroses thrived in the cold and snowy conditions.
Despite the cold, a lot of vegetation grew to keep the various species of animals alive – grass, flowers, plants, and small shrubs would all have been eaten by the vegetarian mammoths who probably their tusks to shovel snow aside and are likely to have used their trunks to uproot tough grasses. They were so big because they needed huge stomachs to digest the grass.
Modern Arctic landscape. Credit: Inger Greve Alsos
Mammoths could travel a distance equivalent of going around the world twice during their lifetime and fossil records show they lived on all continents except Australia and South America. Populations were known to have initially survived the end of the last Ice Age in small pockets off the coasts of Siberia and Alaska – on Wrangel Island and St Paul Island – but the research found they actually lived longer elsewhere too and the breeds of mammoths on both the islands were closely related despite being geographically separated. As part of the project, the team also sequenced the DNA of 1,500 Arctic plants for the very first time to be able to draw these globally significant conclusions.
Dr. Yucheng Wang, first author of the paper and a Research Associate at the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, said: “The most recent Ice Age – called the Pleistocene – ended 12,000 years ago when the glaciers began to melt and the roaming range of the herds of mammoths decreased. It was thought that mammoths began to go extinct then but we also found they actually survived beyond the Ice Age all in different regions of the Arctic and into the Holocene – the time that we are currently living in – far longer than scientists realized.
A selection of the sediment sampled from sites across the Arctic. Credit: Yucheng Wang
“We zoomed into the intricate detail of the environmental DNA and mapped out the population spread of these mammals and show how it becomes smaller and smaller and their genetic diversity gets smaller and smaller too, which made it even harder for them to survive.
“When the climate got wetter and the ice began to melt it led to the formation of lakes, rivers, and marshes. The ecosystem changed and the biomass of the vegetation reduced and would not have been able to sustain the herds of mammoths. We have shown that climate change, specifically precipitation, directly drives the change in the vegetation – humans had no impact on them at all based on our models.”
Humans lived alongside woolly mammoths for at least 2,000 years – they were even around when the pyramids were being built. Their disappearance is the last big naturally occurring extinction story. Our fascination with the huge beasts continues today with ‘Manny’ the woolly mammoth starring as the main character in five Ice Age animated films, and scientists hoping to resurrect them from the dead.
Mammoth steppe. Credit: Guogang Zhang @Hubei University
Professor Willerslev said: “This is a stark lesson from history and shows how unpredictable climate change is – once something is lost, there is no going back. Precipitation was the cause of the extinction of woolly mammoths through the changes to plants. The change happened so quickly that they could not adapt and evolve to survive.
“It shows nothing is guaranteed when it comes to the impact of dramatic changes in the weather. The early humans would have seen the world change beyond all recognition – that could easily happen again and we cannot take for granted that we will even be around to witness it. The only thing we can predict with any certainty is that the change will be massive.”
Reference: “Late Quaternary dynamics of Arctic biota from ancient environmental genomics” by Yucheng Wang, Mikkel Winther Pedersen, Inger Greve Alsos, Bianca De Sanctis, Fernando Racimo, Ana Prohaska, Eric Coissac, Hannah Lois Owens, Marie Kristine Føreid Merkel, Antonio Fernandez-Guerra, Alexandra Rouillard, Youri Lammers, Adriana Alberti, France Denoeud, Daniel Money, Anthony H. Ruter, Hugh McColl, Nicolaj Krog Larsen, Anna A. Cherezova, Mary E. Edwards, Grigory B. Fedorov, James Haile, Ludovic Orlando, Lasse Vinner, Thorfinn Sand Korneliussen, David W. Beilman, Anders A. Bjørk, Jialu Cao, Christoph Dockter, Julie Esdale, Galina Gusarova, Kristian K. Kjeldsen, Jan Mangerud, Jeffrey T. Rasic, Birgitte Skadhauge, John Inge Svendsen, Alexei Tikhonov, Patrick Wincker, Yingchun Xing, Yubin Zhang, Duane G. Froese, Carsten Rahbek, David Bravo Nogues, Philip B. Holden, Neil R. Edwards, Richard Durbin, David J. Meltzer, Kurt H. Kjær, Per Möller and Eske Willerslev, 20 October 2021, Nature. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04016-x
A trio of woolly mammoths trudges over snowy terrain. Behind them, snow-capped peaks rise above dark green forests of fir trees.
Daniel Eskridge
About 4,000 years ago, the last majestic woolly mammoth roaming Earth vanished, and for decades, scientists believed the colossal ancestors of elephants went extinct because humans hunted them relentlessly. DNA analysis of the animals’ old stomping grounds, however, reveals a different story.
The likelier culprit, researchers now say, was rapid climate change that ultimately wiped out the creatures’ food supply. But besides solving the mystery of the disappearing mammoths, these findings may offer a glimpse into the fates of other species if our presentclimate crisis isn’t controlled.
Get the CNET Science newsletter
Unlock the biggest mysteries of our planet and beyond with the CNET Science newsletter. Delivered Mondays.
“We have shown that climate change, specifically precipitation, directly drives the change in the vegetation — humans had no impact on [the mammoths] at all based on our models,” Yucheng Wang, a zoologist at the University of Cambridge and first author of the paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, said in a statement.
Co-author Eske Willerslev, a fellow at the University of Cambridge and director of the Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre at the University of Copenhagen, added, “This is a stark lesson from history and shows how unpredictable climate change is — once something is lost, there is no going back.”
These gentle beings that dined on grass and flowers lived alongside Neanderthals. While many encounters might have been peaceful, the animals were a hot commodity when it came to making fur coats, musical and artistic instruments and hearty meals. That’s because of their thick, chocolate-colored fur, their sturdy, enormous tusks and their huge size.
A mammoth tusk on a bank of the Logata River in Russia.
Johanna Anjar
They weighed approximately 6 tons and stood about 13 feet (4 meters) tall — as Wang puts it, woolly mammoths could “grow to the height of a double-decker bus.”
“Scientists have argued for 100 years about why mammoths went extinct,” Willerslev said. “Humans have been blamed because the animals had survived for millions of years without climate change killing them off before, but when they lived alongside humans they didn’t last long and we were accused of hunting them to death.”
It makes sense that prehistoric people were suspected to be behind woolly mammoths’ eventual demise instead of climate change. These animals somehow withstood the Ice Age about 12,000 years ago — the fanciful Disney movie Ice Age has some thoughts on that — but the new study’s researchers decided to dig a little deeper.
Over a period of 10 years, Willerslev led a team in dissecting DNA fragments collected from the Arctic soil where mammoths were known to graze. The samples were collected over 20 years and analyzed using a method called DNA shotgun sequencing.
DNA shotgun sequencing is an indirect way to create genetic profiles without requiring a person or animal to physically be there. Instead of collecting genetic information from bones or teeth, the method sequences DNA from traces of urine or discarded cells. Scientists have also used this tool to track the movement of COVID-19 by creating DNA profiles from sewage remnants.
The researchers looking into ancient mammoths discovered populations of the enormous animals — uncovered using the sequencing method — were depleted at a rate consistent with the quick speed of climate change at the time. Willerslev says it was because “as the climate warmed up, trees and wetland plants took over and replaced the mammoth’s grassland habitats.”
The modern Arctic landscape.
Inger Greve Alsos
“When the climate got wetter and the ice began to melt, it led to the formation of lakes, rivers and marshes,” he said. “The ecosystem changed and the biomass of the vegetation reduced and would not have been able to sustain the herds of mammoths.”
Wang also notes that prehistoric humans would’ve probably spent most of their time hunting animals much smaller and easier to capture than enormous woolly mammoths, suggesting their impact on the animals’ extinction was arguably smaller than intuitively thought.
Another important aspect of the findings, Wang said, is “we have finally been able to prove that it was not just the climate changing that was the problem, but the speed of it that was the final nail in the coffin — they were not able to adapt quickly enough when the landscape dramatically transformed and their food became scarce.”
Such speed is why the researchers naturally drew parallels between what happened back then and what appears to be in store for us now. For instance, our global temperature is rising so quickly that many countries’ former goal of limiting the increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) is now considered nearly impossible by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That’s unless immediate, drastic measures are taken, they say.
“It shows nothing is guaranteed when it comes to the impact of dramatic changes in the weather,” Willerslav said. “The early humans would have seen the world change beyond all recognition. That could easily happen again, and we cannot take for granted that we will even be around to witness it.”
“The only thing we can predict with any certainty is that the change will be massive.”
Well there’s good news and bad news. The bad news is we might be dooming our entire species by refusing to take meaningful action on climate change. The good news is at least we’re not responsible for the extinction of another species. A new study says humans are not the reason woolly mammoths went kaput. Instead those great beasts succumbed to—oh c’mon!—climate change.
Rendering of three woolly mammoths near water not far from an icy mountain
PBS Eons
A new decade-long DNA study (which we first learned about at
Gizmodo
) published in
Na
ture
says the real culprit behind the demise of elephants’ furry cousins was not mankind as previously thought. The project, led by Professor Eske Willerslev, a Fellow of St John’s College, University of Cambridge, examined prehistoric DNA with cutting-edge technology and sequencing to identify what wiped out those majestic animals. As part of their “large-scale environmental DNA metagenomic study of ancient plant and mammal communities,” researchers analyzed “535 permafrost and lake sediment samples from across the Arctic spanning the past 50,000 years.”
The samples came from a 20 year collection in that region where woolly mammoth remains have been found. While the study gets deep into the scientific weeds, the conclusion is far too accessible for all of us. The genetic evidence points to melting icebergs as the leading cause of the animals extinction 4,000 years ago. The increase in water all but eliminated the vegetation they survived on. That was enough to kill them off after they survived for nearly five million years on this planet.
General wisdom has always blamed humans for woolly mammoth’s fate. It wasn’t an absurd assumption though. Our ancestors hunted them and used their bodies for countless reasons. And those impressive animals had done really well before we showed up. But in the end it was nature itself who did them in as the planet naturally warmed.
If a species that roamed Earth for millions of years couldn’t handle a natural climate change, we might want to do something about artificially warming up our home. Otherwise, some day, another species might be trying to figure out what happened us.
The post Study Says Climate Change Killed Off Woolly Mammoths, Not Humans appeared first on Nerdist.
A trio of woolly mammoths trudges over snowy terrain. Behind them, snow-capped peaks rise above dark green forests of fir trees.
Daniel Eskridge
About 4,000 years ago, the last majestic woolly mammoth roaming Earth vanished, and for decades, scientists believed these colossal ancestors of elephants went extinct because they were relentlessly hunted by humans. DNA analysis of the animals’ old stomping grounds, however, reveals a different story.
The likelier culprit, researchers now say, was rapid climate change that ultimately wiped out the creatures’ food supply. But besides solving the mystery of the disappearing mammoths, these findings may offer a glimpse into the fates of other species if our presentclimate crisis isn’t controlled.
Get the CNET Science newsletter
Unlock the biggest mysteries of our planet and beyond with the CNET Science newsletter. Delivered Mondays.
“We have shown that climate change, specifically precipitation, directly drives the change in the vegetation — humans had no impact on [the mammoths] at all based on our models,” Yucheng Wang, a zoologist at the University of Cambridge and first author of the paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, said in a statement.
Co-author Eske Willerslev, a fellow at the University of Cambridge and director of the Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre at the University of Copenhagen, added, “This is a stark lesson from history and shows how unpredictable climate change is — once something is lost, there is no going back.”
These gentle beings that dined on grass and flowers lived alongside Neanderthals. While many encounters might have been peaceful, the animals were a hot commodity when it came to making fur coats, musical and artistic instruments and hearty meals. That’s because of their thick, chocolate-colored fur, their sturdy, enormous tusks and their huge size.
A mammoth tusk on a bank of the Logata River in Russia.
Johanna Anjar
They weighed approximately 6 tons and stood about 13 feet (4 meters) tall — as Wang puts it, woolly mammoths could “grow to the height of a double-decker bus.”
“Scientists have argued for 100 years about why mammoths went extinct,” Willerslev said. “Humans have been blamed because the animals had survived for millions of years without climate change killing them off before, but when they lived alongside humans they didn’t last long and we were accused of hunting them to death.”
It makes sense that prehistoric people were suspected to be behind woolly mammoths’ eventual demise instead of climate change. These animals somehow withstood the Ice Age about 12,000 years ago — the fanciful Disney movie Ice Age has some thoughts on that — but the new study’s researchers decided to dig a little deeper.
Over a period of 10 years, Willerslev led a team in dissecting DNA fragments collected from the Arctic soil where mammoths were known to graze. The samples were collected over 20 years and analyzed using a method called DNA shotgun sequencing.
DNA shotgun sequencing is an indirect way to create genetic profiles without requiring a person or animal to physically be there. Instead of collecting genetic information from bones or teeth, the method sequences DNA from traces of urine or discarded cells. Scientists have also used this tool to track the movement of COVID-19 by creating DNA profiles from sewage remnants.
The researchers looking into ancient mammoths discovered populations of the enormous animals — uncovered using the sequencing method — were depleted at a rate consistent with the quick speed of climate change at the time. Willerslev says it was because “as the climate warmed up, trees and wetland plants took over and replaced the mammoth’s grassland habitats.”
The modern Arctic landscape.
Inger Greve Alsos
“When the climate got wetter and the ice began to melt, it led to the formation of lakes, rivers and marshes,” he said. “The ecosystem changed and the biomass of the vegetation reduced and would not have been able to sustain the herds of mammoths.”
Wang also notes that prehistoric humans would’ve probably spent most of their time hunting animals much smaller and easier to capture than enormous woolly mammoths, suggesting their impact on the animals’ extinction was arguably smaller than intuitively thought.
Another important aspect of the findings, Wang said, is “we have finally been able to prove that it was not just the climate changing that was the problem, but the speed of it that was the final nail in the coffin — they were not able to adapt quickly enough when the landscape dramatically transformed and their food became scarce.”
Such speed is why the researchers naturally drew parallels between what happened back then and what appears to be in store for us now. For instance, our global temperature is rising so quickly that many countries’ former goal of limiting the increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) is now considered nearly impossible by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That’s unless immediate, drastic measures are taken, they say.
“It shows nothing is guaranteed when it comes to the impact of dramatic changes in the weather,” Willerslav said. “The early humans would have seen the world change beyond all recognition. That could easily happen again, and we cannot take for granted that we will even be around to witness it.”
“The only thing we can predict with any certainty is that the change will be massive.”
