Caring for a woolly mammoth
I think most of us occasionally feel the wistful longing to turn the clock back to the good old days, to the simpler times glorified in our memories. Or imaginations. It’s pretty much the same thing.
Well, apparently scientists have been listening and want to save us the trouble of straining our memories, or of annoying our kids with them any longer. They want to bring the old days to us. Scientists wouldn’t be scientists, though, if they didn’t think they could do better than our memories.
For starters, they want to bring back the woolly mammoth. I know our kids believe we lived in the Pleistocene, but scientists really should know better.
It shouldn’t take Mary Shelley or Michael Crichton to tell us that raising the dead is not without certain risks. I don’t think God could even play God anymore without a permit application and public hearing.
And as the woolly mammoth’s own glory days were from 21,000 to 125,000 years ago, it could be near impossible to find anyone to vouch for their habits, needs and character — unless that’s why there’s also talk of bringing back the Neanderthals. Truth be told, I know some people believe they never completely left, but it really shouldn’t take a Neanderthal to tell us about the character of a species that was hurtling toward extinction.
Genetic engineers have been making remarkable advances in gene editing lately, spurred on, no doubt, by the lack of advances in our genes. Evolution may be so 20th century, but to my thinking this would never have been necessary if our genes had been properly edited before publication. But hindsight is 20-20, as they say.
Perhaps owing to a lack of human volunteers, some paleogeneticists with 10,000 B.C. hindsight are eager to take an Asian elephant and edit its genes until they have either a woolly mammoth or a restraining order. (If you’re wondering why a woolly mammoth, I suggest you keep wondering, perhaps about what these scientists could turn you into if you annoy them.)
As you might think, there are pros and cons about raising an extinct animal, particularly one that’s 13 feet tall, weighs 8 tons, and has tusks big enough to make an ivory poacher dream of retirement.
The last one lived about 10,000 years ago, so a new one would have a lot of catching up to do to fit in. Imagine how awkward it would be for someone from your 10,000-year-old family tree to suddenly appear at your door with a new set of stone tools, only to find that you don’t even live in a cave. A confused woolly mammoth that’s not sure where to live, what to eat or who to trample seems like a bad idea to me, but I’m no paleogeneticist.
The woolly mammoth was also a social animal, which means it will need many more mammoths to fight with to be happy. As surrogate parents, these paleogeneticists will need to know such facts to avoid butting heads with their woolly mammoth stepchild over things like this.
For one reason, a woolly mammoth’s head is much larger than a paleogeneticist’s. For another, the Asian elephant birth mother will probably not stick around to help. She will likely be too worried about getting a reputation for going home with any extinct species that comes along.
DNA evidence suggests that woolly mammoth mothers weaned their young for three years, which would be a big-time commitment for the young paleogeneticist in a hurry. But this would have been a critical mother–child bonding period in which the mother would have passed on all sorts of generational knowledge, like what to eat, who their enemies were and why Neanderthals were called Neanderthals.
Just teaching a young woolly mammoth to eat today would be a challenge, as they ate 400 pounds of tundra grasses and plants a day. I don’t think paleogeneticists could eat half that much on a good day.
The woolly mammoth was also a migratory species and is believed to have roamed across vast distances in the Arctic regions of Siberia and North America. This means that paleogeneticists would need to teach them new migration routes to prevent them from just wandering around aimlessly or hanging out on street corners.
This could be difficult, as the landscape and environment have changed and present new obstacles such as a fast-warming climate, oil pipelines and Instagram viruses. I don’t think anyone would want to see woolly mammoths suffer the embarrassment of a second extinction. Then again, perhaps a bigger worry should be the embarrassment of having them around to watch us go extinct.
In my opinion, a roadmap for the future should not lead us to the Pleistocene. And Extinction should not be a stop on anyone’s GPS. If we learn anything from it, it should be how to prevent it.
There’s no question that seeing live woolly mammoths would be very cool, but paleogeneticists should know they were built for the very cold. And no amount of gene editing will ever be able to bring those good old days back once they’re gone.