October 18, 2001

Plains Folk: The Mammoth: A Once and Future Plains Creature?

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

On the plains of Siberia, teams of researchers and adventurers from Japan, France, and America will not let sleeping beasts lie. They are looking for viable tissue of woolly mammoth encased in permafrost. They intend to clone or in some other way revive the beasts. Visionaries see a breeding population of woolly mammoth roaming a grassy Pleistocene Park that not only would restore the ancient steppe environment but also would be a magnet for adventuresome travelers.

You think I'm writing a tacky movie script here, but I'm not. I'm convinced it is more likely that within my three-score and ten I will play tourist in a Pleistocene Park than in a Buffalo Commons. Moreover, the woolly mammoth proposition is more honest and justifiable than the bison commons. Is such a thing possible? Read the new book by Richard Stone, "Mammoth: The Resurrection of an Ice Age Giant" (Perseus Publishing), and judge for yourself.

Stone is the European News Director of Science magazine. His book recounts the amazing dreams and exploits of an odd lot of characters. There is the sinister genius Nikolai Vereshchagin of Leningrad, who headed early Soviet efforts to clone a mammoth. There is the Japanese genius Kazufumi Goto, who hopes to bring the mammoth back by implanting found semen into modern elephant eggs. There is the charismatic French expeditionary, Bernard Buigues, who thinks he can extract a whole frozen carcass from its icy tomb by helicopter. And there is the folksy intellectual Larry Agenbroad, of Rapid City, on the adventure of his life in Siberia.

As to why all this is necessary, why the mammoth went extinct, opinion is divided, and the issue is highly pertinent to life on the plains. A century or more ago, when scientists got a handle on what the mammoth was and how the glaciation of the Ice Ages had happened, they worked out the first theory as to what became of the mammoth. They reasoned that the woolly mammoth, well adapted to a cold steppe environment, was unable to cope with the warming and changes in the land following the recession of the glaciers.

Late in the 20th century we re-thought all this, the key thinker being the American scholar Paul Martin. He asserted that not climatic change but rather human hunters had eradicated the mammoth. Clovis man came to North America and found it full of big, dumb beasts highly vulnerable to spear-chucking hunters, who pursued them to extinction. Martin's line of reasoning parallels work in Australasia and has become the accepted explanation for megafaunal (big-animal) extinctions.

Recently a third theory has emerged, proposing that some terrible epidemic, some "deadly microbe" wiped out the mammoth and other species. Proponents of this theory fear that the exhumation of mammoth carcasses and the propagation of mammoths could resurrect ancient pestlilences.

That doesn't stop the adventurers and cloners, and it's not likely anything else will, either, since they operate internationally. It's hard to know what to think of this; neither textbooks nor catechisms can tell us if it is right or wise to fool around with mammoth meat. What's clear from the whole discussion, though, is that we have been thinking too narrowly about life on the plains of North America.

Nature, on the plains, is not a bison prairie. It is a mammoth steppe. And somewhere, it may be again. I'm thinking that research and development on electric fencing might be a good idea.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, tom@plainsfolk.com 
Editor: Gary Moran, (701) 231-7865, gmoran@ndsuext.nodak.edu 

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