Mammoth: The Resurrection Of An Ice Age Giant
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No fabled creature of the Pleistocene Era has a more powerful hold on the imagination than does the woolly mammoth. Cave paintings of the giant beasts hint at the profound role they played in early human culture. Our Ice Age ancestors built igloo-shaped huts out of mammoth bones and even feasted on mammoth tongues. Eager to uncover more clues to this mystical prehistoric age, explorers since the time of Peter the Great have scoured Siberia for mammoth remains. Now a new generation of explorers has taken to the tundra. Armed with GPS, ground-penetrating radar, and Soviet-era military helicopters, they seek an elusive prize: a mammoth carcass that will help determine how the creature lived, how it died, and how it might be brought back to life. Science writer Richard Stone follows two teams of explorers -- one Russian/Japanese, the other a French-led consortium -- as they battle bitter cold, high winds, supply shortages, and the deeply rooted superstitions of indigenous peoples who fear the consequences of awakening the "rat beneath the ice." Stone travels from St. Petersburg to the Arctic Circle, from the North Sea to high-tech Japanese laboratories, as he traces the sometimes-surreal quest of these intrepid scientists, whose work could well rewrite our planet's evolutionary history. - Publisher.
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I picked this book up on a whim, and have a non-technical, passing interest in archaeology and geology and in paleontology and the like.
Other reviewers have mentioned the good start and slow finish, but I thought it was methodical in the approach to sharing the story of the various mammoth finds.
Rather than a real analysis of this book, I thought I might just share a few tidbits that interested me on the way through.
* There are 7 separate species of mammoth, the last one being the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius). They evolved consecutively, the oldest evolving around 5 million years ago.
* Genetically the Asian elephant is closer to the mammoth than it is the African elephant!
* I was surprised to find that woolly mammoths are not creatures who lived in a frozen environment - and that they lived in a type of tundra and steppe - essentially grasslands. While these became frozen for parts of the year the mammoths would migrate to avoid the worst of this. There was me thinking the woolly aspect was protection from their frozen environment.
* The place where the youngest remains of mammals has been discovered is Wrangel Island in the Chukchi Sea, north of Siberia. They have been dated as 3700 years old. For context, this was 70 years after the pyramids at Giza were built!
Much of the book fills in the history, the primary finds and the research, and it explains in pretty simple terms the proposals for creating clones or breeding a mammoth using an (Asian) elephant as a surrogate - both these techniques requiring viable DNA to be collected from a preserved mammoth. This is of course, a rather low chance of discovery, as said mammoth would need to die quickly and then be preserved and frozen in a very short period of time, remaining frozen until discovery! The book touches only softly on the ethics of bringing a mammoth back to life.
As for the reasons for extinction - it outlines various hypotheses, including superdisease, overchill and overkill (the impact of humans hunting). No conclusion is reached, but all are explained and presented as viable - perhaps even a combination of these was responsible.
This a a great read for a relatively simple (but interesting) background to mammals which outlines some proposals for the future, but really doesn't deliver on them.
A half hour on Wikipedia explains much of the content of this book, but that probably applies to a great many books, and I know which I would rather read!
A solid 3 stars.
