mammoth?
What a mammoth.
Why not ban mammoths?
Mammoths are extinct.
Oh ~ the earth knows ban mammoth, you don't know?!
So the question is, why did the earth ban the mammoth, and there were still people who planned to resurrect the mammoth? Let's follow the editor together (ceng) solution (xia) a (re) under (du)!
With the end of a recent game event, mammoths have suddenly become the object of everyone's hot discussion. In fact, this creature, which was extinct only four thousand years ago, often appears in the public eye in various forms, such as the "Ice Age" we know, outdoor brands, various game works, and so on. Mammoths, with their large and thick images, can easily be integrated into various works, and have become popular creatures like ice age creatures such as saber-toothed tigers. Throughout the evolution of the mammoth family, from stepping out of Africa and across the Siberian ice field, to crossing the Bering Strait to conquer the northern continent when the earth's temperature changed dramatically, and finally falling down when the earth finally warmed up, the world's last mammoth disappeared into the icy wasteland of Siberia. However, since 2012, the continuous discovery of well-preserved mammoth flesh and blood in the frozen soil has aroused great interest in reviving mammoths and triggered new deep thinking.
Manny and Peaches from Ice Age
Mammoth restoration
Mammoths (mammuthus), also known as mammoths, are extinct mammals belonging to the same proboscis family as modern elephants, living from 5 million to 3700 years ago. Due to the huge number of mammoth fossils found and the recent extinction time, people have studied them deeply. Mammoth genus has many different elephant species, the more familiar are the African mammoth, the southern mammoth, the Colombian mammoth, the prairie mammoth, the true mammoth (long-haired mammoth), the pygmy mammoth, the Cretan dwarf mammoth, etc., the most familiar of which is the long-haired mammoth. Different species of mammoths vary greatly in size, the steppe mammoth is the largest mammoth, shoulder height 4 to 4.5 meters, weight 8 to 10 tons, more than twice the size of modern elephants; we know the true mammoth is smaller, shoulder height 2.6 to 3.5 meters, weight 4 to 8 tons; Crete dwarf mammoth is the smallest mammoth, shoulder height of only 1.2 meters, weight 600 to 800 kg, much smaller than modern elephants.
Restoration of the prairie mammoth
Colombian mammoth restoration
Southern Mammoth Restoration
Fossils of dwarf mammoths in Crete
True Mammoth Restoration
Contrast of different species of mammoths
Intact mammoth skeleton fossils
The name mammoth is derived from the Russian word мамонт mamont, meaning earth horn "horn of the earth", Chinese transliterated from English. Most of the mammoth fossils found now are mainly ivory and molars, and only the Siberian region has preserved complete mammoth remains or dried corpses. The common mammoth ivory has become a common carving and decorative material due to its special reasons to replace ivory, and in China mammoth ivory is also included in the ranks of organic gemstones.
Mammoths have similar habits to modern elephants, herbivorous, but most species live in tundra. Pregnancies are long, up to 22 months, and only one offspring per litter. Their social structure may be similar to that of modern elephants, with female and juvenile individuals living in groups led by a female leader, while males leave the herd after maturity to live alone. Like Manny in the Ice Age, he was a lone traveler on the ice sheet.
Huge mammoth population
Early mammoths did not live in the ice sheets with long hairs, and the earliest mammoths originated in the African steppes 4 million years ago and, like the ancestors of humans, began to move north from Africa. The search for food and grassland habitat was the main purpose of the migration, and this group of African mammoths ate all the way to southern Europe, where warm and open grasslands suitable for mammoths lived, where new southern mammoths were born over time. Soon they occupied southern Europe and Central Asia. In the early Pleistocene, the southern mammoth crossed the Bering Strait (when sea level dropped and the Bering Strait could pass through), spread to North America, and evolved the Colombian mammoth, which is endemic to the Americas. After that, the mammoths widely distributed in Eurasia continued to adapt to the gradually cooling climate of the Pleistocene and grew thick fat layers and long hairs, and the steppe mammoths that appeared at that time were conquerors of the entire Eurasian continent, stepping on more than 3/4 of the land, and the figure of grassland mammoths appeared widely in north and northeast China, and China's Qinggang County was also known as the "hometown of the Chinese mammoth".
Prairie mammoths are the largest mammoths
By the late Pleistocene, winter had arrived, the ice age swept through much of Europe and Asia inexorably, the average global temperature dropped sharply to 5 to 10 °C, more than half of the earth was covered with ice, the rainfall was only half of what it is now, the sea level dropped by 100 meters, many straits were exposed to the surface, and the islands were connected to the mainland. The dry climate makes the forest disappear, and there are only large areas of tundra and ice on land. Creatures at the time faced a severe existential crisis, but mammoths managed to stand out with their hairs and thick layers of fat, and the tundra provided them with an adequate food source. The more hardy true mammoth became the most common creature in Eurasia and North America.
Mammoths are found throughout the northern tundra
Evolution of mammoths in Eurasia and North America (Wei Guangbiao, 2010)
Although mammoths are large, they still face numerous natural predators as herbivores, such as the strongest predator in the Pleistocene, the Blade-toothed Tiger, and the largest lion, the Cave Lion. Humans living in the same era were also predators of mammoths. The cold ice age has also made the fates of these creatures closely intertwined.
Saber-toothed tigers and cave lions often prey on mammoths
Mammoth extinction truth
Many scholars believe that the cause of the extinction of mammoths is likely to be the hunting of humans, and the cave paintings of one of the World Heritage Sites also show the collective hunting of mammoths by humans 13,000 years ago, and the consumption of residual mammoth bones in ancient human caves. The ancestors of the Eskimos who lived in the Arctic Circle used mammoth bones and fur to build cold-proof houses. Even so, ancient humans may not have had the ability to completely exterminate a species (unlike modern humans).
Scene of a mammoth hunting in a cave painting in Altamira, Spain
Human tribes hunt mammoths
Abrupt climate changes could be the real cause of extinction. After the end of the Ice Age, the earth began to warm 17,000 years ago, the continental glaciers gradually disappeared, everything seemed to be back on track, and the earth returned to the scene of spring and warm flowers. But around 12,600 years ago, a sudden accident caused this brief moment to collapse, and a comet struck the Earth, exploding over the Great Lakes of North America, causing the Earth's temperature to plummet again. This sudden climate change has made it impossible for living things to prevent it, and Quaternary creatures such as true mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, and mountain lions have all fallen, and the Clovis people in North America have also become extinct due to comets. This sudden cooling event is known as the "New Fairy Wood Incident". But the comet theory is still controversial, with Chinese researchers recording the start of the new Fairywood event through stalagmite-calibrated Greenland ice cores earlier than the comet impact time, and sudden changes in monsoons and ocean currents caused by the melting of the ice sheet may be another reason, and this sudden cooling event is still a hot spot. But the 12,600-year-old plummeting in temperature did occur, and many large creatures of the Quaternary period ceased to exist. Among them, including the mammoth, once the behemoth that spread around the world, fell in the last cold event of the Quaternary. Human beings were also forced to learn to sow seeds and embark on the road of agriculture due to the impact of this cooling event.
The Neo-Nymph event led to the extinction of a large number of Quaternary mammals
But things didn't come to an end, and it's reassuring to note that Russian researchers found the remains of the youngest mammoth on Wrangel Island, northeast of Siberia, just 3,700 years old. This suggests that the remnants of the mammoth population survived for thousands of years after the Neo-Nymph Incident, and that they gradually retreated to the northernmost island of Siberia on their long journey, representing a long period of time for the entire population. It wasn't until humans started building pyramids that they really fell.
The last mammoth appeared on Wrangel Island
The Resurrection Mammoth Project
Specially buried fossils can often surprise people. In 2002, a mammoth known as the "yuka" was found in the frozen soil, which retains intact body organs such as the head, fore legs, stomach, intestines and so on.
Complete mammoth head
In 2007, on the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia, a herder accidentally discovered a 37,000-year-old baby mammoth buried in the ice, with an extremely intact flesh that researchers named "lyuba."
Luba (lyuba) is a mammoth baby that remains intact, only one month old
In 2013, the Russian research team returned to Siberia again, and this time the discovery was even more shocking, finding freshly preserved flesh in the frozen soil, and even blood that could flow. Blood studies have also found that mammoths have hemoglobin that can still be active at low temperatures, which proves that they can move at low temperatures and consume very little energy.
Intact flesh and blood sample samples were found in the frozen soil
In 2021, scientists extracted DNA from the teeth of prairie mammoths dating back 1.65 million years, setting a record for the earliest DNA extraction.
Mammoth tusks are making the oldest DNA sequences
A magical idea arose in the minds of paleontologists: to extract mammoth DNA and resurrect mammoths through cloning techniques! This is undoubtedly a high-profile study, and just as every biologically loving child wants to see an extinct mammoth, mammoth researchers around the world have taken an interest and participated in it. Mammoth DNA is extracted and injected into the fertilized eggs of modern elephants, but all current resurrection plans have not been realized, but there are still a large number of teams trying.
While most researchers are keen to revive extinct paleontology, the words of the mcmaster university researchers in the documentary plunge us into a new way of thinking, "There is no longer a suitable environment for them to live in modern times, what is the point of our resurrection?" If the resurrection is not a breeding population, but a baby elephant for exhibition, I don't think that can be called a success. But perhaps this will make humanity reflect on the extinction events that have already occurred, and we continue to encroach on the land. ”
Source:
[1] Wikipedia—Mammoth
[2] Documentary Mammoth: The Behemoth of the Ice Age
[3] extinct mammoth fact sheet (archive.org)
[4] Wei Guangbiao, Hu Songmei, Yu Jiao, Hou Yamei, Li Xin, Jin Changzhu, Wang Yuan, jianxin zhao, Wang Wenhua. New materials of mammuthus trogontherii and the origin and evolution model of mammoth[j].Science in China:Earth Sciences,2010,40(06):715-723.
[5] valk t , p penerová, d díez-del-molino, et al. million-year-old dna sheds light on the genomic history of mammoths[j]. nature.
[6] 'living' woolly mammoth protein created | cbc news https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/living-woolly-mammoth-protein-created-1.933228
[7] bunch t e , hermes r e , moore a m t , et al. very high-temperature impact melt products as evidence for cosmic airbursts and impacts 12,900 years ago[j]. proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 2012.
Source: Institute of Geology and Geosciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences