Bringing Back the Dead, Mammoths and Mastodons pt. 2

Sourcing your Mammoth DNA

A harsh wind blew across the Alaskan plains, blasting flurries of snow into the faces of the of every man and dog on the expedition. The dogsled teams were used to the harsh conditions, and some of the scientists too. However, for a few of the younger students, this was their first time braving such cold, even sitting in the stanchions and wrapped in their blankets, the chill went deep into their bones.

“Stop.” The local guide held up one hand, before shouting the command to his lead dog. “Whoa. Whoa.”

The other mushers began to call out to their own teams, some relying on their lead dogs slow and stop, while others gently pressed on the breaks anchoring them into the snow.

“Are we near?” asked the head archeologist. He was driving his own, smaller, team of dogs. His sled was packed with a modest amount of excavation equipment.

“Yes.” the guide told him. “From here we can walk, but first, let’s set up camp. The dogs need to eat, and your students will benefit from a fire.

Once the camp was set up, the dogs were fed, and the fire was raging, the guide lead the head archeologist and his two companions into the harsh winter landscape. Snowshoes over the snowbank, and then back to normal footwear to hike up and over the ridge. “It’s down in this valley.” The guide told them.

They followed him into the valley, walking up to another large snowdrift. This one was different, and as they approached, the head archeologist noted the short tuft of fur poking out of the top of the two-meter-tall hill. “It must have come out of the glacier this summer.” The guide pointed up the valley to a wall off ice. They were standing atop ground which would be meltwater in the summer but was now buried in a layer of compacted snow. Marking, even more, the significant size of whatever furry beast lay frozen within the mound in front of them.

The two other scientists were already hard at work scrapping off the loose snow piled around the block of Ice, and they had soon exposed more of the glacial remnant. The head archeologist eagerly watched as they exposed a fragment of a massive exposed tusk. “You were right.” He told their guide

“Of course.” The guide responded. For the indigenous people, this encounter wasn’t frequent, but it wasn’t unheard of either. There were stories about the large beasts, whose tusks sometimes poked up from the ground. Other stories about people encountering their mummified remains in ice during their travels deeper into the arctic circle. Remains of Mammoth.

For the guide it was a noteworthy discovery, but noteworthy only. For the archeologists, this was their first encounter with such a well preserved specimen! Mammoth parts had been harvested and sold throughout the region for a while. To museums and private collectors. There were stories associated with tusks poking up from permafrost pingos and eroded river valleys, and following those stories, there were academics and collectors willing to trade for the fossils. But there were also stories about whole mammoths frozen in the ice, and that’s what this team of researchers had come to discover.

Fueled by the excitement of the find. The scientists got to work, hacking and digging into the mound in hopes of uncovered more of the creature. Before long, the weary, but thawed students joined them, but the day was ending. It was late spring, but still the days were quite short.

The excavation continued over the course of several days, and slowly more of the Mammoth’s dark shape was exposed within the Ice. Everyone became excited to see the creature which they were pulling out of the history of ice. So excited that on the third day, there was an accident. They had carved down to the level of the valley, and had been working away at the chunk of Ice, with plans to isolate the frozen creature, and transport it, in some way, back to the city from whence they had come. How, exactly, they were going to do that, was still in question. Probably in pieces. Which is why the Head Archeologist wasn’t too angry when someone shouted.

“It looks like part of this one’s leg is exposed.” One of the other archeologists noted. “The meat is still red!” While working with an ice pick, he’d accidentally cut into the creature. The scientist winced to see the damaged soft tissue of the ancient specimen, but then he began to think of the implications.

Not the modern implications. This happened in a time before the discovery of DNA, and long before movies like Jurassic Park would put the idea of cloning extinct animals into popular culture. Instead, these were more base implications, fueled by stories the head archeologist had heard from other such discoveries in the arctic.

It was time for some experimentation.

That night, they thawed some of the meat around the fire, cooking it long enough that the grey outside was blackened. They fed it to the dogs first, and when none appeared any worse for the wear, some of the brave souls tried it themselves.

It was bad. But they survived and had a story to tell which would horrify any modern paleontologists, epidemiologists, and seasoned chefs. (Who likes freezer burned steaks anyway.)

The fictional anecdote above was informed by this interesting article about indigenous encounters with Mammoth fossils, and from the stories my dad has mentioned about one of his previous professors.

On that note.

Did people eat mammoths?

Answer, yes. There’s documented proof that early humans hunted them, along with other mega fauna.

Did modern people eat mammoths?

Actually, apparently the answer is again, ~ yes. Although, the story above is a fictionalization of an anecdote which one of my father’s Archeologist professors used to tell in class. Frank Hibbens is his name, and he, apparently, had a reputation for exaggerating. The only article I could find online about him finding mammoths in Alaska takes place near Chinita Bay in Alaska. Here’s an abstract of Dr. Frank Hibbens findings there. ((Would I have preferred to provide links to a whole article, or to have read the whole article and summarized it for you? Yes, but that would require me to have access to a University Library account, or another method of freely browsing scientific articles.))

The Article discusses finding potential signs of humans and mammoth fossils, (not potential,) along the Bering Strait. However, these would have been bones in muddy permafrost, not mummified mammoths in Ice.

Anyway, here’s an article refuting the discovery of stone tools at the same site some 40 years later but the mammoth fossils are still there. Apparently the stone tools either didn’t exist, or they couldn’t be found. (That Article)

Frank Hibbens, (author of the first article which summarizes his apparent discovery of stone tools alongside those mammoth fossils,) is more well known for the controversial Sandia Man. And maybe that’s why there aren’t any stories about him dining on mammoth mummies further north. No matter what he told my father in class so many years ago. He’s an interesting enough person, that I’ll probably write about him in the future.

But whether he ate mammoth or not, if you check out the first link, you will find stories about how indigenous populations in Siberia, and on Wrangle Island harvested and sold Mammoth parts and apparently did feed some of the nature preserved meats to their dogs, (and perhaps tried it themselves.)

This is all a very long way of explaining that we have something, in Mammoths, that we do not have in dinosaurs, actual preserved soft tissue, and even… blood. Back in 2013, a series of articles made marginal headlines with, what is probably old, news. We have recovered frozen Mammoths with their tissues relatively intact. Here’s one of those articles. (if you want to read more, and see actual pictures, instead of my illustrations.)

Why is this important?

In 1993 a movie came out which entirely changed my world. I saw it advertised on TV, and literally thought it was so magical that I’d never get the opportunity to see it. But I got to see it (twice, and then later I got the Tape,) I’ve watched Jurassic Park enough times that I could probably still walk you through the basic plot and quote more than half of the dialogue. All you need to recall for this, (or know if you have never had the fortune of seeing it,) is that the movie plot hinged upon the ability for scientists to harvest Dinosaur DNA from mosquitos trapped in amber, and then using that DNA to clone and repopulate an island with modern Dinosaur-(ish) creatures.

Here’s the problem. This probably isn’t possible. The half-life of DNA is 521 years. That means that half of the DNA in an animal will probably be degraded after 521 years. 75% of the DNA will be lost after 1,000 years, and from there, this trend continues at the same precipitous rate. Here’s an article about that. I’ll summarize if for you very simply. The bad news: Non Avian dinosaurs lived 66 million years ago. The chances that any Dino DNA has survived, even trapped in a mosquito trapped in amber is so close to 0 that I won’t bother using math to give you the decimal points.

However, during Jurassic Park, they have a debate over an appetizing sea bass dinner about the ethics of bringing dinosaurs back from extinction, and John Hamond, dino-financer extraordinaire, defends the action by bringing up several other animals which were either extinctic-ed or brought to the brink of extinction by man. They don’t mention mammoths, but they do talk about condors and the dodo.

These creatures, notably, were around until very recently, (Californian condors are still hanging on, barely) and thus we are more likely to find actionable, clonable samples of thier DNA.

What then about Mammoths and Mastodons?

In the early 1990’s cloning was all the rage. We copied sheep. Now boutique services will let you clone your pet. (I’ve provided the website to prove it is a thing, don’t do it.) Cloning, recently extinct creatures seems like the next step.

The Dodo, The Tasmanian Tiger. The Northern White Rhino. The Mammoth. The Mastodon. Can we bring them back.

Well, let’s rip the bandaid off first. Mastodons are gone. We have some well preserved fossils which might contain DNA, but they are much older than Mammoths, and don’t have the nice preservative factor called cold. In fact, we don’t really know as much about Mastodons as public perception makes us believe. Even Modern art gets a lot wrong, and several seemingly answered questions actually have not been. Like Did Mastodon’s have hair? Here’s an entertaining article about that: article about the folklore of Mastodons hair, written by an Author and paleo-artist named Mark P. Witten. (language warning for younger readers.)

Mastodons dies out about 10.5 thousand years ago. They did not live, or die, in places which were good at preserving soft tissue. So, what little soft tissue we have is limited, and may be more degraded.

Mammoths, however, have been found whole and preserved in Ice. A few years ago another mammoth mummy popsicle made headlines, discovered in the Yukon. This female baby mastodon wasn’t even the first. Another had been discovered nearby in Alaska 70 years earlier. Several other babies have been pulled out of the ice in Siberia, along with their younger (time wise) but older (age wise) adult counterparts found scattered around in several ice deposits from Siberia to Canada. (Here is a fun article (a little graphic because it shows the mummies) about 10 Notable Frozen Prehistoric Mammals. And there are the previously mentioned stories about animals, and maybe people attempting to dine upon other mammoths they’ve found there and about.

Why is this important?

Well, honestly, for a lot of reasons. There are interesting questions worth asking about how these mammoths were preserved, (why and how were the frozen.) There are interesting questions soft tissues can provide which bones can not, like: were they hairy? What color were they? What did their bones and muscles look like. And there’s the last question the focus of this entire series: Can we clone them? Should we?

The only reason this is a question worth asking is because preserved soft tissue gives us some hope of harvesting Mammoth DNA, specifically an entire sequence of Mammoth DNA so that we don’t have to “Fill in the holes and complete the [genetic] code” with other DNA. It might, therefore, be possible to clone them. Or, more easily, perhaps we could Harvest the direct genetic material and fertilize Mammoth’s closest living relative, and make Mammoth Hybrids, which we could then breed to be nearer their now extinct ancestors.

And thus, while Jurassic Park might be out of reach, we are tantalizingly close to something almost as interesting: Pleistocene park.

There are hurdles, and we will talk about them next time.

Last week I, hopefully, laid out the fact that we walked the Earth alongside Mammoths, and possibility caused or contributed to their extinction.

This week I hopefully whet your apatite about the potential sources of preserved Mammoth meat… I mean DNA.

Next Week let’s talk about what we can do with that knowledge and these frozen resources.

Stay Tuned for part 3.