When Woolly Mammoths Roamed the Earth

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/27/books/review/woolly-mammoths-ends-of-the-world-peter-brannen.html

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THE ENDS OF THE WORLD Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions By Peter Brannen Illustrated. 336 pp. Ecco. $27.99.

WOOLLY The True Story of the Quest to Revive One of History’s Most Iconic Extinct Creatures By Ben Mezrich 304 pp. Atria Books. $26.

DISCOVERING THE MAMMOTH A Tale of Giants, Unicorns, Ivory, and the Birth of a New Science By John J. McKay Illustrated. 264 pp. Pegasus Books. $27.95.

In 1801, Charles Willson Peale, the curator of one of America’s first museums of natural history, put a skeleton on display in Philadelphia’s Philosophical Hall, setting off a popular craze — “mammoth fever,” historians have called it. Trained as a painter, Peale was more showman than scientist, a precursor to P.T. Barnum as well as Neil deGrasse Tyson. (In fact, Barnum would later acquire much of Peale’s collection.) Peale’s beast was something of a chimera, a hybrid of anatomy and make-believe. In place of missing bones, he fashioned approximations out of wood and papier-mâché. In assembling it, he managed to aggrandize it. He stuck the tusks on upside down so that his beast resembled a walrus. In promotional material, he described it as “exclusively carnivorous.” His bones, moreover, hadn’t belonged to a mammoth at all but to its evolutionarily distant cousin, a species of prehistoric North American proboscidean that in 1806, five years after Peale put his specimen on display, the pioneering French naturalist Georges Cuvier would christen “le grande Mastodonte” — but never mind. Peale’s skeleton was a hit, and it was mammoth, and not mastodon, fever that people caught.

There are signs we may be living through a second outbreak of mammoth fever. The remains of mammoths and their cousins keep emerging out of beanfields and permafrost, making headlines. They’ve also been making prominent cameos in books. A mammoth is the first of the 17 animals Elena Passarello thinks eloquently about in her bestiary of essays, “Animals Strike Curious Poses,” published earlier this year. Elizabeth Kolbert opens “The Sixth Extinction,” winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize, with a chapter on the paleontological case history of the mastodon.

One of Cuvier’s contemporaries proposed calling the mastodon “the American incognitum.” It’s a shame the name didn’t stick. Reading John J. McKay’s “Discovering the Mammoth,” an unabridged version of the history Kolbert artfully condenses, one learns that for almost as long as they’ve been extinct, mammoths and their cousins have been to us figures of mystery, totems of the unknown and invitations to fantasize about the past.

In China, people mistook dead mammoths for dead dragons. Ancient Greeks imagined they’d found the remains of Titans slain by the mutinous gods. Multiple villages in Sicily claimed to possess the remains of Polyphemus, the Cyclops blinded by Odysseus. (We now know that elephants once grazed on Sicilian hills. Look at a pachyderm skull, and you’ll see that its nasal cavity bears some resemblance to the socket of an enormous eye.)

One gets the impression that McKay, possessed by a kind of scholarly monomania, has hunted down every written reference to mammoths and mammoth bones ever made, and it is impressive how many authors ancient and modern expressed an opinion on the subject. As he stalks his quarry through the wilds of medieval treatises on, for instance, the disputed existence of giants, even readers who share his fascinations — with mammoths or with medieval treatises — may weary of the chase. Once McKay reaches the 17th century, when anatomists finally noticed the resemblance to elephants, the mystery of mammoths becomes one of the great detective stories in the history of science. Cuvier’s comparative anatomical studies of these ancient pachyderms led him to his heretical discovery, announced in 1796, of the phenomenon of extinction. As evolution would a few decades later, extinction upset the old cosmologies.

Since Cuvier’s time, paleontologists and geologists have identified with confidence five major mass extinctions — the Big Five, they call them. In “The Ends of the World,” accompanying scientists and amateur fossil hunters into the field, seeking lost worlds at the edges of highways and parking lots, Peter Brannen takes readers on a time-traveling tour through all five, in chronological order. Throughout he is a companionable guide, as good at breathing life into the fossilized prose of scientific papers as he is at conjuring the Ordovician reign of the nautiloids. Although a world-destroying asteroid can make for a spectacular apocalypse, many of the most lethal events in Earth’s history, Brannen learns, have been homegrown.

Investigations into the Devonian Extinction, which around four hundred million years ago terminated the Age of Fishes, have recently pointed not to an asteroid, or a super volcano, or any of the usual cataclysmic suspects, but to an unexpected one: trees. As they successfully colonized the continents, trees sent roots into the rock, building soil that washed into the ocean, fertilizing algal blooms of the sort that account for the Gulf of Mexico’s anoxic dead zones. Their leaves, meanwhile, drew down carbon dioxide from the Devonian atmosphere — enough, evidence suggests, to induce an ice age. In debates about climate change, sophists like to observe that the Earth’s climate has changed wildly in the past, the implication being that climate change is perfectly natural. That this is irrefutably so should comfort no one. We’re also perfectly natural, after all. But if human activity does bring about yet another mass extinction, we can at least console ourselves with the notion that trees did it first.

Devonian trees, however, didn’t know what they were doing when they did it. And of course, we’re not depleting carbon dioxide. We’re increasing it at “perhaps the fastest rate of any period in the last 300 million years of earth history.” The planet has run greenhouse experiments before, and if we wish to know their results, we can follow the geologic record back 250 million years to the hell of the End-Permian, when temperatures in acidic oceans reached 104 degrees Fahrenheit and “hypercanes” blasted around the hemispheres. Hurricane Irma, we were told in September, was as big as Ohio. End-Permian hypercanes attained the magnitude of continents. There followed what paleontologists call the Great Dying, the worst extinction in the planet’s history, which extinguished 90 percent of life on Earth. Amid all the eschatological gloom, Brannen does offer some hopeful news: However alarming, the extinction rate we’ve seen in the last four centuries does not come close to rivaling the Big Five, not yet.

Woolly mammoths turn up toward the end of Brannen’s guided tour. As he reminds us, the animals vanished so recently it’s still possible to eat mammoth meat pulled from the Arctic refrigerator. Paleontologists have by now mostly solved the mystery of the mammoth’s disappearance — mostly, but not quite. The retreat of the ice sheets a dozen-odd millenniums ago likely played a role, but mammoths had survived interglacial warm periods before, by shifting latitudes. Why did they disappear this time? Along with beavers the size of bears? And sloths the size of elephants?

Brannen favors the overkill hypothesis — that spear-chucking humans drove the mammoth if not to extinction then to extinction’s brink. The case, among scientists, remains open, and hotly debated. Rivals to the overkill hypothesis include, among others, the landscaping hypothesis, according to which we eradicated mammoths by burning down their habitats. Amazingly, scientists not long ago discovered that a remnant mammoth population on Wrangel Island in the Siberian Arctic held on until just a few thousand years ago, but their gene pool was too small, and they succumbed to inbreeding, also known as genetic decay — which is how isolated populations today often meet their end.

If Ben Mezrich’s “Woolly” is to be believed, mammoths may be returning someday soon to a tundra near you, resurrected by the necromancers of synthetic biology. Even if you don’t live to see a mammoth in the flesh, the odds are excellent you will have the opportunity to see its computer-generated likeness. Mezrich wrote the book that became “The Social Network,” and the cover of “Woolly” announces that a movie adaptation is already on the way. The advertisement is almost unnecessary. The book reads like an extended movie treatment, or mammalian fan fiction inspired by “Jurassic Park.”

The real star of Mezrich’s story isn’t his eponymous mammoth but the Harvard geneticist George Church. Along with journalistic access Church has furnished Mezrich with nine epigraphs and an epilogue. A leader of the Human Genome Project and a pioneer of synthetic biology, Church is well suited to the familiar role Mezrich casts him in, that of the wizardly genius. Church even possesses what Mezrich describes as a “billowing white beard.” In photographs, the beard looks more woolly than billowing; like it would take a hypercane to billow it. Not so Mezrich’s prose. In hagiographic reconstructed childhood scenes Mezrich has a prepubescent Church already speaking like someone trying out lines for a TED Talk.

Although the subtitle promises a “true story,” “Woolly” is, like Peale’s beast, something of a chimera, a hybrid of journalism and science fiction. (One chapter narrates, from the point of view of a doomed baby mammoth, a scene set 3,000 years ago on Wrangel Island. Another narrates, from the point of view of a scientist, a scene set “four years from today.”) If a mammoth ever emerges from Church’s lab, it will likewise be chimerical, in the genetic sense of that word — not the clone of an individual mammoth but an approximation of one conjured out of synthetic DNA spliced, crisply, into the genome of an Asian elephant, the mammoth’s closest living relative. It would be, in effect, an Asian elephant compelled to express several of the mammoth’s distinctive genetic traits: frost-resistant hemoglobin, diminutive ears, woolly hair. Mezrich makes believe that this brave new Snuffleupagus will be stomping around by the next presidential election cycle. Even optimistic proponents of the science behind his fiction predict a birthday that middle-aged hominids like me probably won’t be around to celebrate.

Why make a pseudomammoth? Ostensibly, for ecological reasons. The most fascinating chapter in Mezrich’s book might well be one he didn’t write. It excerpts “The Wild Field Manifesto,” by Sergey Zimov. A Russian geophysicist, Zimov has spent much of his career working to resurrect an ecosystem, the pasturelands of the Siberian tundra as they existed 14,000 years ago, before bipedal apes with a taste for megafauna came along. His motives aren’t nostalgic. He isn’t trying to turn back time or build a new Eden so much as he’s trying to landscape the future. The “frozen soils of the mammoth steppe” are “the biggest natural source of greenhouse gases on the planet,” and the permafrost has already begun to thaw. Snow insulates soil, and by trampling it in search of forage, big herbivores expose the permafrost to the air, lowering ground temperatures by as much as 40 degrees centigrade. “It is very hard to agree to reduce industrial carbon dioxide emissions,” Zimov writes. “Reducing permafrost emissions is much easier.”

Zimov doesn’t really need a living mammoth to restore the mammoth steppe, however. In a demonstration project he calls Pleistocene Park, he’s already introduced other big herbivores adapted to cold climates: moose, Yakutian horses, Finnish reindeer, North American bison, elk, musk oxen, yaks. The greatest benefit that a mammoth might bring is publicity. Already, it is becoming to “de-extinction” what the humpback whale was to marine conservation four decades ago — a charismatic mascot. Save the Whale, Make a Mammoth.

It would be fitting and a touch ironic if we brought the mammoth back purely so that we could see a living breathing one with our own eyes at long last. As Peter Brannen notes, the secret to the predatory success of our clawless, fangless species on the ice age hunting grounds may well have been our culture — language, tools, all of those technologies that allowed us to acquire knowledge and transmit it across time. As John McKay informs us, paleontologists finally learned what mammoths looked like — the upward curling tusks, the humped shoulder, the downward sloping spine — not by studying bones but by looking closely at ice age art made by those who’d observed the animals attentively, perhaps even lovingly, or wondrously, or worshipfully. Of the 255 engravings and paintings left by Paleolithic artists on the walls of the Rouffignac Cave in southern France, 16 depict the horse, 29 the bison. There are 11 rhinos, 6 snakes, 4 human figures, a single bear. The woolly mammoth outnumbers them all, recurring over and over, 158 times, like a dream.