Russian Scientists Say They'll Clone a Mammoth Within 5 Years

Many scientists (mainly Japanese and Russian) have dreamed of cloning a mammoth over the years. When the mammoth genome was partially reconstructed in 2008, that dream seemed a bit closer. Besides the millions of dollars needed for such a project, the biggest hurdle was the lack of a good sample of mammoth DNA. That hurdle has now been cleared, thanks to the discovery of well-preserved bone marrow in a mammoth thigh bone. Russian scientist Semyon Grigoriev, acting director of the Sakha Republic's mammoth museum, and colleagues from Japan's Kinki University say that within 5 years they'll likely have a clone. From the article: "What's been missing is woolly mammoth nuclei with undamaged genes. Scientists have been on a Holy Grail-type search for such pristine nuclei since the late 1990s. Now it sounds like the missing genes may have been found."

Comments

Ice Age Park

[alen]

Just like Jurassic Park, but colder

Re:Ice Age Park

[KennyG944]

OMG! They're gonna clone Roseanne Barr?

Re:Ice Age Park

[bobcat7677]

Seems less likely than Jurassic Park to attract enough tourists to keep such a venture solvent. Besides...what can they really do with one set of DNA? You bring one back from the dead as it were, but wouldn't you need at least two (male and female) to re-start the species...and several to have any remotely healthy genetic diversity? Frozen specimens have shown what the animal was like...not sure what more could be learned from a living example?

Re:Ice Age Park

[Anonymous Coward]

the roseanne ref is almost as old as the mammoth :)

Re:Ice Age Park

[GNious]

Mix with current age elephants and unix-gurues - should make for diversity, while keeping the hairyness.

Re:Ice Age Park

[Hentes]

It might be possible to crossbreed them with elephants, but even one animal would be a huge success, as it would lead to the development of methodology to revive an extinct animal, and with the global extinction of today, there will be need for such technology.

Re:Ice Age Park

[Hadlock]

That's an interesting question! People regularly throw around the number 40 as being the minimum number of people to keep a diverse gene pool going, could that roughly be true for mammoths too? Could they splice in enough genetic material from other partial strands of mammoth DNA to get 40 complete, but slightly different mammoths cloned and breeding? And second, where are you going to find enough space and money to house your herd of mammoth mammoths?

Re:Ice Age Park

[Alphadecay27]

They can already insert genes from a completely different species into e.g. a cat to make it glow: http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/27338236/ns/today-today_pets_and_animals/t/me-yow-cat-has-glow-good-cause/#.Tt5uaRfNmeU I imagine they could identify the elephant-like portion of the genome and vary that using different "donors" to create diversity/swap sex. I think initially they would probably just clone one animal and sell it to zoos across the world. Setting up a prehistoric park that mimics the animal's natural habitat makes for a good story but there is no economic advantage. A simple zoo enclosure would cost less and be more accessible to visitors.

Re:Ice Age Park

[devitto]

Behaviour. The genome is are the 'building blocks' of the creature, and like building blocks, they don't tell you in isolation how warm the building is, if the building is noisy or quiet, or if the building lives happily with sabre-tooth tigers....

It's a totally new kind of nature vs nurture experiment, and a step beyond 'Dolly'.
Dolly and her twin both grew up with other sheep, went 'baa' and ate grass - but will this mammoth behave like a elephant if kept with elephants? What if it's not influenced by other animals including humans ?

Ligers are a good example of how a creature's DNA influences it's behaviour more than 'learned' social aspects.
Liger keepers say they are 'confused' and never 'fit in' with Tigers (even when mating is an option) or Lions (as part of a normal pride)

Re:Ice Age Park

[flibbidyfloo]

Well, have we learned anything from living Coelacanths that we didn't already know from their fossils? Other than that they weren't actually extinct, I mean.

Re:Ice Age Park

[ThePeices]

Who?

Re:Ice Age Park

[PRMan]

The Creationists were right?

Re:Ice Age Park

[StikyPad]

Or you could just clone the one indefinitely. It's already being done in other animals. The important of genetic diversity should not be forgotten, though in the case of an extinct animal, it's probably not the primary concern.

Re:Ice Age Park

[MozeeToby]

According to the wiki, 150-200 randomly chosen individuals will be stable for 80 generations or more. But then, the Amish were founded with around 200 members originally, and while they are certainly still around they have much higher rates of genetic disorders (and then again, many of those 200 were probably related before they isolated themselves). It's not an easy question to answer.

Re:Ice Age Park

[Archangel Michael]

I've noticed, the more proficient I get at Linux, my beard grows thicker and greyer ... I'm no longer thinking it is coincidence.

Re:Ice Age Park

[Archangel Michael]

Then we'll kill it for dinner. Back to Extinct for you!

Re:Ice Age Park

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

"Can" and "Should" are seldom in agreement.

How cruel this would be, cloning an individual or two.

If the Mammoth is anything like the Elephant, it has a sophisticated intelligence and psychology - intimately linked with the social and familial bonds in its herd.

A lone mammoth or two, without mature, bonding mdels? It is similar to breeding a captive human on a distant asteroid, from an in vitro culture.

Re:Ice Age Park

[PReDiToR]

This is what the Asgard tried to do but ... Oh wait, you're talking about real life?

Re:Ice Age Park

[Anonymous Coward]

I think those numbers are for different things.

Something like this:
40 is for individes with diverse genes and with careful planing. ("generation ship" with 40 carefully chosen people for all over the world)
150-200 is for randomly chosen individuals (almost) randomly fucking each other. ("new world ship" not filled with sects members)
1700-2700 is for individes that already live close to each other and where most individes have a few relatives, (A small town getting isolated when the zombies attack.)

Re:Ice Age Park

[majesticmerc]

Why does it always have to be about the money? Let's do it because we can. I mean, lets face it, that's the only reason we've ever been to the moon. It cost a fortune, and many lives, but at the end of the day, we put a man on the fucking moon. Can we bring back the woolly mammoth? I'm sceptical, but let's go for it, because it's science, and the lessons learned along the way could have all kinds of medical benefits, and let's face it, it'd be awesome to see one.

Re:Ice Age Park

[cyberchondriac]

Step right up to see the glowing wooly mammoths! Yay!

Re:Ice Age Park

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

When the cannibal re-located to the Caucasus, he opined, of the local cuisine: "Tastes like Chechen".

Re:Ice Age Park

[geekoid]

If it's tasty, we will have a million of them in a few years.

Wouldn't it be weird if it replaced beef?

Re:Ice Age Park

[icebike]

You need more than 1 pair. 1 pair will get offspring, but if you plan to breed brothers and sisters, you won't be in business for too long.

Much longer than you might imagine. Although not without consequences.

There are more than one instance of frozen mammoth in the world, and more will likely appear over time. These animals survived until 1700 BC in some places, and there are bound to be more frozen samples found.

If the Russians succeed in this endeavor once, the ground work will be there to do so again, when new samples are discovered.

Re:Ice Age Park

[geekoid]

So we have way to bring a species back, and that's cruel? Some people are just whiny bitches.

Re:Ice Age Park

[icebike]

Why does it always have to be about the money?

People have to eat, pay for braces for their children's teeth, heat their homes, and pay bills.
To say nothing at all about building and equipping a lab.

I would have thought this was self evident.

Re:Ice Age Park

[DigiShaman]

DNA changes over time. Eventually, you start cloning the many mutations created over time and thus in aggregate carried over to the latest clone alive. Eventually, the success rate for cloning may diminish over time. Also, wasn't there that whole telomere length issue where it didn't get reset when cloning an animal? Was a solution ever found?

Re:Ice Age Park

[Kenoli]

Go extinct twice; achievement unlocked

Re:Ice Age Park

[cupantae]

That's just because you used to shave. Remember that?

Re:Ice Age Park

[cjb658]

And if that doesn't work, 2012 is right around the corner.

Re:Ice Age Park

[Man On Pink Corner]

I would be too busy sprinting in the other direction to "step right up."

Re:Ice Age Park

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what, you got me thinking. Let's go for the gold here. I mean, why wuss out half way. When we clone a mammoth I say we stick it on a ship and launch it to the moon. When they ask why, we say "Because we can". There's only one concern... what will PETA say? Screw it, we can just launch them to the moon too. Bill Gates could pay for the whole thing, we just need to convince him Apple is already planning to do it with Facebook and Google close behind.

Re:Ice Age Park

[dosware]

Inference from fossils is a mature and noble science- but pales in comparison to studying live organisms. Direct observation of a living specimens provide verifiable data on behavior, ecology, soft anatomy/ physiology, genetics...and the list goes on and on. Digging up a human cranium likely wouldn't reveal to an alien the full behavioral potential (good or bad) of Homo sapiens.

Re:Ice Age Park

[ceoyoyo]

Not sure if it's what you meant, but 40 diverse individuals sounds like about the minimum number to keep a gene pool surviving long term. It wouldn't be particularly diverse.

Re:Ice Age Park

[ceoyoyo]

Or raising a kitten or puppy in a home without other pets. Oh, wait.

Re:Ice Age Park

[syousef]

Mix with current age elephants and unix-gurues - should make for diversity, while keeping the hairyness.

SSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHH!!!! PETA will hear you!

Re:Ice Age Park

[Golddess]

not sure what more could be learned from a living example?

Why, the most important piece of knowledge that can be learned.

What did it taste like?

Re:Ice Age Park

[rubycodez]

nonsense, almost all geeks have reproductive activities, with one of their hands

Re:Ice Age Park

[rubycodez]

yes, give it a Mac

Re:Ice Age Park

[koona]

It has been found that organisms vary considerably in the minimum viable population, and inherent genetic variability within that population, required for long term sustainability.

The original canary in the mineshaft, the african cheetah suffered from a low variability. Introducing new gametes solved that nicely.

Aplodontia rufa on the other hand seems to do very nicely with less than a loving spoonful.

Re:Ice Age Park

[Ungrounded Lightning]

If the original is male you can construct a female by duplicating the X and removing the Y. The female will likely be viable since the male was and there are very few genes on the Y.

Both will be heterozygous for many genes. Breeding them for a few generations will likely eliminate the detrimental recessives and produce a viable nearly-all-homozygous "purebread", assuming none of the genes actually require two alleles for viability. You may have a rather high rate of miscarriages and defects for a while but it shouldn't take very long.

Once you have a viable purebread and a niche it fits you can go many generations with essentially no diversity at all. (Cheetahs are doing this now.) The main problem is lack of immune system diversity: A bug that kills one of 'em is likely to kill most of 'em. (Secondary problem is difficulty moving into a new niche if the old one dries up. But that's not an issue for what would amount to a zoo animal.)

Regardless, once you've got a breeding pair that is producing viable offspring, you've got many generations of leeway to find and incorporate more DNA and restore a more robust level of diversity. (Unlike the initial clones, the DNA need not be from a completely intact genome, or even an intact chromosome. So it's easier to find.) Elephant generations are about 25 years (compared with 30 to 35 for humans) so there's no big rush.

Re:Ice Age Park

[GNious]

Actually shaved recently (we have a gubbermint - yay!), and now I feel like I cannot grep to save my life ...

Re:Ice Age Park

[somersault]

Why?

First, why be scared if it's in a suitable enclosure? They're not that much different from elephants, and people have been doing that fine for ages. Elephants aren't carnivorous nor particularly aggressive in general either.

Even if it did chase you, you'd probably want to vary the direction you're sprinting too when dealing with such a large and heavy animal that can run as fast as an olympic sprinter in a straight line..

Re:Ice Age Park

[somersault]

Oops, turns out elephants do eat animals too, but I still think you're being a baby :p

Re:Ice Age Park

[RockDoctor]

People regularly throw around the number 40 as being the minimum number of people to keep a diverse gene pool going, could that roughly be true for mammoths too?

"Throw around" sounds about as precise as this is. There isn't a huge amount of actual data about this.

If you look at every colonisation of any island by any species, then the minimum that is needed to start a colony is the arrival of a single pregnant female. For long-lived, slow breeding species such as humans (and elephants, and presumably mammoths), that's likely to be very dodgy on both the population genetics front, and the simple question of whether or not there are enough hands to feed enough mouths.

But in practice, that's not how things would happen. If you have a classical colonisation scenario of your beasties being caught on vegetation rafts in a flood (or on ice floes) every few decades, and carried to Terra Nova, then there's a reasonable chance of a newcomer arriving in the incipient colony every few decades. And it doesn't particularly matter if it's a male or female that arrives. That does a lot of good for population genetics.

There was a study published a few years ago of a wolf pack in southern Sweden. They're isolated from the main Finno-Russian population by a combination of tough landscape and many miles of unfriendly farmers, despite them being a protected species. The pack was, for a long time (I haven't read the paper for several years!), in pretty desperate straits genetically, with poor breeding success, and to the researchers following them were seeing a variety of diseases of in-breeding. (They could do a complete unambiguous family tree by doing DNA analyses on wolf turds, and track new pups.) The pack's size was stable at around a dozen, despite there being abundant wild(-ish) land and game for the pack to expand into. Then in the mid-90s one single solitary male (I think) wolf managed to make it through the gauntlet of central Sweden to meet up with the pack. Within a few years the pup count was rising rapidly, and the degree of consanguinity in the pups was dropping substantially. That's the effect of, literally, one incomer.

So, although 40-odd may be bandied around as a minimum safe population size, it's not a well-founded figure. It's also likely to be a decidedly different figure for different species.

Returning to the mammoth population subject : If I were planning a cloning/ breeding programme, I'd probably start by trying to clone a male. (Reasoning : the first one off the production line is going to be a "learning experience", and you really want to get your cows right for breeding from.) Then, learning lessons from "M1" and continuing genetic analysis of the raw material from new mammoth finds, I'd work on preparing my first cow : "F1".

(I've already realised that I'd have to do some careful background research to try to identify a restricted population of mammoth genetic material, in both time and space ; there's likely a lot of endemism in the populations, and mixing dissimilar genomes could cause issues. Say, one population has digestive genes optimised for grasses, while another population lived on leaves from trees ... not good to mix them, at least not while learning mammoth biology.)

Back to the population : I've now got a (probably flawed) M1 and an F1 (hopefully better). It's going to be years before F1 is fit to attempt to breed, so I'd now turn back to trying to make a better M2 (say I'm only going to get to use one elephant's uterus per year). Then F2 ; then F3 ; then F4. By now, I'll be getting close to being able to breed off F1 (I think ; IANA mammoth keeper ; then again, no-one else is), so I'd better start to attend to my stock of males. I'm making the (not unjustified) assumption that modifying male's sperm is going to be cheaper and easier than modifying eggs, so I can use more-or-less off the shelf genetic engineering techniques to bring parts of

Re:Ice Age Park

[RockDoctor]

Well, have we learned anything from living Coelacanths that we didn't already know from their fossils?

You've seen fossils of Latimeria? That's interesting, and it must be relatively new, because around 2003, I visited the man who literally wrote the book on coelacanths (ISBN : 0412784807) in his fossil-coelacanth-strewn lair, and he didn't mention any fossils of Latimeria. (Mind you, there was still vigorous debate at the time of whether the newly-discovered Indonesian population was the same species as the East African population.)

Where were the fossil Latimeria found? Oh, hang on, I should be able to work this out : you'd need somewhere that has "recently" (I'm a geologist - last couple of million years is "recently" to me) emerged from the sea, after previously being an area of submarine deposition. That rules out the majority of the East African coast (where I've been working for most of the last 6 months). Add in an extant environment for a Latimeria species ... and the fossils would have to be from somewhere in Indonesia.

Do you have the reference? (I am being half serious.)

Re:Ice Age Park

[RockDoctor]

Those are reasonable concerns, Jeremiah. But in practice, you'd almost certainly be using an elephant as a surrogate dam, so perforce your mammoth would be growing up in elephant society. Which would mean that our behavioural study of "the mammoth" would be hopelessly shot from day one.

But accepting that, the interest in cloning the animal to see what it looks like (and what it tastes like) ... is adequate justification, to my mind.

Sorry : that ellipsis was rule 34 kicking in. Mammoth blowing. I've seen elephant blowing. Someone would do it. Someone else would pay to see it being done. Quite a few "someone else"s would. There : we're onto "step 3 : profit".

I can't summon the energy to try to fit any more slashdot memes in.

Re:Ice Age Park

[RockDoctor]

My punishing sense of humour takes it's hat off to you. And vomits into the hat.

This is a sign of favour.

Re:Ice Age Park

[Stuarticus]

People for the Ethical treatment of Admins?

Re:Ice Age Park

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Think of the SWEATERS that'll be made!

Re:Ice Age Park

[flibbidyfloo]

My post was mostly rhetorical, intended to highlight the absurdity (IMO) of asking why scientists would be interested in having a living mammoth to study when we have some fossils and frozen carcasses already.

I don't know much about Coelacanths, but considering that they've been found now living off of South Africa, Madagascar, Kenya, Mozambique and Tanzania, I suspect we're learning far more about them now than we could even from a plethora of Latimeria fossils, were they available.

Re:Ice Age Park

[RockDoctor]

I don't know much about Coelacanths, but considering that they've been found now living off of South Africa, Madagascar, Kenya, Mozambique and Tanzania,

About 1998 an ichthyologist (Erdmann? I can't be bothered checking) was walking through a fish market on holiday in Indonesia. to his face-palming astonishment, he met a coelacanth coming the other way. On a sack trolly. He was so astonished that he only got one photo of it before someone brought it and took it away. But that was enough. With modest additional work, he established the existence of a second population of the genus Latimeria in Indonesia. That has since been shown to be a separate species. But they're decidedly more widespread fishes than was thought until then.

These days, when (it's not an "if") someone pays me to go to PNG, or WA, or somewhere like the Keeling islands (http://maps.google.co.uk/?ll=-12.586732,96.844482&spn=5.10221,10.821533&t=h&z=7&vpsrc=6) or Sri Lanka ... this will be one pair of eyes that will be keeping very well peeled.

I wonder

[Dunbal]

What the giants will have to say about that.

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

Only when we clone the giants, we will know for sure.

Re:I wonder

[sexconker]

What the giants will have to say about that.

Who gives a shit what the giants say?
FUS RO DAH
FUS RO DAH
FUS RO DAH
FUS RO DAH

Re:I wonder

[lennier1]

Who cares? They lose focus once you jump into a river anyway.

Re:I wonder

[shutdown -p now]

No surprise there. By far the easiest way to kill dragons early on in the game is to lead them to giant camps.

Re:I wonder

[cyberchondriac]

Speaking of, that's what I really want to see - dragons. It'd be sweet if they could eventually genetically engineer such a creature.. starting with dino DNA as a base. ;) The "fire breathing" aspect would be quite the challenge though..

Re:I wonder

[felixmeister]

Don't worry about the fire breathing. Just go for a green one. Acid breath should be much easier.

Re:I wonder

[Dunbal]

McCaffrey is dead. Give it up already.

Re:I wonder

[cyberchondriac]

Clone McCaffrey ;-)

Putin...

[Anonymous Coward]

Will have shot it five minutes later...

Re:Putin...

[kingturkey]

Actually he'd have it shot and then pose for photos pretending he shot it. Or he might just skip the cloning part and pose over an existing skeleton and claim he shot that one.

Re:Putin...

[mjwx]

In Soviet Russia, president assassinates you.

Welcome to...

[i kan reed]

Pliocene park.

All this in the mist of global warming.

[jellomizer]

Lets give birth to an Ice Age animal during earths period of global high heat. They couldn't survive the end of the last ice age. So lets bring them to life and stick them in a post/anti-Ice Age environment... Brilliant!

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Each one will be issued a heavy-duty electric razor and a bottle of SPF-50 sunscreen, along with an umbrella in one of five ridiculous novelty prints.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[0123456]

Lets give birth to an Ice Age animal during earths period of global high heat.

Today isn't particularly hot, even by the standards of the time since the last ice age, and much of Russia is often extremely cold.

In any case, the next ice age should be along at some point in the next few thousand years, so we might as well get prepared. A mammoth will be much more useful as transport than a Prius when the planet is covered with mile-thick ice and the temperature is permanently below zero.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[Palshife]

We have penguins at the St. Louis zoo.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[MikeyO]

They couldn't survive the end of the last ice age

I thought they were done in by humans hunting with clovis point spears. They should be fine now, nobody uses spears anymore.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[sexconker]

Lets give birth to an Ice Age animal during earths period of global high heat.

Today isn't particularly hot, even by the standards of the time since the last ice age, and much of Russia is often extremely cold.

In any case, the next ice age should be along at some point in the next few thousand years, so we might as well get prepared. A mammoth will be much more useful as transport than a Prius when the planet is covered with mile-thick ice and the temperature is permanently below zero.

Fucking Starks and their "winter is coming" doom and gloom bullshit.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[Hentes]

Mammuts became extinct because of human overhunting. Also, the Earth has a great thermal diversity, so you just have to put them north of there original location. And if that's not enough, shaving off their fur will prevent them from overheating. At least the polar bears in the zoo of my city manage to survive each summer this way.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[GameboyRMH]

Siberia gets down to -40C in the winter, it's cold enough with plenty of margin for global warming.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets give birth to an Ice Age animal during earths period of global high heat. They couldn't survive the end of the last ice age. So lets bring them to life and stick them in a post/anti-Ice Age environment... Brilliant!

We are currently in an ice age. Mammoths died out very recently about 4,500 years ago. The world was pretty much the same back then.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[elgeeko.com]

That's because we haven't had any Mammoths to hunt. Soon the whole spear industry will be booming again. I'm not sure, but I think IBM holds the patent rights and collects royalties from anyone who gives anyone else the shaft, which should cover all future spear or shaft based technologies. I hear Microsoft and Apple both pay billions just for the right to give anyone the shaft at any time and the US government pays in the trillions.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[magarity]

A mammoth will be much more useful as transport than a Prius when the planet is covered with mile-thick ice and the temperature is permanently below zero.

Wouldn't a tauntaun be a better choice?

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[Samantha Wright]

You had me at "one of five ridiculous novelty prints." Where does one apply to be a mammoth? Is there a BSD convention nearby?

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[jellomizer]

I doubt that humans were a major impact on the Mammoth population.
1. They were big and dangerous. While perhaps once in a while their might be a mighty mammoth hunt, but for the most part lets hunt bison for a big catch. But normally hairs and fowl.

2. Humans really are not well adapted for the cold. Mammoths like the cold... People do not. Sure there are some colonies who have made it. But no large cities large enough to decimate a population.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[jd]

Yes, yes, but you're forgetting that the body armour business will sky-rocket. Can you imagine how much they'd be able to charge a Mammoth for a spear-proof suit?

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[thomasw_lrd]

Actually according to the Poncas there were a few woolly mammoths left around until about the 1200's. At least one tribe has a story of an extremely long winter when food supplies were running low, and they then went hunting and killed a woolly mammoth, and it saved the tribe.

Who knows what animals survived in small herds in the America's until the Europeans arrived.

Source:
http://www.helium.com/items/2119958-sightings-of-living-woolly-mammoths

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[Belial6]

Actually spear hunting is alive and well. http://www.google.com/search?q=boar+spear+hunting

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[jd]

Humans had a huge impact on Mammoths, that's well-established. The standard hunting technique for big game appears to have been to trigger a stampede off a cliff. You should also remember that humans primarily hunted Pygmy Mammoth, not the giant kind, and that humans lived right up to the ice sheet during the Ice Age (and even hunted beyond it). Neandertals and Denisovians were the primary hominids living in extremely cold climates, but modern humans were quite capable of enduring extreme climates provided some sort of food existed. (Fishing from boats turns out to have been an extremely ancient technology.)

Having said that, Mammoth diversity was dropping long before humans even reached places like the Americas, so there were clearly other factors involved.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[jd]

Those were Pygmy Mammoth, which is not the same species as the Woolly Mammoth.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[Arker]

Uh, no.

Look people like the image of the stone-age human hunter taking the huge bull mammoth down with a spear, perhaps working in groups... it's a very popular image for that reason. But it's utter nonsense. There's no hard evidence mammoths were ever hunted by humans. There is some evidence that mammoth meat was consumed by humans, which is often conflated, but scavenging food isnt the same thing as hunting. There is even some evidence that mammoths may occasionally have been killed by humans - but it was more likely an opportunistic event than a planned hunt. A small, young mammoth that happened to get cut off from its group? An isolated individual that got stuck in a bog? Sure, some of that would have happened, and humans would certainly seize the opportunity, but that's a far cry from actually going out to hunt healthy, full-grown mammoths with a stone spear.

Wooly mammoths were quite a bit larger and more dangerous than todays African elephant. And we have one and only one known case of a human group hunting African elephants without firearms. Pygmy hunters in central africa do it and have apparently done it for centuries. BUT they dont do it with stone spears - they use bows and arrows coated with a potent poison. And even so, they often lose hunters. For even a large group of humans armed with Clovis technology to attack a full grown african elephant, let alone a mammoth, would be suicidally foolish.

Elephants arent just HUGE animals, they are also quite intelligent. They are also social animals and move in groups. Another large (though much smaller) animal that also moves in groups and certainly WAS hunted at the time is the bison - but not only are even the extinct, gigantic species of bison still much smaller than a mammoth, there is a huge difference in their group behaviour. Bison are much more cow-like, and can be stampeded easily. And THIS is how they were actually hunted - whole herds were stampeded into fatal falls, then the humans went in to salvage meat and other material from the corpses afterwards. This is a much smarter tactic than trying to take one down with a spear (though also extraordinarily wasteful,) and in fact we know that is exactly how our ancestors did it. But that tactic just doesnt work on elephants.

So, no, mammoth extinction did not come at the tip of a spear. If human action helped to bring about mammoth extinction, it was not in such a direct fashion.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[Remus Shepherd]

Find me some tauntaun DNA and we'll talk.

I suggest looking on Luke Skywalker's winter outfit.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[shutdown -p now]

Generally speaking, the assumption is that mammoths were hunted by luring them into pit traps. It's not like humans would charge them with spears out on the plains.

Also, mammoths - if they are like elephants in that respect - are not purely social animals. Females herd together, but males often wander alone.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[shutdown -p now]

Lets give birth to an Ice Age animal during earths period of global high heat. They couldn't survive the end of the last ice age. So lets bring them to life and stick them in a post/anti-Ice Age environment... Brilliant!

The Northern pole of cold is near the village of Oymyakon, with the lowest registered temperature of -71 C. I'll let you guess which country it is in.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[Arker]

Generally speaking, the assumption is that mammoths were hunted by luring them into pit traps.

But again the known elephant intelligence level makes this an unlikely hypothesis at best. Elephants are extremely hard to trap. The amount of energy one would have to expend, on average, to bring down a mammoth in this way just wouldnt make sense - particularly not when there was an abundance of other game that would have been so much easier to take using that method or others.

Again, I am not ruling out that a very young or old, or sick or wounded or otherwise disoriented mammoth might have occasionally have stumbled into a pit trap intended for another animal, but subsistence strategies are not built around such long-shots. Subsistence hunters consistently execute strategies that make sense in terms of calories out vs calories in while minimising the risk of injury to the hunter (important today, imagine how much more important with no doctors and no medicine so that even minor wounds could easily result in death!) which is why we have survived as a species.

Also, mammoths - if they are like elephants in that respect - are not purely social animals. Females herd together, but males often wander alone.

Sure, you have a few wandering bulls that arent accepted in the herd. Attacking a young healthy male would be far more dangerous than it could possibly be worth. Attacking an old bull on his last legs? Still quite dangerous, but more feasible at least, particularly as that animal might be more susceptible to some form of trapping. But again, that would have been an occasional opportunistic score, not a subsistence strategy. You wouldnt go out in the morning thinking "hey, I know what, let's go comb the forest and try to find an old half-dead bull mammoth for meat. There's got to be a fair chance that there is one wandering around out there somewhere today," That's just not a sensible strategy. What you would do instead is go out to hunt deer or bison or whatever was typically abundant and easily harvested in the area, and then maybe one day you just happen to come across that old lame bull in dire straits, stumbled into a pit or whatever, and you take that one individual because it happens to be right there so why not.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[cyberchondriac]

Until Apple patents their own "iSpear". Unfortunately for them, they won't be very effective as the spear tips will have rounded edges.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[Arker]

The standard hunting technique for big game appears to have been to trigger a stampede off a cliff.

You are correct, that was the usual and effective method. You are incorrect to assume that it would work on mammoths. There is no evidence it did, and attempts to use this method on surviving near relatives of the mammoths (elephants) dont work and tend to backfire spectacularly. Elephants are not bovines, they are much smarter, and rather than running over the cliff they will turn around and stomp the humans.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[elrous0]

Hey, if we can find a way to keep those pussy-ass Giant Pandas around, we shouldn't have any trouble preserving these things. At least we'll probably be able to get THEM to mate and not kill their own young.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[Palshife]

He can't have mine ;)

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[ABadDog]

Ho! "in the mist" of global warming. That's funny. Mist is a phenomenon of small droplets suspended in air. The word you're looking for is 'midst'.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[Arker]

Yeah, really. Again, traps are not effective tactics on elephants! Building a simple pit trap may only take a few hours for someone that's practiced at doing so, but it just isnt likely at all to trap an elephant, no matter how it's constructed and camoflaged. These things are not normally sized anything like large enough for a mammoth anyway, and you arent going to bother sizing the thing up for a creature that is never going to fall for it.

The largest creatures that were 'hunted' were the giant Bison, and they were driven off cliffs. Elephants dont drive like that.

Plus, let's say you manage to pull it off anyway. Great, you have a ton of meat. Enough to feed you all year. But you cant just throw it in the freezer, you know. Yes, humans could have had some primitive methods of preservation (though that is pure speculation without evidence,) but these would still be extremely labour intensive and require that the kill be dressed and processed quite quickly, before it went bad.

What portion of that ton of meat do you think you are actually going to be able to slice off and preserve before it goes rotten? It will be a very small proportion. Even very late period hunter gatherers who were capable of quite sophisticated preservation techniques never used them all that much. A typical case would be the Idaho salmon runs, where it was long expected that the gross oversupply of fish meant a lot of smoking or salting went on. Guess what? When you dig up the sites where the fish were harvested, there is no sign of that. They had a much quicker and easier (if less efficient, but when the meat is over-abundant that isnt such a concern) method of storing the nutrition. They fed the fish to their dogs, and then when they got hungry during wintertime they ate the dogs.

When the pygmys killed african elephants (much smaller than mammoths) you would see multiple bands converge and 30 or 40 people slicing off hunks of meat, everyone taking as much as they could possibly handle, yet even more would be left behind.

Running a herd of bison off a cliff produces an even greater surplus of meat, with far less work, and far less danger. Hunting smaller game could easily satisfy their need for meat, with probably only a slightly lower investment/return ratio, and is still less dangerous. A hunter who would avoid those easy and very effective ways of bringing home the meat, and decided to go after mammoth instead, would almost certainly be an ex-hunter very soon. And there is no evidence whatsoever to indicate that anyone ever did that.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[ColdWetDog]

Until Apple patents their own "iSpear". Unfortunately for them, they won't be very effective as the spear tips will have rounded edges.

You just have to hold them correctly.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[shutdown -p now]

You need a large, continuous, habitat to sustain a viable large animal population.

Well, you don't really need it to be at -71 C, either. My point was that Siberia is huge, and a lot of it is pretty damn cold. Sure, it's going to warm up somewhat, but likely not enough to make the difference.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[rubycodez]

on that day, you luddites lumbering about on your silly mammoths will envy me as I ride in comfort in my invention for the next Ice Age, the Wooly Prius.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[rubycodez]

oop, you get your meat at the supermarket, right? Anyone who has hunted and eaten deer or bear knows better

As long the temperature is below 35 degrees F, you don't need to rapidly do anything but bleed the kill. Aging meat for 7 - 10 days in the cold lets enzymes take the gamy taste out and even makes the meat firmer for cutting. Your beef steak had that done to it.

So, in ice age, you can kill and bleed your mammoth and let the rest sit for more than a week.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[koona]

C'mon, don't you remember that pygmy dude with the big meticulously crafted blade? He followed for days, creeped up when the elephant slept, and pranged him in the gut. Then followed for days till peritonitis set in. Hero of his people, all women were available. Hardly a Mamoth extirpater though.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[Arker]

I live 30 miles from the nearest small town, I grew up here, and I eat a lot of venison. If you think you are telling me anything I dont already know you are badly mistaken.

Now, you think you can process an animal larger than an elephant like it was a white-tail? Really? I'd love to see how you think you are going to get it off the ground. And in those days there were plenty of other predators and scavengers out there. Leave that meat laying on the ground and every other meat eater in the area will be on it in a blink. You think you are going to come back in 7-10 days and find anything edible left? Wrong.

All you could do was work fast to remove the best cuts quickly, before the wolves, tigers, and bears showed up and started eating. And bad luck for you if you get in their way. Remember, you dont have a gun, you dont even have a bow and arrow. Stone-tipped spears, that's it. Against a pack of dire-wolves? A giant cave bear? A sabre-tooth tiger? Yeah, right, have fun with that.

And that's assuming you could kill the thing in the first place. Barring very extraordinary circumstance your attempt would only get you killed anyway. You would be a total idiot to even try it when there were so many other much more practical types of game available in abundance.

It's hilarious how many people cling to this myth against all logic and evidence though.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[jackbird]

Elephants coevolved with humans in their environment; mammoths did not. That appears to be a major reason most megafauna that are still around are in Africa.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[RockDoctor]

He can have my UID when he prys the password from my cold dead fingers.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[RockDoctor]

Until Apple patents their own "iSpear". Unfortunately for them, they won't be very effective as the spear tips will have rounded edges.

That's not a problem, as long as the radius of curvature is sufficiently small.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[rubycodez]

Don't need to get it off the ground, blood will pool in the lowest parts of the corpse, cut there. Maye they built some fires around the carcass at a distance, maybe they other techniques since their IQ was probably *slightly higher* than the average of humanity's today, as today we have systems in place to make unintelligent people breed like maggots.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well... Humans were likely hunting similarly sized mastodons 14k years ago. I don't see why mammoths wouldn't be hunted. This was in the news recently recently :
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44995744/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/sleuths-solve-american-mastodon-mystery/#.Tt-OXWAgcmQ

And the science paper the article is based on:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6054/302

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[RockDoctor]

You should also remember that humans primarily hunted Pygmy Mammoth, not the giant kind,

Why hunt pygmy mammoths when every population of mammoths (pygmy, giant, polkadot) contains small and relatively easily confused mammoths called babies? Thin skinned, they'd be relatively vulnerable to projectile weapons. get them bleeding, then keep harassing the herd to move along until the baby drops behind or just flat-out dies. As long as you take care to keep distance from the adults, and have co-operative, communicating hunters (to deflect attention from anyone who is cornered by an angry adult) ... all should be manageable.

People did succeed in capturing and killing elephants in pre-gun times. But it would probably have not been a very efficient use of time.

If I were teleported into the palaeolithic and grunted-at to organise a mammoth hunt, I'd have looked at building pit-fall traps, tree-trunk tripwires and that sort of thing, before using fire and/ or weaponry to drive a stampede at my "killing ground". If one of them breaks a leg (or even it's neck!) on one of the traps, then we pile in with the spears until it's dead, then eat for a week ; if none of them trip, we spend a day re-camouflaging the traps (women and children's work!) while others (ruffty-tuffty men's work!) turn the herd, or go and start driving a naive herd towards the traps.

Should work. The same techniques may also work with bison etc, but you might want to put punji sticks around the trips. Again, they don't need to kill a beast themselves, merely hurt them badly enough that they'll be unable to keep up with the herd.

We don't know the habits of these animal very well, but most assuredly our ancestors did, for they used the bones by the thousands to build shelters. It's pretty implausible that they didn't have mammoth burgers too.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[lupinstel]

But Soviet Russian the mammoth charge you.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[RockDoctor]

There's no hard evidence mammoths were ever hunted by humans.

Manis mastodon?

Elephants arent just HUGE animals, they are also quite intelligent.

Both points are granted. For ELEPHANTS. Which are not Mastodons. They're very closely related, it's certainly true, but complex issues like "intelligence" (what the hell do we mean by that anyway?) and behaviour vary a lot over quite short taxonomic distances.
Humans, anatomically modern humans with a few percent of Neanderthal and another few percent of Denisovan, are not the stupidest of creatures either.

Further down-thread the issue of pit traps and cliffs gets aired, again. A "Flintstone" model of pit trap would have a 15ft tall mastodon falling into a 16ft deep pit, and the straw man is trotted out that digging such a pit would have made the process energetically inefficient. Which is true. But you don't need a pit that's big enough to drown your mastodon in, you just need one that is deep enough (and unexpected enough) that it sprains or breaks one of the mastodon's four legs. Now, exactly how deep that is, I don't know precisely. But I do know that the elephant enclosure at a zoo I visited was surrounded by a "moat" around a metre deep and a metre wide, with a fence on the outside (to keep the humans out!). That gives a very much more credible scale of trap.

Now, put your 1m wide x 1m deep x (how wide?) mastodon trap across a pathway through dense woods (to channel the beasts), disguise it by felling a small tree across one side of the trap (so the panicked, chased mastodons don't see it as anything other than a tree across the path ... set the herd running (spears, flaming brands, arrows, and a lot of strategic running away) in the desired direction ... mastodon after mastodon after mastodon successfully gets over the trap, until one that is big enough, and clumsy enough trips. With luck it breaks it's neck, or one of the other beasts does the job for you ; pessimistically it just sprains a muscle. But you know which one it is : it's the one that can't keep up with the rest of the herd. At which point, it may not have stopped moving, but it is dead. Meat on (fewer than the normal number of) legs.

If I can figure it, our ancestors could figure it. Neither of us had our bloodlines too polluted by politicians or bankers.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[Arker]

Elephants and mammmoths are different species, true, but they are very closely related and all evidence indicates the same sort of behaviour and intelligence level. That moat is not a trap, and you will notice that elephants are routinely enclosed in that manner with no worry of breaking or even spraining their legs. In the wild they routinely navigate more treacherous obstacles, and it is noteworthy that the Pygmys, master trappers themselves, do not use such tactics when hunting elephants. Their tactics involve large numbers of archers with poison arrows ringing a solo elephant from all sides, with the ones in front of it at any given moment running and dodging for their lives while the others pump arrow after arrow into it from the rear and sides. This will go on for a very long time, with hunters who dont run and dodge fast enough winding up dead or severely injured (which amounts to the same thing, without medical care,) until finally the elephant, resembling by this time an enormous pincushion, begins to succumb to the poison.

The so-called manis mastadon site is entirely consistent with an opportunist scavenging operation, much more so than hunting. The point embedded in the rib *might* be of human origin, but it was certainly not the cause of death, it was an old and long-since healed wound - and one as grievous as the best hunter could possibly be expected to deliver with the tools of the day.

The whole idea of driving a herd into a panic and stampeding them is misplaced. This is exactly how giant bison were hunted, but pachyderms are not bovines and they do not stampede like that. African park rangers have experience in the matter and have learned, at times the hard way, that attempting to herd elephants like cattle is suicidally foolish.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[Arker]

You do need to get it off the ground, or else every other meat-eater for miles around will be on it quickly. And you dont want to be fighting a pack of dire-wolves, or a sabre-tooth tiger, with a stone spear. You will lose. Which means, just as I originally said, all you can hope for is to slice off as much meat as you can carry and then run for it.

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[RockDoctor]

Their tactics involve large numbers of archers with poison arrows ringing a solo elephant from all sides,

My emphasis on the "solo".
Which is the point of the "ankle-snapper" type of traps.

Next time I'm in Africa (a few weeks), I'll see if I can find a game warden to discuss the efficacy of elephant herding techniques with. ("Hamish Something" the Logistics manager, who lives in-country, is likely to know who I need to talk to) But I'll maintain my caveat that these are not the same species, and detailed behaviours are likely to differ between the species. Indeed, they may well be "cultural" differences (to open another large can of wriggly worms), and so differ between proboscidean "clans".

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[Hognoxious]

How many man days to build the (reusable) trap?

One, you need to dig a hole beg enough for an elephant to fall into. Two, you don't have metal shovels and picks. Three, how the hell are you going to hoist a dead elephant out of it?

Re:All this in the mist of global warming.

[Arker]

I suspect Hamish will have some interesting things to say on the subject, it's been a few years since I spoke with someone in a similar position but I can say the language was colourful and the message emphatic. :D

I dont disagree at all that they are different species and there could certainly be some difference in behaviour. Whenever we are talking about something that happened 20,000 years ago there will be some gaps in knowledge. It's just that there are so many reasons to believe that humans would not have hunted mammoths, which I have outlined in this thread, and on the other side absolutely zero evidence to the contrary, yet despite this the portrait of our remote ancestors taking on mammoths with stone-tipped spears seems to be such an attractive one that people insist on believing it anyway.

Kinki University?

[cashman73]

Now, I really don't want to know WHY they're cloning a mammoth,. . .

Re:Kinki University?

[Baloroth]

Yep, the Japanese get... that, and the Russians get woolly mammoth coats! Win-win!

Re:Kinki University?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Japanese probably want to eat the mammoth.

Re:Kinki University?

[vlm]

The Japanese probably want to eat the mammoth.

It would make a good iron chef episode.

I wonder if it tastes more like beef or chicken? My bet is on beef.

Re:Kinki University?

[Anonymous Coward]

Trunk porn.

Re:Kinki University?

[jd]

It's also a great insurance policy, in case the Australian government gets fed up and starts sinking their whaling fleet. It's much harder to sink a Mammoth hunting lodge.

Re:Kinki University?

[Belial6]

I know I do.

Re:Kinki University?

[Anonymous Coward]

Its the HOW that scares me the most.

Re:Kinki University?

[Anne_Nonymous]

>> eat the mammoth

Re:Kinki University?

[game kid]

It makes sense to me now! This mammoth business is a plot to lure Riko Tachibana to do porn again by giving her a rare and massive toy to play with. It all comes together (along with the viewers).

Re:Kinki University?

[mjwx]

It's also a great insurance policy, in case the Australian government gets fed up and starts sinking their whaling fleet. It's much harder to sink a Mammoth hunting lodge.

Which brings up a good idea, why aren't we cloning whales or other animals on the brink of extinction thanks to human activities?
Better yet, animals we've cause to go extinct recently such as the Tasmanian Devil or the Lithgow Tiger.

As for the whaling fleet. Dear RAN, use the big missile, you might get the hippies at the same time.

Re:Kinki University?

[rubycodez]

thank god that wasn't a link to Roseane Barr getting her wooly rug munched.

Strategic Mammoth Gap?

[VIPERsssss]

This is distressing.

Re:Hasn't anyone seen

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Maybe the Russian scientists didn't see that documentary.

I dunno

[Megahard]

Sounds like a mammoth project.

Re:I dunno

[Anne_Nonymous]

Yeah, it's more than a little hairy.

Re:I dunno

[thrillseeker]

Tusk, tusk - you're just trying to pull the wool over our eyes.

In soviet Russia ...

[rbowen]

Oh, never mind.

Re:In soviet Russia ...

[CannonballHead]

mammoth clones you.

Steak

[kehren77]

Unless they taste great, why bother?

Re:Steak

[Culture20]

Of course they taste great. We hunted them to extinction!

Re:Steak

[JustSomeProgrammer]

This is my thinking :D

fewer attempts than a successful Soviet Mars Probe

[peter303]

All of 17(?) of the Soviet Mars probes failed to make it there or failed shortly after arrival.

Wired

[kodiaktau]

Wired Mag had their article about this back in September.
I believe this to be an ethical issue that really needs to be thought through before folks go off tinkering with genes. As the article calls out, do we know what the impact to an ecosystem where a species like this is released? What about natural predation? In a broader sense, what is the real value in cloning something that was selectively removed from the environment? Hell we cannot even keep from releasing invasive species to control other species without completely screwing it up. This process does nothing more than allow a scientist to study an animal that doesn't exist by bringing it into existence.

Re:Wired

[ChrisMaple]

Mainland mammoths were killed off by humanity before, without really trying. We can do it again. It will not become an expanding species with a notable effect on the ecosystem unless we help it to do so. In short, don't get upset over a non-issue.

(I say mainland because I've read that the last mammoths were isolated on an island and died off after many generations of becoming smaller to match a declining food supply.)

Re:Wired

[socrplayr813]

All of that is extremely unlikely to be an issue, considering they only have one sample of DNA that's any good. You would need AT least a male and female to start producing more mammoths in any kind of normal fashion, and you'd need a good number more than that to provide enough genetic diversity for them to be healthy.

While it's POSSIBLE we could eventually resurrect the species, it's unlikely, and we're not even close to that yet.

Re:Wired

[Fallingcow]

I'd be more worried if they were cloning ancient, long-extinct bacteria or even rodents.

Megafauna? People we pay for the privilege of helping make them re-extinct if they become a problem. Even a half-assed elimination effort could likely wipe them out in short order. Hell, just not protecting something like that would probably doom it.

Re:Wired

[kodiaktau]

I hadn't thought about bacteria and the like - that makes for a scary source here. Also it is worth noting that if we only have on good DNA we don't know if that DNA is good or bad compared to others.

Re:Wired

[cyn1c77]

Wired Mag had their article about this back in September.

I believe this to be an ethical issue that really needs to be thought through before folks go off tinkering with genes. As the article calls out, do we know what the impact to an ecosystem where a species like this is released? What about natural predation? In a broader sense, what is the real value in cloning something that was selectively removed from the environment? Hell we cannot even keep from releasing invasive species to control other species without completely screwing it up. This process does nothing more than allow a scientist to study an animal that doesn't exist by bringing it into existence.

The process does a lot more than that! It shows that we have the potential to actually bring extinct wild animals back into existence for ANY reason. Perfecting that capability is tremendously exciting from a scientific and evolutionary standpoint.

Obviously there are ethical implications. Like with other capabilities (moon landing, nuclear weapons, fracking), they will be debated as the technology is actively developed. Is that the "right" approach? Well, that's an ethical issue unto itself.

Are you really worried about the accidental release of a wooly mammoth into the wild? If so, it's probably be pretty easy to find.

Re:Wired

[LordLucless]

do we know what the impact to an ecosystem where a species like this is released?

If it were released into the wild, the impact would probably be a free meal for local carnivores. One strand of DNA does not a breeding population make, and an animal adapted to Ice Age conditions isn't likely to be marked high for survivability in the modern era.

Re:Wired

[geekoid]

What ethical issue? Bring a species back?

Why do you think there will suddenly be herds of these things? There will be a few in zoos unless they taste good.

"In a broader sense, what is the real value in cloning something that was selectively removed from the environment"

Are you fucking kidding me?
How about a return of the species? science? The fact that humans where instrumental in their extinction might have something to do with there 'selective' removal. Never really ahd a chance to adapt.

Plus it's in Russia. so cold won't be an issue.

"This process does nothing more than allow a scientist to study an animal that doesn't exist by bringing it into existence."
That's not exactly true, but if it was, so what?

Re:Wired

[ceoyoyo]

Wired likes to do alarmist navel gazing.

Nobody is going to release this thing into an ecosystem. It's going to be kept in a zoo and babied as the fabulously expensive pet it is. Even if you did release it, it would just die, if not of starvation, an accident or poaching then of old age with no offspring.

Re:Wired

[Xest]

"As the article calls out, do we know what the impact to an ecosystem where a species like this is released? What about natural predation?"

No problem, we'll just have to bring back T-Rexs and Velociraptors too.

Re:Wired

[bloodhawk]

They weren't selectively removed from the environment, Humans are considered to be the likely cause of their extinction through hunting.

Re:Wired

[socrplayr813]

No. I'm saying that, without a a society large enough and diverse enough to grow on its own, we would never have enough of the things to be at risk for what the GP is talking about.

Re:Hasn't anyone seen

[Sexy Commando]

Make sure they use UNIX!

Mammoth in 5 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, and we'll have strong AI in 10 years & fusion power in 20 years - as it has always been.

mammoths are dumb

[MikeyO]

Mammoths are dumb, If they are going to pick a species to bring back from extinction, they should pick something cooler, like a mermaid or a unicorn or something.

Re:mammoths are dumb

[lennier1]

Saber-toothed cats!!!

Re:mammoths are dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

No no, saber-toothed squirrels! Long live Skrat!

Re:mammoths are dumb

[elrous0]

Fuck that noise, I want DRAGONS!

And I mean the European ones that breathe fire and spit on Christian Bale too, not those weird looking Chinese ones.

Re:mammoths are dumb

[hey!]

Mammoths are dumb, If they are going to pick a species to bring back from extinction, they should pick something cooler, like a mermaid or a unicorn or something.

... or moderate Republican politicians ...

"within 5 years"?

[plerner]

It means they know how it should be done, but not how to actually do it. It the mean time, who wants to invest?

"A Statue for Father"

[Thud457]

I got me a hankerin' for some mammoth shortribs.
YABBA DABBA DOO!

If I'm not mistaken...

[NerveGas]

... I've been hearing this sort of claim for at least a decade. At first I got excited, but now, I take the position of "Wake me up if it ever happens."

Seeing how much people will pay to hunt certain exotic species already, I imagine that you could make terrific money owning your own private mammoth preserve.

Re:If I'm not mistaken...

[petermgreen]

For a hunting preserve to be sustainable the reproduction rate of the animals has to be high enough to maintain the population of animals in the face of the hunting. Elephants are slow to reproduce (both in terms of how long it takes them to reach sexual maturity and in terms of rate of births) and need a lot of land so your sustainable hunting quota would be very low mammoths would be even worse.

Afaict we don't have elephant hunting preserves and I think it's highly unlikely we will ever have mammoth hunting preserves.

Re:If I'm not mistaken...

[anonymousNR]

better yet bring me back to life with the same process when it happens.

Re:If I'm not mistaken...

[geekoid]

That just means the price will be higher, and the number of hunter will need to be low.

Clone Putin

[bkmoore]

...so Russians can vote for either Putin or for his clone.

Re:Clone Putin

[macromorgan]

"I say your 5 cent tiantium tax goes too far." "And I say your 5 cent titanium tax doesn't go too far enough."

Re:Clone Putin

[cyachallenge]

"I say your 5 cent tiantium tax goes too far." "And I say your 5 cent titanium tax doesn't go too far enough."

http://www.comedycentral.com/videos/index.jhtml?videoId=147821 That's a Futurama quote to those who didn't catch it.

Whatcouldpossiblygowrong?

[ThePeices]

Nothing, because Wolly Park just doesnt sound scary.

This and Fusion Power

[paleo2002]

Every few years someone announces that they'll clone a mammoth within the next few years. I remember writing a science report about this in the 6th grade, around 1990-91. It'd be great if they finally do it, but I'm not holding my breath.

I'm sure they'd make good eating, though.

Re:Preparing for the coming Ice Age

[glassbeat]

Well, since anthropomorphic global warming is causing the melting of Greenlands ice sheet, which will then cause an Ice Age in Europe, this seems apropos.

Don't anthropomorphize global warming. It hates it when you do that.

That darn global warming

[Quila]

Now it's giving us scientific breakthroughs.

It must be stopped.

Nucleic DNA is not the whole story

[nut]

So they have the nucleic DNA - what about DNS from other intra-cellular bodies such as mitochondria? What about the epi-genetic effects of bringing a mammoth fetus to term inside another species? (Presumably an elephant.)

I think what they will end up with is an approximation of a mammoth, not an true instance of the species that became extinct 10,000 years ago.

Re:Nucleic DNA is not the whole story

[impaledsunset]

That's part of the point. To learn how to clone an extinct species you have to start somewhere, you need to see what's missing. Granted, if you're close you might not necessarily know how close to the real species have you gone, but you will know if the approximation is good enough. After all, every species is an approximation. We no longer remember the mammoths, so any difference wouldn't matter. Who said that the approximation of mammoths that lived back then would be better than the approximation that we will get?

Re:Nucleic DNA is not the whole story

[nut]

Good points

Re:Nucleic DNA is not the whole story

[Locke2005]

That's why it's a 100 year process, not a 5 year one. Once you get a "mammoth" with elephant mitochondria, you have to interbreed it for several generations to get back to mostly mammoth mitochondria. To say nothing of reestablishing learned behavior patterns that allow it to survive in the wild. And of course, most of the clones will have flawed DNA and will die prematurely anyway.

Old news

[uigrad_2000]

They were 5 years away, one year ago.

So, it seems that after finding the "holy grail" of the missing genome, they have been set back by one year.

I did a lot of research about this back in January, when they first said that it was 5 years away. I heard a genome scientist interviewed on the radio, and he said that the resulting baby will be at most half Mammoth. It will have more elephant characteristics than mammoth, and will most likely be non-fertile, but it is still an important step to eventually having a fertile mammoth clone.

So, as much as I'd like to imagine mammoths in the zoo for my children to see, the truth is that we are still far from that point.

Re:Old news

[dkleinsc]

Obligatory xkcd explaining the nature of that problem.

Re:Old news

[Taibhsear]

If they do it right, the only thing that would maybe be from the elephant is the mitochondria. The full genome should be viable. And if you have a male DNA sample, (assuming the males are XY like humans) then you can extract the Y chromosome and double up the X chromosome to make the female. It's been a while since I studied genetics in fine detail but if the result is fertile you can still breed them, they'll just be inbred as all hell.

I for one wlecome our

[future assassin]

new ... stomp....

Just because something can be done...

[Dcnjoe60]

Just because something can be done, doesn't mean it should be done. While resurrecting a long ago extinct species might be neat, think of all of the talent and research dollars going into it, when instead those resources could be used to help solve real world problems, like increased crop yields, alternative energy sources, finding cures, etc. None of those have the wow factor of producing another cloned mammal, particularly an extinct one, but all of them would be absolutely more meaningful to the human condition.

Re:Just because something can be done...

[shutdown -p now]

Just because something can be done, doesn't mean it should be done.

If something can be done, and someone wants to do it, and no-one is harmed in the process - why shouldn't it be done?

If you want to solve real world problems, go ahead. Don't ask other people to do it on your behalf instead of doing something they enjoy.

Re:Just because something can be done...

[Dcnjoe60]

Just because something can be done, doesn't mean it should be done.

If something can be done, and someone wants to do it, and no-one is harmed in the process - why shouldn't it be done?

If you want to solve real world problems, go ahead. Don't ask other people to do it on your behalf instead of doing something they enjoy.

So, if if cloning an extinct mammal uses very limited research dollars, isn't that still harming someone? Put differently, if the funding this project keeps from funding a project that could improve crop yields and feed more starving people in third world countries, would not funding this project in effect be harming others?

Since there are a finite amount of resources, both physically and financially, would it not be prudent to use them where they have the greatest impact on humanity?

Re:Just because something can be done...

[shutdown -p now]

So, if if cloning an extinct mammal uses very limited research dollars, isn't that still harming someone?

Not unless those dollars are taken from the people who would otherwise have them.

Since there are a finite amount of resources, both physically and financially, would it not be prudent to use them where they have the greatest impact on humanity?

Who decides what will have the greatest impact on humanity? Who can even know that, long-term? I very much doubt someone would have predicted the crucial inventions of the industrial age in advance.

Anyway, following your argument, you should spend every single dollar above what it takes to feed and clothe yourself on charity, since buying luxury goods and services (like, say, that Internet connection you're using to post to /.) while there are people somewhere in the world who cannot even afford food, is not prudent.

Re:Just because something can be done...

[Dcnjoe60]

So, if if cloning an extinct mammal uses very limited research dollars, isn't that still harming someone?

Not unless those dollars are taken from the people who would otherwise have them.

Since there are a finite amount of resources, both physically and financially, would it not be prudent to use them where they have the greatest impact on humanity?

Who decides what will have the greatest impact on humanity? Who can even know that, long-term? I very much doubt someone would have predicted the crucial inventions of the industrial age in advance.

Anyway, following your argument, you should spend every single dollar above what it takes to feed and clothe yourself on charity, since buying luxury goods and services (like, say, that Internet connection you're using to post to /.) while there are people somewhere in the world who cannot even afford food, is not prudent.

Actually, I didn't say that, but there are many who believe something to that effect. However, in the world of research, there is never enough money to fund all the projects. As for what will have the greatest impact on humanity, I'll leave that answer up to the philosophers, it doesn't change the argument, however.

Re:Just because something can be done...

[ceoyoyo]

If you want to admire wasted talent lay off the scientists trying to learn about genetic manipulation which could lead to all sorts of useful things and focus on the truly wasted. A good place to start would be all the talent we devote to trying to sell each other crap.

Re:Just because something can be done...

[Dcnjoe60]

If you want to admire wasted talent lay off the scientists trying to learn about genetic manipulation which could lead to all sorts of useful things and focus on the truly wasted. A good place to start would be all the talent we devote to trying to sell each other crap.

Except that the genetic manipulation has already occurred. You do remember Dolly the sheep, right? They aren't planning on taking the DNA of an elephant and manipulate it into a woolly mammoth, they are planing on using the same cloning procedures that produced Dolly but using 10,000 year old DNA.

Re:Just because something can be done...

[ceoyoyo]

Cloning is different even in other living mammals. Remember how long it took before something OTHER than Dolly was cloned? Cloning an animal from DNA recovered from preserved material is an entirely different proposition. Otherwise it wouldn't be all that hard, would it?

Re:Just because something can be done...

[bloodhawk]

Many of the greatest scientific discoveries have been made through the research of completely different things or accidents, . For all we know this could bring about the cure for Cancer or a means to add 100 years to the life of a human. To exclude research just because the direct benefit is not 100% obvious would be idiotic.

Re:Just because something can be done...

[Locke2005]

Or it could result in a great new food offering at McDonald's!

obligatory

[Eponymous Hero]

what could possibly go wrong?

Mmm...

[Traxton1]

Mammoth burgers!

Re:obligatory

[JumperCable]

...mammoths turn out to be venomous, highly intelligent, fast, stealthy, have a taste for human flesh and can open doors.

re: beard

[King_TJ]

Yeah.... and the longer I do systems administration on Microsoft Windows based networks, the more of my hair turns gray. No beard though....

Finally we will answer the age old question...

[wcrowe]

...what does a mammoth taste like?

Re:Finally we will answer the age old question...

[Krau Ming]

that's what she said!

Re:Finally we will answer the age old question...

[Locke2005]

People have already tasted frozen mammoth... ask them. Although fresh mammoth steak would probably taste a lot better.

Business Plan

[nickdc]

Quick! Send in the Business gurus. Maybe we can expedite this process! http://xkcd.com/678/

What I am most interested to know from this...

[CdrGlork]

Do they really sound as dull as Ray Romano?

Re: beard

[toastar]

Yeah.... and the longer I do systems administration on Microsoft Windows based networks, the more of my hair turns gray. No beard though....

I would think that would make one bald.

Next up...

[rgbatduke]

...the passenger pigeon? Surely there must be some decent DNA in a museum somewhere, or the very back of a very old freezer...

Re:clone is not the same thing as restarting...

[rgbatduke]

Hmmm, sounds like time for a science fiction story, or a grade B movie...

However, I would point out that if they get the genes exactly correct, nature provides a fair bit of instinct to help out. I also wouldn't call anything a "monster" -- that's all sorts of value judgement -- unless or until it is proven to be one.

I actually think they could resurrect the entire species, over time. The Holocene might still be a bit warm for them -- there are reasons they became extinct -- but a Siberian mastodon herd would be very cool.

rgb

Russian scientists clone the mammoth...

[Isarian]

...so that in 2016, when Putin is elected with 178% of the total vote, the army can subjugate the teeming masses from mammoth-back. Consequences will never be the same.

Spam, not spam

[chinton]

So does that mean all of the "You Can Have a Mammoth Penis" emails I am getting won't be spam in 5 years?

Why a Mammoth?

[izomiac]

IMHO, starting with a mammoth is a bit foolish. Mammoths have been extinct for 4500 years, which generates problems in reconstructing the genome, disease resistance, and probably a half dozen other factors. They're also rather large, and slow to mature, which makes them a terrible experimental animal, and with the reduction in clone lifespan it may not survive to reach sexual maturity. I'm not saying we shouldn't eventually clone the mammoth, but I think we should start with something a bit easier.

A better choice that's equally impressive would likely be the Moa. It's a 12 ft tall, 500 lbs bird that was hunted to extinction 600 years ago. Given how tasty the natives apparently thought it was, there's some potential for farming them as well. OTOH, the best candidate would perhaps be the Thylacine, a marsupial wolf-like predator which has been extinct for only 75 years. We also know how to keep them in captivity and they're fast to mature (lifespan of 5-7 years, 9 in captivity).

Re:Why a Mammoth?

[Locke2005]

No, mammoths are a great choice because there are readily available surrogate moms from which to steal eggs, switch out the DNA, and implant the modified zygotes into. What exactly are you going to use as a surrogate for a Moa or a Dodo? How do you know mammoths aren't even more tasty than moas?

Re:Why a Mammoth?

[izomiac]

Ostrich eggs would be a good start for the Moa. The Thylacine is a marsupial, so let it's closest relative, the numbat, carry the fertilized egg until it can be delivered and incubated (i.e. much easier than placental mammals). Mammoths probably delivered larger offspring (given size difference) and carried them for significantly longer (given climate) than elephants, so I'm not sure it's as simple as you think.

So "going the way of the dodo" ...

[Kittenman]

... will soon mean "Being totally wiped out and then coming back just to prove a scientific point by some nit-pickers".

Mamouth Steaks

[WilCompute]

100 million cavemen can't be wrong!

Yes, but...

[DSS11Q13]

the real success will be when they can clone enough for our growing demand for obnoxious furry boots

Yeti next?

[scharkalvin]

Maybe the Russians will clone a Yeti next, I know they have been looking for them.

Time for another Heinlein invention?

[Max Threshold]

In one of Heinlein's books, a character has himself cloned with one major change: his Y chromosome is replaced with another copy of his own X. This results in two cloned "daughters". Of course, the offspring of the original male organism and the female clone would be as inbred as a creature can be. Plus it would express any recessive traits on the X chromosome. I wonder if the offspring could be kept alive for enough generations to produce diversity through mutation... and whether it would be monstrously cruel to do so.

I heard...

[JustNiz]

...this is being sponsored by McDonalds.

Moa? Haast's Eagle?

[NonFerrousBueller]

I'm keen to have them re-create the Moa and the Haast's Eagle. Nothing says bad-ass like a bird with a 9-foot wingspan that can dive at 50mph

globally warmed polar bears

[OrangeTide]

Well it might be nice to clone polar bears when they go extinct. (not joking)

Re: beard

[wisty]

And throw chairs when someone says "google".

Re: beard

[syousef]

Yeah.... and the longer I do systems administration on Microsoft Windows based networks, the more of my hair turns gray. No beard though....

Reporter: Wow! he looks so old! He must be ancient! Sir! Sir!! Over here Sir! What is your secret to a long and healthy life?
Greybeard: Women! Women in the morning! Women in the afternoon! Women at night?
Reporter: And how old are you if you don't mind me asking, sir?
Greybeard: On Tuesday I'll be 26.

Re:obligatory

[rubycodez]

forget that. it's the poop. mammoths are big, very big. they poop. they poop a LOT. you would not believe how mind bogglingly much they poop. you might think its annoying to avoid geese poop on the sidewalk next to a pond, but that's peanuts to mammoth poop.

Re:Who?

[helios17]

Never mind...Chuck Norris killed her.

Mmmmmm... Mammoth!

[Locke2005]

I am quite looking forward to this development because of my personal theory that Mammoths were hunted into extinction by humans because they are SO FUCKING TASTY!

Re:obligatory

[Locke2005]

Plus, if they paint their toenails red, they can hide in cherry trees!

Wake me up when it actually happens

[assertation]

People have been saying scientists are 5 years away from cloning a Mammoth for at least 20 years. Wake me up when it happens.

Hopefully before they do someone will have the ethics debate about bring an extinct animal back to life in a world where their environment is now gone.

Er no.

[ananyo]

Here's a step-by-step guide outlining how difficult it would be to clone a mammoth. you have to gestate the damned thing for example....

What about the associated microfauna?

[alleycat0]

Biologists have relatively recently come to understand the complexity, abundance and importance of the mammalian microbiome; for example, it is estimated that bacteria alone (only one component of our microbiome) far outnumber human cells. Given that mammoths are long extinct, their associated microfauna are likely absent from the word as well. Doesn't sound promising for maintaining healthy animals...