# Mammoth Task: Plan To Clone Ice Age Beast



## JohnGalt (Nov 5, 2011)

TaylorS said:


> Reviving the species and returning it to the wild would be a good thing. We hunted them to extinction, it's only right that we bring them back. It would be good for the ecosystems of the boreal forest regions, as well.


Survival of the Fittest is not a mistake. Should we also bring back the dodo, moa, and every other species that has ever gone extinct? 300 million year old plant life?

Do you think it would be natural for 2012 ecosystems to be interacting with a species from tens of thousands of years ago (or longer)? No, that wouldn't be more "human meddling" at all and couldn't have more disastrous consequences than hunting a species to extinction 10,000 years ago... 

What happened when humans accidentally brought the common cold to North America? (that's the real reason most Native tribes died out) Or when explorers' boats accidentally brought dogs to Australia's outback and they went rampant and ate everything? Or when human trade ships recently brought Zebra Mussels over from Europe? Or purple loosestrife... etc. If you think a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon can cause a hurricane in China, you should see what happens when you unnaturally introduce that butterfly to China!!! (even if its species had lived in China 100,000 years ago) 

While I think it's cool that people want to speculate what it would be like to have mammoths roaming around on an abstract level, people sharing your rationale (and that of many other commenters on this thread) should NEVER be allowed to work in ecological conservation or any field involving making decisions about wildlife and ecosystems. EVER. Thankfully most biologists know better.


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## koalaroo (Nov 25, 2011)

@JohnGalt, @TaylorS

Not to mention, humans probably didn't hunt the mammoth to extinction anyway.


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## JohnGalt (Nov 5, 2011)

koalaroo said:


> @JohnGalt, @TaylorS
> 
> Not to mention, humans probably didn't hunt the mammoth to extinction anyway.


Good point. I was just referring to it hypothetically anyway. "Reintroducing could be a lot worse than hunting to extinction". Etc..


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## koalaroo (Nov 25, 2011)

JohnGalt said:


> Good point. I was just referring to it hypothetically anyway. "Reintroducing could be a lot worse than hunting to extinction". Etc..


I guess I'm among the group of people who have a hard time buying the idea that small bands of hunters managed to hunt mammoths to extinction. That said, if climate change was the reason for mammoth extinction, releasing mammoths into the wild in our day and age is probably a fairly stupid idea anyway.


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## TaylorS (Jan 24, 2010)

koalaroo said:


> I guess I'm among the group of people who have a hard time buying the idea that small bands of hunters managed to hunt mammoths to extinction. That said, if climate change was the reason for mammoth extinction, releasing mammoths into the wild in our day and age is probably a fairly stupid idea anyway.


Of course we hunted them to extinction, they survived every previous interglacial, so the climate argument is nonsense. I suspect that many people don't want to admit that we killed the Megafauna because it clashes with our idealistic notions of the "noble savage" who is at one with nature.


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## koalaroo (Nov 25, 2011)

TaylorS said:


> Of course we hunted them to extinction, they survived every previous interglacial, so the climate argument is nonsense. I suspect that many people don't want to admit that we killed the Megafauna because it clashes with our idealistic notions of the "noble savage" who is at one with nature.


It makes absolutely no sense. Go look up more recent paleolithic studies! Go take an anthropology course! Humans may have contributed to the demise of the species, but they certainly weren't the sole reason. It has nothing to do with "noble savages".


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## TaylorS (Jan 24, 2010)

koalaroo said:


> It makes absolutely no sense. Go look up more recent paleolithic studies! Go take an anthropology course! Humans may have contributed to the demise of the species, but they certainly weren't the sole reason. It has nothing to do with "noble savages".


It makes no sense that the megafauna would succumb to climate change when they survived every other interglacial. Also, not all mammoths were cold-climate species and were furry. the Columbian Mammoth was an elephant native to tropical Americas and looked like an oversized Asian Elephant.

Oh, and the Australian megafauna died just a couple thousand years after humans got to Australia 40,000 years ago, no interglacial then.

The only place that kept their megafauna was Africa and tropical Eurasia. Why? Because they evolved with humans and so evolved behaviors to deal with us.


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## koalaroo (Nov 25, 2011)

TaylorS said:


> It makes no sense that the megafauna would succumb to climate change when they survived every other interglacial. Also, not all mammoths were cold-climate species and were furry. the Columbian Mammoth was an elephant native to tropical Americas and looked like an oversized Asian Elephant.
> 
> Oh, and the Australian megafauna died just a couple thousand years after humans got to Australia 40,000 years ago, no interglacial then.
> 
> The only place that kept their megafauna was Africa and tropical Eurasia. Why? Because they evolved with humans and so evolved behaviors to deal with us.


This is shortsighted as well. If you want me to explain why, I'll do it later.


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## sprinkles (Feb 7, 2010)

TaylorS said:


> It makes no sense that the megafauna would succumb to climate change when they survived every other interglacial. Also, not all mammoths were cold-climate species and were furry. the Columbian Mammoth was an elephant native to tropical Americas and looked like an oversized Asian Elephant.
> 
> Oh, and the Australian megafauna died just a couple thousand years after humans got to Australia 40,000 years ago, no interglacial then.
> 
> The only place that kept their megafauna was Africa and tropical Eurasia. Why? Because they evolved with humans and so evolved behaviors to deal with us.


Extinction is not an immediate event. It's not simply "disaster happens, animals go immediately extinct or they do not". In some cases a species may persist for quite a long time after the initial causes before finally disappearing.


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## Miss Scarlet (Jul 26, 2010)

I thought the title said Plan To Clone Ice Age "Breast" the first time I read it.


I also hope that they can do it. I think it would be awesome!


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## Uncouth Angel (Nov 26, 2011)

^ Positing one explanation for the extinction of the Ice Age Megafauna is like positing one cause for, say, World War I and World War II. Anyway, I'm in general agreement with John Guilday's assessment of Mammoth extinction. He felt that mankind certainly played a role in bringing about their demise, but could not have been the sole cause. Just think for a moment about how hard mammoths would have been to kill, how many people a single mammoth could feed per month, and whether a massive species genocide would have necessary, let alone plausible.

I don't remember--have there been any frozen mammoth carcasses found on Wrangel island, or just fossils? It might be useful to go about searching for potential mammoth DNA from this most recent of surviving mammoth populations.


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## LimeDegree (Mar 6, 2012)

Found this impressive little site that features an interactive map of earth (I was hesitant to start a new thread just to advertise it, and this thread seemed the closest common interest) with colored dots that can be zoomed in on for information about extinctions and other changes that humans have brought about on the planet. 

Many of them would take priority over mammoths, in my opinion, like the Carolina Parakeet,










which was the only biological control on invasive cockleburs.


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## sprinkles (Feb 7, 2010)

Uncouth Angel said:


> ^ Positing one explanation for the extinction of the Ice Age Megafauna is like positing one cause for, say, World War I and World War II. Anyway, I'm in general agreement with John Guilday's assessment of Mammoth extinction. He felt that mankind certainly played a role in bringing about their demise, but could not have been the sole cause. Just think for a moment about how hard mammoths would have been to kill, how many people a single mammoth could feed per month, and whether a massive species genocide would have necessary, let alone plausible.
> 
> I don't remember--have there been any frozen mammoth carcasses found on Wrangel island, or just fossils? It might be useful to go about searching for potential mammoth DNA from this most recent of surviving mammoth populations.


Indeed, extinctions are actually hard to figure out due to the concept of 'extinction debt'.

In extreme cases there can be a downward spiral that takes millions of years for the actual extinction to happen, due to things like progressive habitat destruction or disrupting the food chain. Kind of like a house of cards that can fall very slowly.


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