Mammoth has nowhere to go back

Paleontologist Yevgeny Mashchenko – about mammoths and the prospects of their recreation

Alice Veselkova, "The Attic"

At the end of August, they started talking again about recreating mammoths and settling them in a Pleistocene park on the territory of Yakutia. The correspondent of "Attic" asked Yevgeny Mashchenko, a senior researcher at the Mammalian Laboratory of the A.A. Borisyak Paleontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, about the prospects of recreating the mammoth, its lifestyle, habitat, and what paleontologists and archaeologists found this year when they went on an expedition to the Novosibirsk Islands.

– At the end of August this year, geneticist George Church visited Yakutia and said that he was going to create a hybrid with an elephant based on the isolated mammoth DNA. Does the idea of creating such a hybrid have a chance of success?

– Mr. Church tries to work with nuclear DNA, which is still preserved in the cytoplasm, if the cytoplasm itself is preserved in the cell. His main idea is to embed such pieces of nuclear DNA into the DNA of a modern elephant. Why he thinks this DNA will work and replicate, I do not know. So far, our genetic engineering capabilities are not at the level to make such a combined model work.

The main function of DNA is to read certain information that is encoded, and protein synthesis through this information. If the molecule is damaged, special proteins pass along the entire DNA chain that repair it, remove unnecessary areas, make others or stitch if they are torn. Why Mr. Church thinks that even if the molecule is alive and starts working, these proteins will not react to someone else's, completely foreign DNA, I do not know.

– Then is it worth carrying out these works at all?

– I'm not saying that this is an uninteresting topic, that these works should not be carried out. But their prospects are not very high yet. Another thing is that technologies and techniques are being worked out that allow working at this level.

This animal will not live, even if it is born. I think that in the next 10-20 years there is no need to talk about any revival of the mammoth.

– And why does the topic of recreating a mammoth keep coming up?

– They give big grants for it. In addition, the cloning of modern animals has been put on stream and now it is not a very complicated technological operation. Police officers need good dogs, they need certain animals with the necessary signs for a person, for example, those that are necessary for the restoration of some population. But, in fairness, I must say that all this should be done on animals whose biological material is taken from living individuals. No animal that died at least 30 or 40 years ago has been resurrected in this way. And it won't be done in the near future either. The process is too complicated, and the constructive change that occurs in DNA, even preserved in permafrost, is such that it is not possible to repair DNA.

The topic is fried. The reports that go to the press, to put it mildly, are not scientific. If someone gives a comment, it's not always a biologist who understands the essence of the problem. People who are not related to biology or paleontology may really think that tomorrow they will clone a mammoth.

– And how is the Pleistocene park in Yakutia connected with this?

– This experiment has been going on for about 18 years, but it is not related to the cloning of animals. There is an acclimatization of animals that do not live in Yakutia now – this is a bison, it seems, Przhevalsky's horse. This park is located in the lower reaches of the Kolyma, its head is Sergey Zimov. It's more of an environmental experiment. He is trying, by introducing large mammals, to revive the ecological system. Maybe he knows perfectly well that he will not get a mammoth or a woolly rhinoceros soon. I don't think that some kind of hybrid of an elephant and a mammoth will be created in my life. But this does not mean that such work is not necessary. Of course, you need to. Just don't expect everything to happen tomorrow.

– Theoretically, the conditions in this park could suit a mammoth?

– No, the mammoth has nowhere to go back. There are no ecosystems in which the mammoth existed. Some elements of such ecosystems exist in central Yakutia, Alaska and in some parts of Arctic Canada. That is, it will be an animal that will need to be fed, watered and clothed.

– In what conditions did the mammoth live?

– What is the north of modern Yakutia, where are they going to get a mammoth? Now these are tundra and Arctic deserts, and those in which only reindeer can survive from large mammals and that's it.

– And the musk ox? Or can he live only on Taimyr?

– There are slightly different conditions. They are trying to acclimatize him. On Wrangel Island, this experiment is going quite successfully, and maybe it will eventually be introduced to the north of Yakutia, too.

And the mammoth and woolly rhinoceros are not large mammals, they are giant mammals that need a lot of food, water, large areas of territory on which they could make seasonal movements in search of food. In winter, vegetation stops, it is clear that there is no green vegetation, and mammoths were forced to move from one pasture to another. By the way, we still don't know what the mammoths ate in winter. All the finds of frozen mammoth corpses that still have a stomach belong to animals that died either by the end of summer or the beginning of autumn. We know that during these seasons the mammoth's main food was various herbs. In my opinion, 12 or 13 species of herbaceous plants and 5% of the total amount of plant food were shoots of shrubs.

Mammoths did not live in the tundra and not in the taiga. In the modern taiga, large mammals also do not live everywhere. Moose and deer prefer the edges, where there is an undergrowth of deciduous plants – alder, willow. They mostly feed on them. And when mammoths lived, these zones – neither tundra nor taiga – did not exist. There were areas of larch taiga. Basically, most of the ecological conditions for the mammoth were favorable if they were various meadows, and the meadows were quite moist, with a lot of vegetation. And animals don't eat everything, it's not a lawn mower. It is clear that they ate only certain types of plants. Therefore, meadows, various areas around lakes, rivers are places where mammoths lived. The climate then was drier and maybe even a little colder. But at the same time, all this plant community existed perfectly, but, unfortunately, it has not been preserved. This ecological niche is no longer there.

– If the climate was dry, then the depth of the snow cover was not the same?

– There were different periods in the Pleistocene. There were periods when it was very cold, and there were periods when it was quite warm. Maybe even on the Novosibirsk Islands the climate was similar to what we have now in the Moscow region. The mammoth survived all this perfectly, nothing happened to him. So, he could adapt to deep snow, and to the fact that there was little snow. This all suggests that in his ecological niche he had a very large range in which he could adapt. But as soon as the base of its ecological niche disappeared, the mammoth itself disappeared.

If the conversation turned to Yakutia, I must say about this year's expedition. It was a complex expedition, which was patronized by the Russian Geographical Society, its branch in Yakutia. It turned out that there were quite a few expeditions to the Novosibirsk Islands, but there was no data on botany on Kotelny Island. It turns out that no one collected herbaria there. And it was necessary to check the message about the discovery of a mammoth corpse on the northern coast of this island.

The expedition was complex: one group was on the north shore, one on the south, not far from the military base. And an archaeological group of only three people threw themselves on Stolbovoy Island, which is not very far from the western tip of Kotelny Island.

I'll start with the archaeologists. A brilliant guess was made that the Lena riverbed continued further into the shelf. In the Stolbovoy area, it was supposed to merge with Yana. The archaeologist, who is engaged in Paleolithic, immediately assumed that since there was such a convenient place, maybe people came there. The guess turned out to be correct. On Stolbovy Island, he found a stone tool and a lot of stone flakes that remained during the manufacture of stone tools. It is clear that it is necessary to continue work there, get permission and conduct excavations, because now it was only exploration. This is the northernmost human encampment, which is now known in the Arctic. This is a discovery.

Our task was more modest. In our group on the northern shore there was a permafrost expert, a botanist, an ornithologist, I – a paleontologist – and a guide. We were there for eight days. We were very lucky with the weather, it was bad for only two days, and then it was sunny, wonderful: 12 degrees, the sun is shining, almost a resort, despite the fact that it is an Arctic desert.

The northern part of the coast of the island differs in the composition of the flora. We managed to find only eight species of plants – there is nothing else. On the south coast – much more. Such a huge difference, even though it's only 50 km.

And our main task [was] to look at the mammoth carcass. It is located on the littoral, it opens only at low tide. In summer, it is impossible to dig it out, because there is a layer of silt about 50 cm. But the polar bears still got to her and gnawed. It is impossible to dig, because everything is flooded right there: the sea is shallow, it does not go far – only 200 meters. But in May, when everything freezes, you can try to drive the equipment and excavate, hollow out this section of soil together with the mammoth.

We took a piece of the [mammoth's] leg. The cursed bear came to the camp at night and wanted to eat her. With difficulty they drove it away. You can't shoot them, and they behave very unceremoniously.

In parallel, we also collected a paleontological collection. Because the paleontological collection at Kotelnoye was purposefully collected for the last time almost during the Russian Polar Expedition at the beginning of the XX century.

– And what are you most interested in among the finds?

– We walked along the littoral five kilometers every day after low tide – we looked at which bones were eroding. The taika of the coast is very intense. Our permafrost expert said that, according to his calculations, the coast recedes by four meters every year. As we defrosted, we collected some bones. It turned out that on these five kilometers lies the corpse of a mammoth of small size. And there was a fragment of another skeleton, also a medium–sized mammoth - two meters high, no more. And some more bones of the same small mammoths. At the same time, the bones of large mammoths, of normal size, were also found there.

And this rather unusual combination of small individuals and large ones is also a fact that deserves to be studied. It will be necessary to make a dating, look at genetics. Maybe it's some kind of local feature. In the Pleistocene, this territory was not an island, it was a single continent, animals could move anywhere. It is possible that there were conditions here that allowed both large individuals and small ones to survive. Maybe there was a period when only small individuals survived.

– Is it possible to determine the age of the mammoths found?

– The individual age can be established, they are all adults.

– Will you send an expedition to Kotelny again next year?

– Now the field season will end, the Yakut colleagues will begin preparations for the expedition scheduled for May. If these excavations are not carried out, the bears will do their job. They've already messed up quite a lot there. Then, all this is in the zone of high tide and low tide, flooded with water, spoils. Although at a depth of 40-50 cm there is permafrost, in which the most interesting thing is located.

– Is the preservation of mammoth remains in Yakutia a problem?

– Extraction of mammoth tusks is permitted by law. The people who do this receive the appropriate permits. Russia now exports more than 60 tons of mammoth tusk annually. Apparently, the demand will grow, because the tusks of modern elephants are completely forbidden to sell. There is illegal trade. But if this is a normal business, then it is better to work with legal goods. The mammoth tusk is just an adequate replacement. Both in Southeast Asia, China, and Japan, the demand for mammoth tusk products is very high, so mammoth tusks will remain an export item. This is one of the traditional activities now in the North. Unfortunately, it is not so easy to find a job there now, so hunting, fishing and collecting mammoth tusks are the few traditional economic activities that the local population is engaged in.

– How does this affect paleontology?

– The Yakut Academy of Sciences establishes direct contacts with the owners of companies that collect tusks, cooperation agreements are concluded. And all the findings they make, they show scientists. If there is something very interesting, they agree on how to convey it. This is a very important aspect of the work that we have come to and that needs to be supported. Financially, they would have supported me. Sometimes they are reluctant to make contact. Some very good tusk will be very expensive, and the academy does not always have the money to buy it.

– Which region is of the greatest interest to you?

– I'm involved in a big project The Perm Museum of Local Lore at the deposit, which is located in the Okhansky district of Perm Krai. There are many years of excavations, the skeletons of the trogonterium elephant are the ancestor of the woolly mammoth. This year we spent another season, collected quite a lot of material, but have not yet dug it out. Very difficult working conditions. For the first time, we managed to use the technique so well: it opened up a large area for us. There are very scattered bones from the skeleton, they do not have an anatomical position, so you have to open large areas. The preparation took several years, because there is no road, it was necessary to cut a clearing, coordinate all the necessary documents.

– What is the reason for the fact that the skeleton does not have an anatomical position?

– These are deposits of either an old river or a riverbed where the hydraulic regime changed. The current was either strong or weak, so everything is mixed up. But the bones are large, they were not dragged far. But this area is probably 15 by 30 meters.

– Are scattered mammoth remains or more or less complete skeletons found more often?

– Whole skeletons or corpses of mammoths are unique finds. Most often these are individual bones or such locations as in the Perm Region. Besides, there is not one trogonterium elephant – at least two. This year, a tusk was found, the length of which is almost 3.5 meters. I think now in the museums of the Russian Federation it will be the largest tusk that is kept in the museum fund of Russia.

– According to your estimates, what will be the most interesting in the field of mammoth studies in the near future?

– One of the tasks that concerns my subject is to determine the chronological periods and the changes that occurred with animals during these chronological periods. What changed in their morphology and physiology. If we talk about frozen mummies, then some features of physiology can be discovered there. This is the most interesting thing. And, probably, also at the geographical level, at the level of studying the population. In fact, this will be a task set by neonantologists – specialists who are engaged in the study of modern animals.

– Have you researched how the range of animals has changed?

– So far it is difficult to do. We need a large sample of animal remains. They should be tested, a genetic analysis should be done. So far, it is very time-consuming and costly. But sooner or later they will come to this.

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