We Can “Bring Back” The Woolly Mammoth. Should We?
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- Опубліковано 6 чер 2024
- In the quest to understand how evolution basically built the woolly mammoth, we may have found the blueprints for building them ourselves.
Thanks to Julio Lacerda ( / juliotheartist , Roman Uchytel (prehistoric-fauna.com), and Dmitry Bogdanov for the mammoth art featured in this episode!
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References: docs.google.com/document/d/1w...
I still miss Steve… he was an Eons legend
He's busy building a woolly mammoth.
Finally someone said it lmao. I miss him too
I was shocked when I noticed Steve was no longer at the end. I hope they're doing okay, I never thought the time would come that the name wouldn't be at the end of an Eons video.
Three cheers for Steve and his foundational contributions to Eons!
*And Steve
"...has been a truly 'mammoth'...I'm sorry, they're making me say this...has been a truly 'mammoth' challenge." Blake, you're not fooling anyone. You wrote that line and begged for the writers to put it in!
I took a sustainability class from Dr. Eugene Potopov, one of the people involved in a project called the Pleistocene Park in Siberia, which has the goals of increasing biodiversity and preserving permafrost in northeast Siberia through the introduction of animal species which were formerly found there but have since gone extinct in those areas. A key part of this is preserving and expanding grasslands which existed in the Pleistocene but have since been replaced with mostly monoculture coniferous forest, which involves the purposeful removal of trees. The removal of these trees would have historically been the ecological role of mammoths, and the extinction of mammoths was a large factor in the disappearance of these grassland habitats.
It’s possible that if mammoths were reintroduced and able to thrive in northeastern Siberia, it could lead to significant increases in biodiversity and retention of permafrost (and less subsequent emissions of methane).
However, Dr. Potapov told me, cloning may not be necessary. Despite the many differences between surviving elephants and mammoths, African elephants are actually pretty resistant to cold and potentially could survive in the wild in Siberia. He said that if they have looked into ethically procuring African elephants to keep them in the large fenced-in area of the Pleistocene park. If they find that the elephants are able to survive and reproduce in that environment without needing human intervention, the idea of de-extinction of mammoths may be entirely unnecessary.
This, this right here. *chefs kiss*
That sounds like a terrible idea. In particular, the conifer belt that runs across Siberia and Canada generates a huge chunk of the Earth's oxygen and sequesters an even larger amount of carbon. Tearing down a large part of that is just like clear-cutting the Amazon Rainforest.
Well more likely would be a hybrid elephant/mammoth species, but it'd be... cool... either way! 😏
@@Bacteriophagebs How does it compare to the steppe environment that might replace it? Like my understanding is that the vast expanse of the Boreal Forest is quite new, during the Ice Age most of that area was covered in Mammoth Steppe.
@@malleableconcrete Grassland of any kind doesn't compare to trees _at all_ for oxygen production and carbon sequestration.
The two of those things are directly related. More carbon sequestered means more net O2 produced and vice-versa. Grass sequesters virtually no carbon at all. Whether it gets eaten, burned, or just dies off and rots, all of the carbon grass absorbs is re-released into the environment within a year or two. Grassland is only _slightly_ better than barren desert in that regard.
If the two were comparable, we wouldn't worry about forests being clear-cut to make farms, which are either actual grassland (wheat and such) or made up of plants with comparable properties.
How To Build A Woolly Mammoth?
step 1: get a mammoth
step 2: cover it in wool
step 3: profit!
How to get a mammoth
Step 1; get a mam
Step 2; get a moth
Step 3; combine????
10/10, instructions were very clear and now i have a wooly mammoth
Now I want a video game where I can tame one lol
@@Onus6688 well there’s a game named Ark: Survival Evolved so go play it
@@Onus6688 ARK
@@zasproductions9258 Ty!
@@juanjoyaborja.3054 Ty!
The title reminds me of the children's book "Me and My Mammoth" about a boy who accidentally builds a mammoth while trying to build a model aeroplane, who then whisks him away to the arctic at night to play. It's really sweet and cosy.
Cool.
what a weird twist.... nice
The what now
@@thegoldenegg8313 This is a children's book.
@@zooker7938 and then the mammoth did a backflip, snapped the bad guy's neck, and saved the day
I love this show and i hope y'all never stop teaching people about our ancient world history,
and doing puns
And how to build them.
😂 he's so precious. i love it when Blake is the host!
his dadjokes escapades have been evolving to a whole new heights lately
Blakes literally tied for best PBS presenter with space time's matt o'dowd, no other pbs youtube host is even close
When the script contains a pun so bad that Blake objects, you know it’s a bad pun.
His plea to adopt a wavy-haired mouse is the cutest thing I've seen today.
He used to look like a field researcher in nice clothes. Now he looks like field researcher in a different person.
@@jessepitt I'm always happy to see him host. Informative and nice to look at. He's zzaddy. I'm sorry; the thirst is real.
I still think a lot about the "Island of the Last Surviving Mammoths" episode. It was a fascinating examination of genetics and population. And this one was great too- I've never considered the role genes play in adaption to extreme latitudes... not just the cold, but the dark, and the whole midnight sun thing.
It could happen to pockets of surviving humans (or any species).
Seeing a live wooly mammoth has been a lifelong dream of mine, but unfortunately I think it makes more sense for us to see if we can maintain the elephant species we already have first. Even if we could reintroduce them to the wild and try to recreate the mammoth steppe, they'd have to be guarded from predators (and poachers) constantly just like their modern cousins. And if they still need a lot of human help just to exist, they'll be way behind those modern cousins in survivability.
I tend to agree that we should preserve what we have first. Plus, bringing wooly mammoths into the present creates more questions like, what impact would they have on an ecosystem without natural (non-human) predators, as most of the their predators were much larger and are also extinct, and where would you introduce them, and how would you create a large enough population to avoid genetic issues endemic to small isolated populations (like the wooly mammoths that were on Wrangel Island).
@@Sitiveni12 Easiest fix is to do that chickenosaurus nonsense on a cassowary and let them hunt the hairy elephants. Could be pretty cool to see.
@@garythefishable I don’t know if that’s how you fix it, wouldn’t there’s be other problems too? I feel like it’s a bit more nuanced lol
megaloceros instead
I can totally see they would be guarded by armed military soldiers just like Sudan since those damn poachers would try to find an opportunity to kill them for their tusks which possibly could be more expensive than regular elephant's
I think the biggest problem with cloning mammoths would be the time, money, and resources required to create a functional breeding population.
An elephant pregnancy can take up to two years, and there's usually a four to five-year interval before the elephant is ready to mate again. It takes nine years for a female elephant calf to reach sexual maturity, and fourteen to fifteen years for males. The same almost certainly applied to mammoths.
If elephants are such slow breeders, that means the number of mammoths required to create a functional breeding population would be well into the triple-digits. Thus, we would have to capture hundreds of various unrelated individual elephants (which, need I remind you, are endangered) from all over the world, and force them to give birth to mutants over and over again over the course of a century. And would all this be worth it in the end just to say "Look! Mammoths are back!"?
How about we spend this time, money, and resources to focus primarily on conserving modern elephants, which are currently in danger of going the route of their extinct cousins?
Bringing back mammoths would probably do wonders for the awareness of elephant conservation. It would be huge news if someone actually pulled this off.
I admit that it is probably pretty hard and not necessarily the greatest idea but there are legit merits to bringing back mammoths. They were one of the key species maintaining the mammoth steppe and looking at the effects of other megafauna could not just help the transition zone between taiga and tundra be a lot more productive but could actually significanty increase the stability of the permafrost. Look into the "pleistocene park" which has done a lot of field work leading up to such conclusions. But regardless they will certainly be brought back if we don't extinct ourselves in the next hundred years. We can bring them back and doing so will only become easier. Eventually someone, some obsessed rich person, a team of scientists with government support or simply some average guy in a near post scarcity civilisation with their own space habitat, will bring them back, be it with deeper intentions or just for the sake of it.
So basically what we need to do is expedite research into artificial wombs. So far we got it to work on small animals like mice. Now we just need to figure out how to apply it to larger, more complex animals
We can't even protect the species we still have.
Any scientist that would tell you that creating new mammoths (we aren't talking about cloning mammoths here, but recreating the species from asian elephants) has no understanding of what it means to sustain a species in high danger of extinction.
Not to mention the success rate isn’t going to be 100% so you’ll probably at least have to double the number needed.
Fart
Underrated comment
@@CoralReaper707 Underrated reply
Someone bring a trophy to this chicken
Now you just need investors.
Instructions not clear, ended up with Titanus Behemoth.
instead of a woolly mammoth we should bring back the megaloceros. reasons why:
cooler looking
big moose
probably could live in more places
big moose
big moose
big moose
big moose
big deer
big elk
big reindeer
big horns
Ahh yes i agree
Funny big moose
And those other reasons are cool to
The moose (or elk as it’s called in European languages, including English before it went extinct there) is already terrifyingly big.
Note the sly statement that mammoths survived temperatures of minus 40 degrees without specifying Fahrenheit versus Celsius without making a big deal of it. This is the one temperature where Fahrenheit and Celsius have the same value.
For once, not specifying which scale is forgivable, because it doesn’t matter.
You should assume that science channels use SI units unless they say otherwise.
@@AndrewTBP
Not a safe assumption with Americans.
@@ragnkja in this channel their role is not of a scientist, but a *science communicator*
@@iwatchwithnoads7480
And at least 95% of the world use Celsius, so if you want to communicate the science globally, you need to use units that aren’t limited to 4.25% of the global population.
Blake: "Sorry, they're making me say this"
Also Blake: Head of content
It could help our climate issue, potentially.
Woolly mammoths and Mastodons were responsible for keeping tundra forests (carbon inefficient) from expanding. Bringing them back could make the tundra more carbon efficient and help pull more CO2 out of the atmosphere, helping to ease rising temperatures.
(This is a very simplified account, and would require more research, of course).
Instructions were unclear, now my mammoth can talk and is socializing with my also intelligent ground sloth and sabertooth cat.
First, they socialize. Then, they plot.
It was nice knowing ya, man.
Ice age intensify
Mammoths living in the artic would be cool as hell
Smacking up polar bears n' that on BBC wildlife documentaries 👌
The biggest problem I see is that the gastrointestinal biome that co-evolved with mammoths went extinct with them. The bacteria they would get from an elephant host mother will be sub optimal for healthy digestion.
Unless they share the same diet as an elephant….
@@chubbrock659 They don't. Mammoths were grassland inhabitants and were grazers. Modern elephants are browsers who largely eat woody/shrubby vegetation (leaves & stems). Even the dentition is a bit different.
COMPLETELY AGREE. Absolutely. Someone needs to get their hands on woolly mammoth calf gut microbiota.
With luck, a “suboptimal” biome will still be enough for survival, and from there they can hopefully adjust it with their diet
Great point, and one of many I'm sure I haven't considered. Would it be possible to get a range of the gastrointestinal biome from some of the beautifully frozen/preserved young mammoths that have been discovered in Siberia?
I love Blakes puns so much
I refuse to believe that he was forced to say those puns. I remember him from the old scishow quizshow. He's the reason those puns are in the script!
I've never been this early to an eons before. Hi guys! Your editors always do a great job and I appreciate the clear captions!
I’ve been stuck on step 21 thanks for the updated diy
Ugh!!! The elephant in the room joke at the end... i don't think we need a mail in joke this week after that one :) great episode EONS team!
edited to preface: Thank you, Eons team (And PBS Team in general- lookin' at you, too, PBS space time) I love this channel. This channel is how I found one of my most beloved hobbies in life. And one of my most favorite things about this channel is how 'real' it feels to watch. The cheesy jokes you guys laugh at even while trying to tell, the excitement I feel when I'm watching an old video going 'oh oh oh, I know this one' (memory is bad, don't judge me) that makes my partner laugh.
It feels so fun and casual and like-friends when your shows don't edit out the occasional pronounciation blooper or a few takes where you laughed too early trying to tell a 'bad' joke that is just that GOOD...
I enjoy this channel, in large part, because I don't feel spoken-down-to for not being a part of the smaller 'academia', even though I love the subject matter and want to know more.
I'm pretty well educated on some subjects, but there are a lot of things I don't know. And this channel works really hard to make these things accessible. If I want to look more deeply into a thing.. I have the vocabulary to start. If I already grasp a subject, I can enjoy hearing it phrased a new, usually funny, way. It's win-win, and I really appreciate all the effort the PBS Eons team puts into doing that for people like me.
Thank you. Thank you for making jokes I can't not-laugh at, and thank you for turning a really cool (but sometimes hard to get into) topic fun and easy to dip the toe into.
Thanks for another great video! Mammoths are really interesting to learn about and the megafauna period is fascinating.
blake's reactions to the puns are always the best lol it's either completely on board or actively rejecting it
I loved the Q&A episode on your podcast! It was a lot of fun to listen to you guys just talking about stuff.
Pleistocene park would definitely benefit from having woolly mammoths so they can finally stop trampling trees with a tank to maintain and grow the grasslands on the park.
🤣
No, no, he’s got a point.jpg
Yay! It’s a new Blake video! The perfect remedy for a crappy week. Blake always makes me smile. 😊
Really enjoyed the presentation on this episode, it was fun
I love this topic, truly, to have such ancient animals back among us is both sobering and wondrous.
beautiful episode 👏
thank you!
Absolute legends, thanks for the knowledge and the smiles 😊
I absolutely LOVED the Q&A podcast!
So glad to finally see an episode on this subject. This is something I’ve been interested in for a long time, and there's currently a team led by Dr. George Church with a company called Colossal that's working on bringing these mammoth-elephant hybrids to life. Some of the concerns you brought up are already addressed on their website. For their habitat, there's a place called Pleistocene Park in Siberia that's recreating the mammoth steppe biome that covered much of the northern hemisphere during the Pleistocene. As for the endangered Asian elephants, they're hoping this project could actually help them by facilitating research on the elephant herpes virus that they suffer from. And rather than putting an Asian elephant at risk, I think they currently plan on using an African elephant as a surrogate mother.
Can you provide a link?
Considering how mammoths appear to have been a keystone species in maintaining arctic steppe, which was itself highly important in regulating global carbon levels and temperature, I think at least attempting to create a cold-adapted elephant (which would NOT be a woolly mammoth, even if it resembled one) as an ecological substitute species is worth it. The techniques and technologies developed for such a program (up to and including artificial wombs in an ideal result) could help repopulate other elephant populations at the same time.
I don't consider 'save endangered species' and 'refill empty ecological niches' as mutually exclusive goals.
@@Vespuchian They'll definitely perform an important role if they topple trees and help preserve and expand the grassland ecosystem like they're expected to do.
Glad you brought up the ethics of de-extinction. I'm opposed to the practice. We're failing at keeping alive what we already have. Let's not go mucking about until we get better at avoiding initial extinctions.
The practice of de-extinction? I think it would have to have been done successfully a few time before it would qualify as a practice. Otherwise, I very much agree with you
Considering that the likelihood of most megafauna extinctions have been caused by humans is quite on the high side, de-extinction can also be viewed as undoing the damage we caused in the first place.
It's not a zero sum gain. We can make an effort towards conserving species AND learn how to recreate them from genetic data. It would have benefits beyond just bringing back extinct species; we'd be able to create more populations of endangered species and restore lost genetic diversity in small populations.
@@limiv5272 By "practice", I was using the less common meaning of "habitual / common / routine doing of a thing", in the same way someone can refer to a doctor's efforts as their "practice".
@@nekononiaow Yet the likelyhood of the environment being the prime cause of the megafaunal extinctions is also significant and cannot be ignored. It also completely changes rhe ethics of the issue. In any case, spending millions on a project that wont even give us a real mammoth but a genetic mutant does not seem worthwhile to me.
I had read that there was another animal, the Quagga which were extinct, were selectively breed from close related zebra relatives to have similar dna sequences and then a couple of them whom appearance that were close to the Quagga were released to areas where the former species one roam in southern Africa. Would this be a successful de-extinction project and would this project be viewed as a stepping stone for other extinct species that could be used in a similar way? Such as the Passenger Pigeon, Great Auk, Aurochs, Mammoths such as in this video, and Steller's Sea cow as an example?
That's mentioned in the Jurassic Park novel!
We should absolutely bring these guys back. I'd love to see them in my back yard and honestly it'd be great for restoring our Tundra
I don’t think you’d have much of a backyard left if a mammoth visited it XD
Omg when she said “And more serious questions, like “Did Dinosaurs taste like chicken!” I lost it 😂😂
Eons is my favourite channel on UA-cam. Just wanna express that out 😁
my favorite youtube channel. thanks team
This is sooo interesting and informative~👍
Thank you for sharing this video~🤗
6:14 Just because we CAN do a thing doesn't mean we SHOULD do that thing
As proof i offer this story: one time, years ago and several beers deep, I decided to see if a nest of ground hornets would enjoy a beer as much as I do by pouring it into their nest...multiple stings later I realized the fact that just because you CAN do a thing doesn't mean you SHOULD do that thing...resurrecting a mammoth (or any other extinct animal) might very well end up stinging us in the butt in very a similar fashion to my story...again, just because we CAN do a thing doesn't mean we SHOULD do that thing
Ironic, what Ian Malcolm have said, there's might be truth to that
The hosts are pretty awesome. They mix good humor with great knowledge.
Love you Eons guys. Just thought I’d get get that out of the way. XP
Alas, one thing I feel wasn’t quite touched on enough - if mammoths are anything near like modern elephants, wouldn’t family dynamics have a massive part to play in their upbringing?
I doubt they could learn what they’d need to from us, or even from a warm-adapted elephant family.. epecially if the poor thing were to suddenly be relocated and expected to contribute to (let alone be a leader of) a clan up north.
The way elephants survive, and one of the many things that makes them so beautiful, is how much time and effort each generation puts into teaching and fostering the next.
Something that we can only hope our modern elephant buddies will never lose.
Just like us.
Imagine, it would never be the same were we forced to begin again. Memories wiped, cultural knowledge gone, no-one there like us to mentor, help, or even point us in the right direction. Let alone the comfort of feeling like you have a place in the world you’ve found yourself in.
Just figured it might be an angle worth assessing.
Much love to whomever made it this far!
i would love to see mammoths brought back! my only question is: wouldn't the resources necessary to do so be better employed in other problems that we currently face?
No, because the large investors currently financing the development of this technology would not have given the money to preservation in the first place.
@@peasantkyr oh, so it's like that spider-man meme? about the villain who wants to turn people into dinosaurs
is there even a question that the ressources used are this sparse to begin with?
@@GabrielLima-zo3fj EXACTLY
just because people are giving money to do this, does not inherently mean it's taking away money from other conservation efforts. That's not how it works.
Now for a philosophical question. If we introduced one of these mammoth/elephant hybrid in Siberia, would it be an invasive species or an endemic species ?
I don’t think that you could consider it invasive so long as the mammoth/elephant hybrid didn’t harm (directly or indirectly) extant species native to the region. If the animal’s realized niche matched its theoretical role, the species should actually enhance its habitat while also providing the ecological service of fostering the permafrost.
💯 Not that I fully buy into the Pleistocene Park idea, though…
@@austintrousdale2397 But i do.
It shouldn't be re introduced
The line between native and invasive is somewhat arbitrary. Like, horses originated in America but that doesn't make wild horses native.
You really enjoyed making this episode. I can tell.
This host is great and I love his humor!
I'd love to see an episode on how late Cretaceous Asia had such enormous non-sauropod dinosaurs, namely Deinocheirus, Therizinosaurus, Gigantoraptor and Shantungosaurus, to name a few
I loved this episode. So many funny puns that made me lol 😆 🤣 😄
Super cool thanks for sharing
i love watching the eons hosts try not to grin through puns they have to read
"But should we?"
Yes.
"But what if"
Yes.
"But ethically-"
Yes.
The answer is yes. I want to eat one. Give me a slice of that mammoth steak. I want a mammoth burger.
I want to marinate mammoth meat in teriyaki sauce and grill it on the 4th of July. Gimme.
The answer is yes.
The real question is how many?
Has the overview of elephant/mammoth/mastodon evolution been covered here yet? Maybe the most recent existance of elephant-alikes than the mammoths and Asian/African elephants?
That Ian Malcolm reference was the best
Now I'm going to start my own, thanks for the tutorial man
I thought it was going to involve a lot of coarse wool , big knitting needles and lots of patience
I love it. My 11 year old makes my 3 year old avian dinosaur nuggets...
Yet another great video!
Well done, cheers
Hilarious, while very educational. I just can’t stop giggling 😁
As a faithful of Science, I say not only we should, but we have a moral duty to do so. Even the end result is unlikely a Jurassic Park of mammoths, the step in trying to achieve serves a greater goal of mastery of our environment and ourselves.
we wouldn't want to bring back a species that wouldn't benefit our environment, but bringing back species recently driven to extinction by humans is the far better idea with far potential for great benefits versus bringing back mammoths or other ancient creatures
What an amazing group of creatures
Great Video!
Finally, a tutorial
We should view the creation of a new cold-adapted elephant species not as a fanciful frivolous dream of bringing the mammoths back, but as an insurance policy for the elephant kind. Having the arctics made available for them means they have much more habitat to live in, and are less likely to go extinct all together. I support creating TWO new species of boreal elephant - one based on the Asian elephant and the other on the African one. They have different eating habits which complement one another.
I like that better.
Happy Super Month! 👩🏿🦰
I just have this image of him being sat down in a chair with a tiny lightbulb hanging from a wire. "You're gunna say the pun or you don' wanna know what's gunna happen."
Finally I can finish building it
We should not try to bring back woolly mammoths. Besides the whole abuse-of-elephants question, we currently are driving many animals (and plants) to extinction. We are failing to save those things which are already around, so let's not try to bring about another animal just to be a zoo oddity.
@Brandon Letzco Nonsensical. First because it's not cloning mammoths, it's recreating a mammoth-like species from asian elephants.
Second, because why not starting with cloning endangered species directly?
Your argument is like if you said: "cloning humans can be applied to save Ukrainians at risk of being genocided by Russians". It's absurd.
We help endangered species by investing ressources in their protection, not by feeding a crazy dream.
Brandon but to create an established population you’d need to repeatedly harvest, modify, and implant embryos from Asian elephants, which are pretty endangered.
Brandon, the forces driving them to extinction wouldn’t disappear, they’d increase since you’re lowering the amount of breeding individuals. Not to mention for every successful pregnancy it’d take a few implanted females since the success rate isn’t 100%.
Another great video.
Great stuff!
"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think whether or not they should"
I think that if we were to bring back the woolly mammoth, but one adapted to the modern world, we would have to undo many of the genetic adaptations that were made for them to become adapted to the cold, so they would instead be adapted to a warming world. Ironically though, the end result is that even if they would be woolly mammoths, they would more or less be indistinguishable from a modern day elephant, in which case... why did we go through all that trouble to begin with?
All the people with Siberian American Indian Ancestry will have immense urges to poke them with sharp sticks.
Really impressive tusks.
@@jonathanthomas8736 would the tusks attract poachers? They may be wiped out shortly after their return.
@@kellysouter4381 impose the DEATH penalty for poaching
because they might heavily reduce tundra melt which is a significant cause of warming and in the goal of 'bringing back the mammoth' we might learn something about saving modern elephants in the process. Sometimes the journey can reveal more than the destination.
I remember learning about this is genetics!!! So interesting
There were also pygmy mammoths on the Catalina Islands in California
They did a video on that already
Step one: slowly, over 2 billion years force elephants to have to live closer and closer to the Arctic.
The question of de-extinction is rife with ethical and moral implications.
Remember the recent discovery of the mammoths trunk 'hood' which protected the tip of the trunk while curled up from frostbite
This episode felt like the mammoth's version of the question if a chicken can be genitically modified into a non- dinosaur like creature. Though, for the elephant, it would be to evolve into a mammoth while for the chicken, sort of like devolve into a dino.
chickens already ARE dinosaurs, so the dinochicken experiment isn't really reviving dinosaurs but just disfiguring an existing one.
Yeah we need to breed spiders as big as horses. 8 legs compared to 2? or are ya gonna drive a prius
@@dracodracarys2339 that's why I specified "to non-avian". Trey the explorer did a video on a proposed project to do it but, like making a modern day elephant to look like a mammoth, ethical concerns arise.
Pliestoscene park in north eastern Russia uses tanks to push trees down there because they don't have any cold adapted elephants and you are telling me we can make them. It sounds like we found a solution to a problem we have. Not all extinct species have a home in our modern world but we are trying to remake the mammoth steppes to turn that area into grassland. Pliestoscene park. I am not spelling that right.
I just love that he quotes Dr Ian Malcolm 😁🙌
i think itd be a good way to get tusks back on elephants after losing them to poaching, since they need those for the many ways they gather food
Respect the dead, but protect the living. Some of this research money could be better used for conserving living elephant habitats.
6:30 As I understand the Pleistocene Park project in Siberia, backbreeding woolly mammoths so they can knock down forests and bring back the northern steppe ecosystem is actually a crucial step in limiting climate change by stabilizing the massive amounts of greenhouse gasses trapped in the permafrost. So global warming isn't a problem to mammoths; mammoths are part of the solution to global warming.
Hahahahaha How about Mammoth Farts?
I just built one thanks for the help
Third times the charm Blake! Nice job with the woolly good pun at the end
No! As much as it would delight me to see a living mammoth, I do not think we should be attempting to recreate extinct species until after we humans have learned how to stop pushing current species into extinction with our choices, behaviors, and shear numbers. Once we have learned how to stop causing extinctions then we can revisit the notion of playing with recreating the past.
Thank you ! That's the only thing that makes sense to me.
If you wanna make that moral argument... Aren't the mammoths probably one of the species that we pushed into extinction with our choices, behaviours, and sheer numbers?
@@neolexiousneolexian6079 I think the point is that those money should be spent on avoiding farther extinctions instead of bringing back extincted animals. It's much more cost effective and protecting one animal you protect their entire ecosystem, so you are factually protecting much more
@@neolexiousneolexian6079 I doubt it. Could humans have been a factor? Sure. I think the loss of mega-fauna such as the mammoth has a lot more to do with climate change; much of the mega-fauna died out around the end of the last ice-age. But, let's say, for the sake of argument, that humans did cause the extinction. The humans of that time had no idea they were causing problems. The humans of the 20th & 21st centuries no longer have the luxury of that ignorance.
@@beniaminorocchi it doesn't have to be one versus the other
I think the debate on the Wooly Mammoth should if we "de-extinct" them, what sort of ecological niche would they fill that can't be otherwise filled by an existing animal, if the answer is no I think that the experiment should be put on hold until if/when such a thing would possibly be needed.. Or genetically sequence an animal that's neat extinction because of human intervention because I don't believe we know nearly enough to accurately know how an animal dead for tens of thousands of years could impact the flora and fauna we have living today.
Worst case scenario we bring back animal that causes more damage to our already fairly fragile ecosystem
Fully agree. I think it is fine to bring back a couple members of an extinct species for study, but a whole population big enough and fully fertile to make the species functionally extant merits deep investigation and strong consideration of the ecological impact. I think we're more likely to get better results with species driven to extinction by humans in recent years as opposed to mammoths.
It is likely best to work with modern extant species as far as benefitting our current environment.
Thank you!
Great video
Can I build one with Legos instead?
If we're going to de-extinction species, I think it should be species that we drove to extinction recently - like passenger pigeons or dodo's or Tasmanian tigers. That way we would be repairing damage we have done to the ecosystem.
I agree, we should do species like those, and then move down the extinction ladder, until we get to the Pleistocene creatures, like mammoths and ground sloths ‘n’ stuff like that.
i think the megaloceros would be way cooler
I did have good chortle at the unexpected image of Farrah Fawcett hair styled lab rodents.
Being that Farrah did define youth hair styles from the late '70s into the early '80s.
You guys are awesome
I’d love to see this type of science used for something but I’m definitely on the unethical side as far a mammoths are concerned. Very cool and interesting video 👍.
a few mammoths for study is fine, I think, but a whole population big enough and fertile enough to make the species functionally extant is not, and likely not a smart idea, either
this science is better used to bring back species driven to extinction by humans (within the past 100-200 years, I think), so long as the environments they belong to have not adjusted to their absence or would benefit from the introduction of an extant species instead
I believe that if it can actually be done, we have a moral responsibility to bring back species that humans drove to extinction. I know our role in Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions is hotly debated, but I find it impossible to believe we weren't at least partially responsible. Thus, even aside from the ecological benefits of restoring missing ecosystem members, it is just the right thing to do.
HOWEVER, it has to be done the right way, with patience and a lack of ego-driven races for breakthroughs. It's too complex and there are lots of unknowns beyond just genomic information. Something as intelligent as a mammoth - nurture must have been at least as important as nature, so how would we 'teach' new mammoths to be mammoths? And the issue of elephant surrogates can't be taken lightly either - we shouldn't just press-gang them into becoming breeding machines. There's so much to figure out before racing ahead, but I believe it is worth it if we take the long road.
I thought they started 20 years ago
@@alphatrion100 They didn't.
[Edited] I'm sorry. I just don't know. I mean, Jurassic Park.
Come on. We're All Thinking It.
Also, Maybe we should now take the option of doing nothing and seeing the planet begin to heal itself without our consistent and constant butting in.
Too many times, we Think we Know and we Don't. We think we're Helping and we're Not.
Perhaps, we should try The Stay The Hell Out of It Method and see what happens.
We do have examples of some ideas working out, such as the reintroduction of wolves that helped some areas equal out the biosystems that fell out of whack when they were driven out.
On the other hand, remember how our always putting out natural wild fires became a Huge problem due to the proliferation of undergrowth and dead flora, and sequoias not being able to grow new treelings because we didn't figure out that they'd adapted to using fire to drop their seeds? Remember that? Now look. We've got increasingly longer wild fire seasons.
So, I don't know. I'm not convinced we need to step in for all situations. Maybe there are times we need to step Back because sometimes, it's just not about us
Yes humans were not solely responsible for wiping out the mammoths. Humans utilised the whole animal for survival purposes (ie meat, tusks/ivory for weapons and other tools), fur and skins for clothing and shelter.. which is morally acceptible in its own right. There were simply not enough people around to hunt them into extinctnction. One adult mammoth alone would have kept a family or tribe sustained in food and shelter for quite awhile.. maybe a couple months. Would killing off an easier prey such as a baby, which you could argue might have led to extinction, have been worth it? I think humans instictually knew not to because an adult had alot more yield. So we wouldnt have hunted them all that often. Plus there were other easier prey animals around that we also hunted such as camels, horses, small game like rabbits, deer, etc. There was a huge risk and cost of human life in taking down a large animal such as a mammoth. Human remains have found to have bone breaks and head injuries similar to those of pro football players. It was likely a combination of drastically changing environment such as the catastrophic ending of the ice age (ice dams breaking, megaflooding, wildfires, etc), lack of vegetation/food sources, natural animal predators, and human hunting that all played a part in their demise. This also happened over a long time. Humans were nearly wiped out during that time as well. All in all i dont think we have to feel guilty about our ancestors need to survive an ice age and doing what they had to do. We cant really blame them. I dont think guilt is a reason to bring the mammoth back, but it would be interesting to study them in say an Arctic facility that mimicked their natural habitat.
@@LA_HA I definitely understand the sentiment, and it's warranted, essential even, to be wary of carless action. We have to learn from mistakes. To your larger point about leaving things alone and not interfering though; unfortunately, we don't really have a choice. Human beings are as much a part of nature as anything else that evolved here. The idea that we can somehow exist separately from the planet's ecosystems isn't physically possible.
If it's any consolation, there isn't anything about human nature that is intrinsically incompatible with nature. History is full of examples of indigenous cultures where human beings have developed not only non-destructive relationships with nature, but mutually enriching ones. Not just history, but present day, even if they are marginalized. Human presence on a landscape can actually enrich and renew it. That isn't the current paradigm, but there's no rule that says it can't be what we choose for ourselves.
If you guys aren’t chicken doing a complimentary video on “novosaurs” would awesome as well!
growing up with PBS before UA-cam was awesome hoping for more of the same for the years after UA-cam science, biology, history, literature, and entertainment
I always thought that the ability to ice fish was the major genetic trait that allowed mammoths to inhabit the higher latitudes. Either that or their discovery of snow machines. 😁
Maybe they can just throw snow balls?