According to media reports, several gold miners recently excavated a small mammoth mummy during excavation in the Klondike permafrost in the Yukon region of northwest Canada, and experts believe that this mammoth has a history of more than 30,000 years and is the best preserved mammoth remains to date.
In fact, it is not unusual for mammoths to be excavated from the permafrost layer. Since 2016, a large number of mammoth remains and fossils have been found in many places; In 2018, the most complete mammoth corpse was unearthed in the permafrost of Siberia, Russia, with intact brain tissue and full body hair.
According to experts, the mammoth remains were between the ages of 6 and 9 when they died, and they have been sleeping in the frozen soil for 39,000 years. So, whether mammoths are constantly being excavated from the frozen soil, is it a good thing or a bad thing, and what will be the impact of its subsequent succession? Let's discuss it together.
The history of mammoths
Mammoths, also known as woolly or woolly elephants, belong to the mammalian/euphalinis/proboscis/eutropin suborder Elephant family, and are one of the largest mammals that have ever lived on land, belonging to the same order as modern elephants, but belonging to different branches.
Mammoths lived in the cold Pleistocene. The Pleistocene, also known as the Flood or Ice Age, was a cold epoch from 2,588,000 to 11,700 years ago, and the mammoth is a product of this era, appearing 1.8 million years ago and spreading across Eurasia and northern North America.
As the climate warmed, mammoths became extinct 10,000 years ago, and the last Siberian mammoths became extinct around 2000 BC. As a result, the mammoth extinction is considered a symbol of the end of the Ice Cold Age.
Mammoths are large and fat, about 5 meters long, about 3 meters high, about 1.5 meters long incisors, and generally weigh 6 to 8 tons, with the heaviest up to 12 tons. In order to adapt to the cold, the mammoth fur is very thick, the subcutaneous fat layer is rich, up to 9 cm thick; Mammoths are vegetarian animals and feed on grasses, legumes, shrubs, and bark.
Mammoths are social animals, led by females, and males mature alone or in loose small groups, with a gestation period of up to 22 months, and only one offspring per litter, and a low survival rate, so growth rate and population development are very slow.
Judging from the period of mammoth survival, it is the evolutionary era of human beings from apes to humans, so mammoths are considered to be the companions of human evolution. But this partnership completely disintegrated with the improvement of human hunting ability, becoming a relationship between hunting and being hunted, and people hunted mammoths for food and cold, and later for ivory, hunting mammoths in larger and larger numbers.
Therefore, the disappearance of mammoths, in addition to the warming climate, slow reproduction rate, little communication between populations, genetic defects caused by inbreeding, etc., the increasing killing of human evolution has also contributed to the extinction of this huge species.
So, can this species be revived now?
Human evolution has been the culprit or accomplice of the extinction of many animals along the way, and now that human technology has developed, it is thought to resurrect some extinct ancient creatures. But to date, there has not been a single case of successful resurrection of ancient creatures. So does the mammoth have a plan and hope for resurrection? There really is.
Under the permafrost of Siberia, scientists predict that 15 million mammoth remains may be buried, and most of the mammoth's body can be well preserved due to the long period of extreme cold. So far, dozens of mammoth remains have been found, and on some mammoth skeletons, soft tissues and even intact tendons have been adhered to, and in 2014 the world's first complete mammoth brain was found in the Yakutia region.
To this end, Russia spent $5.9 million in 2018 to build a cloning center, planning to revive mammoths through cloning technology.
Some scientists believe that in theory, resurrecting mammoths is feasible, but the process is complicated and difficult. An experiment by Kei Miyamoto's team at University in Japan seems to be ahead of the curve, in which they implanted nuclei extracted from mammoth remains into rat eggs and regenerated, i.e., obtained active mammoth embryos.
The study, published in the electronic edition of the British scientific journal Science Reports on March 11, 2019, used a mammoth that had been sleeping in the Siberian permafrost for 28,000 years, extracted bone marrow and muscle tissue from its body, compared genetic information with African elephants, confirmed the mammoth's unique DNA and proteins, and then extracted nuclei from it for implantation into mouse eggs.
It's a huge breakthrough, but it's only the first step. Because there are many difficulties to truly resurrect the mammoth. Miyamoto said the first step is to be able to progress to cell division and then implant embryos into the mother. According to the theory, if a mammoth embryo is implanted in an Asian elephant to develop, it is possible to produce a mammoth.
But this process does not happen overnight, and many causes, such as immune rejection, can lead to death. The gestation period is as long as 22 months, as long as there is a slight difference, it is necessary to start all over again, and another few years have passed. Asian elephants are also endangered species, and there are many procedures for testing them.
From this, we see only a little hope of reviving the mammoth. In the Jurassic Park science fiction film, scientists derive dinosaur genes by extracting the blood of mosquitoes in amber and then resurrect dinosaurs, a story that is impossible to do in reality
Because the half-life of DNA is 521 years, after 1.5 million years it is difficult to read, and after 6.8 million years all the bonds are completely destroyed. Therefore, it is impossible for dinosaur genes, which have been extinct for 65 million years, to be preserved to this day. The mammoth's final extinction is only 4,000 years old, and the earliest exhumed remains are within 40,000 years, and there is hope for resurrection.
But it remains to be seen when, or if, the tall and mighty mammoth alive will be seen.
A succession of mammoth excavations and the impact
The discovery of paleontological samples that have been extinct for a long time is of course a good thing for scientists who study paleontology, and it is of great significance for human beings to understand the past and the future. But more and more secrets of the permafrost layer have been discovered, which has aroused the vigilance of many scientists.
Decades ago, scientists discovered trends in global warming. Scientific research believes that the temperature of the earth for thousands of years has been maintained at a relatively balanced level, which has given human beings the opportunity to develop smoothly, and if this equilibrium is broken, the earth's ecology will usher in a catastrophe of extinction.
Prior to this, since the Emergence of the Ezoogens in the Cambrian Period, the Earth's ecology has suffered five mass extinctions, and each time about 80 to 95% of the species have disappeared. The most recent mass extinction was the Cretaceous mass extinction 65 million years ago, when the dinosaur family and many creatures disappeared. The study found that it has now entered its sixth mass extinction.
The cause of this mass extinction is the rise in the earth's average temperature, and the culprit is the arbitrariness of human beings. The test found that since the industrialization of human beings, greenhouse gas emissions have become more and more intense, the global average temperature has risen by 1 °C, scientific modeling believes that the global average temperature rise of 3 °C is a threshold, reaching this critical point, the Earth's climate self-regulation system will collapse, extreme climate disasters will be irreversible.
The result of the disaster was melting ice sheets, rising sea levels, flooding of coastal cities and displacement of 65% of the world's population; Devastating extreme weather is frequent, droughts and floods are frequent, and the oases of the past become deserts, and the deserts of the past become zealous countries; Human beings had to undergo a great migration, hunger and plague swept the world, the biological chain food chain was broken, and most creatures and humans could not escape the fate of extinction.
At present, signs of global disasters have been frequent: the polar ice sheet is melting, tropical rainforests are disappearing, forest fires across the globe are continuing, the area of marine stagnant waters is expanding, coral reefs are dying, freshwater resources are decreasing, and catastrophic weather is frequent.
To this end, global scientists jointly issued the first open letter in 1992; After 25 years, in 2017, a second open letter was jointly issued, warning all mankind to change bad habits, low-carbon environmental protection, protection and restoration of ecology, otherwise, there is not much time left for us!
And the mammoth is constantly being dug out of the permafrost layer, which also warns us from another angle that the earth is indeed warming, and the tipping point is getting closer and closer!
In addition to the above series of disasters, scientists also have a concern: as the warming ice sheet and permafrost melt, some unknown viruses and bacteria frozen in ancient times will be released, and these ancient viruses have reached modern times, like the European rabbit to Australia, bringing unpredictable disasters.
In 2016, on Russia's Yamal Peninsula, a sudden anthrax infected a large number of residents, and a 12-year-old boy died. According to studies, reindeer died of anthrax infection 75 years ago, and the corpses frozen in the frozen soil were exposed due to ablation and spread of anthrax bacteria.
If ancient viruses and germs are exposed, the consequences are even more unimaginable. Many biologists and geneticists believe that some extinct viruses can survive for tens of thousands of years or more, as long as conditions are right, and in 2014 researchers extracted 30,000-year-old giant viruses from the Siberian permafrost and revived them in the laboratory to be contagious.
Many of these ancient viruses are modern unknown or extinct viruses, and once they are transmitted to humans, it is likely that a great plague that is much more serious than the new crown epidemic will occur. It's like opening Pandora's box and releasing the devil into the human world.
As a result, many have called on local governments to strictly control and reduce these excavations, especially the wanton destruction of frozen soil by some gold prospectors.
Based on this, many scientists and social people believe that instead of spending a lot of time and money to revive mammoths, it is better to use these resources and costs to increase the protection and restoration of the current ecology. Because this resurrection may not bring any benefits to human life and future, in the state of accelerated extinction of existing species, even if the mammoth is resurrected, can it be guaranteed that it will no longer become extinct?
Therefore, protecting and restoring the current environment so that ecology and human beings have a better future is the right way. What do you think about that? Welcome to the discussion, thanks for reading.
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