Mammoth model at the Royal BC Museum. Photo: Thomas Quine - https://www.flickr.com/photos/quinet/44598416660/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80400437
Boys are fascinated by big things. So much so that we have an unfortunate habit of overstating the size of many of them: our bank balances, life achievements, numbers attending our presidential inauguration …
So it was that when I read scientists may be on the brink of resurrecting the long-extinct woolly mammoth, my boyish heart skipped a joyous, albeit minuscule, beat. Imagine that - one of the world’s most daunting creatures, all tusks and limbs and wild fur, lumbering once again across the tundra like an outsized Leonardo di Caprio in The Revenant, a mad assemblage of hairy body parts striving to organise itself into some kind of coordinated whole.
Turns out my happiness may have been misplaced. But first, a little history.
The woolly mammoth existed for a little under a million years, dying out about 4000 years ago. Scientists are unsure whether its demise was the result of human hunting or climate change, or a combination of the two. In any case, a number of other large species disappeared around the same time, including the woolly rhinoceros, the cave lion, the Arctic fox and the steppe lemming.
They were a truly remarkable beast. The same size as an African elephant, they could easily weigh eight tonnes and were wonderfully adapted to cold climates. And if you think that was only about fur, think again - their blood contained compounds that effectively operated as antifreeze and they could store fat faster than Jeff Bezos can pack away money. They even had a flap over their anus to prevent the bitter Siberian wind from whistling up their jacksie, a brilliant evolutionary adaptation if ever there was one. In fact, with a cold Waikato winter soon to descend upon this part of the world and our home perched on an exposed ridge, I’m more than a little envious.
The word mammoth isn’t recorded in Europe before the early 17th century. It probably comes from the Russian mamot via the Finno-Ugric language of northern Russia. In Finnish, maa means “earth” - for many years, people believed mammoths rooted underground like moles, which says something about people’s credulity if you ask me.
Mammoths should not be confused with mastodons, a related species that lived in North and Central America and for some time was actually confused with the mammoth. Their name was coined in 1806 by the ornately titled Frenchman Georges Léopole Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert, Baron Cuvier, and is a mashup of the Greek mastos (breast) and odon (tooth). He chose the name because of the nipple-like projections on the creature’s molars, which I guess is as good a basis for a name as any, and one that surely made for interesting dinner conversations at French salons.
Another large beast that sounds like its name could be connected to mammoth is behemoth. But behemoth is a Hebrew word, a form of the primaeval chaos-monster cooked up by God at the beginning of creation. Like mammoth, behemoth has since become a byword for any giant animal or machine. According to Jewish legend, the Behemoth and Leviathan will fight a fierce battle at the end of time before God slays them both. Humans will then use the skin of Leviathan to construct shelters and feast on the flesh of Behemoth in an event that sounds like Burning Man crossed with Coachella. I hope God likes a good music festival.
Oddly, it took a while for mammoth to become an adjective and, even more oddly, its first use is believed to be in relation to a four-foot-wide wheel of cheese gifted to President Thomas Jefferson by the ladies of the Baptist congregation in Cheshire, Massachusetts. When a local newspaper described the wheel as mammoth, it didn’t mean it as a compliment, which probably says more about attitudes towards women at the time than anything else.
As for the woolly mammoth, self-dubbed “de-extinction company” Colossal Biosciences has announced plans to resurrect the beast by 2027. In doing so, it is challenging the usual definition of “de-extinction”, which Wikipedia calls “the process of generating an organism that either resembles or is an extinct species”.
Colossal explains that its work is also “about merging the biodiversity of the past with the innovations of the present in order to create a more sustainable future”. What this grey slab of corporate speak actually means is anyone’s guess; it’s certainly vague enough to ensure the company can’t be held to account for it, while having enough of a visionary flavour to it to make for great copy on press releases.
Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, a rare sober voice in a world awash in spurious claims, has sounded a loud note of caution. “What they are going to do,” he writes, “is put a handful of mammoth genes … into an elephant genome, producing, so the company hopes, a large, hairy elephant with tusks (bolding mine). In other words, the animal they propose to produce is simply an elephant with a few mammoth genes that makes it look superficially like a mammoth.”
Besides the scientific challenges, which are well beyond my understanding, Coyne points out ethical problems with “bringing into being a mammothy elephant not designed to survive on the tundra, and then putting it in that habitat. It has no mate, it doesn’t have the genes for surviving on the tundra, and it will likely die. If scientists ever screw up by ‘playing God,’ well, this may be one example.”
Moreover, he states, mammoths, like elephants, were social beings. Who would teach this infant mammoth how to, well, mammoth?
After reading Coyne’s warning, my heart subsided into its normal, skip-free routine. Regardless of whether doing so is possible or not, I’m left wondering why we would want to resurrect a long-extinct animal, given the likelihood that whatever pops out of the test tube will live a brief and miserable existence that’s as far from its ancestors’ natural state as it’s possible to be.
I am now officially skeptical that it will happen in any case. Which is tough luck for me. Once again life has teased me with the possibility of a very big thing, only to dash my hopes on the harsh rocks of reality. Mammoth? Honey, would you settle for slightly below average on a good day?
Bits and specious
RIP Daniel Kahneman, Nobel prize-winning economist and author of the seminal Thinking, Fast and Slow. Like many thousands of people, I was profoundly impacted by this book, the central premise of which is, in the words of Steven Pinker, “that human reason left to its own devices is apt to engage in a number of fallacies and systematic errors that humans are prone to.” Self evident as that may be, Kahneman’s great contribution (along with his colleague Amos Tversky) was to identify a host of those fallacies and errors, leaving the reader stripped of any illusion that they, unlike the rest of humanity, might be above any tendency to stupid thinking.
Besides the woolly mammoth, Colossal also plans to resurrect the Tasmanian tiger and the dodo.
I’m a big fan of Nina Schuyler’s Substack, Stunning Sentences. Each week, Schuyler, a successful novelist in her own right, unpacks a sentence that has caught her attention, identifying what it is that makes it so noteworthy. If there’s anyone better at doing this - and, in the process, offering other writers profound insights into how to improve their own work - I would like to meet them.
Quote of the week
Men read maps better than women because only a male could conceive of an inch equalling a hundred miles.
Roseanne Barr