Mammoth: The Resurrection Of An Ice Age Giant

by Richard Stone

No fabled creature of the Pleistocene Era has a more powerful hold on the imagination than does the woolly mammoth. Cave paintings of the giant beasts hint at the profound role they played in early human culture-our Ice Age ancestors built igloo-shaped huts out of mammoth bones and even feasted on mammoth tongues. Eager to uncover more clues to this mystical prehistoric age, explorers since the time of Peter the Great have scoured Siberia for mammoth remains. Now a new generation of explorers has taken to the tundra. Armed with GPS, ground-penetrating radar, and Soviet-era military helicopters, they seek an elusive prize: a mammoth carcass that will help determine how the creature lived, how it died-and how it might be brought back to life. In this adventure-filled narrative, science writer Richard Stone follows two teams of explorers-one Russian/Japanese, the other a French-led consortium-as they battle bitter cold, high winds, supply shortages, and the deeply rooted superstitions of indigenous peoples who fear the consequences of awakening the "rat beneath the ice." Stone travels from St. Petersburg to the Arctic Circle, from the North Sea to high-tech Japanese laboratories, as he traces the sometimes-surreal quest of these intrepid scientists, whose work could well rewrite our planet's evolutionary history. A riveting tale of high-stakes adventure and scientific hubris, Mammoth is also an intellectual voyage through uncharted moral terrain, as we confront the promise and peril of resurrecting creatures from the deep past.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, History, Nature, Natural History, Archaeology, Biology

242 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2001

About the author

Richard Stone is the senior science editor for HHMI Tangled Bank Studios, where he oversees science content for documentaries and other nonfiction productions and manages media partnerships. Prior to joining HHMI Tangled Bank Studios, Stone was the international news editor at Science Magazine, where his writing often featured datelines from challenging reporting environments such as Cuba, Iran and North Korea.

Stone’s experience in international science and education includes stints as a Fulbright Scholar at Rostov State University in Russia in 1995-96 and at Kazakh National University in Kazakhstan in 2004-05. As a science writer, he has contributed to Discover, Smithsonian and National Geographic magazines, and is the author of the nonfiction book “Mammoth: The Resurrection of an Ice Age Giant.” Stone earned a B.S. in genetics from Cornell University, and he did graduate work in biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania and science communication at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In his spare time, he enjoys playing squash and writing science fiction screenplays.

Reviews

[Daren · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this book up on a whim, and have a non-technical, passing interest in archaeology and geology and in paleontology and the like.
Other reviewers have mentioned the good start and slow finish, but I thought it was methodical in the approach to sharing the story of the various mammoth finds.

Rather than a real analysis of this book, I thought I might just share a few tidbits that interested me on the way through.

* There are 7 separate species of mammoth, the last one being the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius). They evolved consecutively, the oldest evolving around 5 million years ago.

* Genetically the Asian elephant is closer to the mammoth than it is the African elephant!

* I was surprised to find that woolly mammoths are not creatures who lived in a frozen environment - and that they lived in a type of tundra and steppe - essentially grasslands. While these became frozen for parts of the year the mammoths would migrate to avoid the worst of this. There was me thinking the woolly aspect was protection from their frozen environment.

* The place where the youngest remains of mammals has been discovered is Wrangel Island in the Chukchi Sea, north of Siberia. They have been dated as 3700 years old. For context, this was 70 years after the pyramids at Giza were built!

Much of the book fills in the history, the primary finds and the research, and it explains in pretty simple terms the proposals for creating clones or breeding a mammoth using an (Asian) elephant as a surrogate - both these techniques requiring viable DNA to be collected from a preserved mammoth. This is of course, a rather low chance of discovery, as said mammoth would need to die quickly and then be preserved and frozen in a very short period of time, remaining frozen until discovery! The book touches only softly on the ethics of bringing a mammoth back to life.

As for the reasons for extinction - it outlines various hypotheses, including superdisease, overchill and overkill (the impact of humans hunting). No conclusion is reached, but all are explained and presented as viable - perhaps even a combination of these was responsible.

This a a great read for a relatively simple (but interesting) background to mammals which outlines some proposals for the future, but really doesn't deliver on them.

A half hour on Wikipedia explains much of the content of this book, but that probably applies to a great many books, and I know which I would rather read!

A solid 3 stars.

[Peter Sprunger · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is a quick read about the history of the hunt for mammoth remains and to a lesser extent the mammoth itself. From the standpoint of someone who has never really contemplated the process of unearthing any ancient creature let alone the difficulties involved if the creature starts decaying as soon as it encounters the air, this book was very informative.

WARNING - SPOILERS AHEAD
The book started off as a very exciting read... but then it didn't go anywhere. The whole book is written as a set up for the unearthing of a very rare mammoth find. But it ends while they are thawing out the remains. Why didn't the author wait another half a year or so to get some final results? Even if the find turned out to be less than what they were expecting, I would have liked more of a conclusion.

In conclusion, it was a quick, informative read without any real conclusion.

[Amy Flint · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it!

[Jora · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.75 stars, rounded up to 3

It may have taken me longer to read Mammoth: The Resurrection of an Ice Age Giant than any other book. That isn't all this book's fault, but the book didn't help, either. I included that because it's relevant to my review.

I found this book interesting to some extent. At least, parts of it. The genetics, theories on why mammoths went extinct, and the descriptions of Pleistocene Park, to name a few, interested me. But I got so confused by all of the places and people and happenings and perspectives. I barely knew what was going on! To be fair, I may have been confused because I kept taking long breaks in between reading this, or I may have taken breaks because I was already confused, or maybe I was already confused and the breaks didn't help, or possibly I would have been just as confused if I had read it in a week. Who knows?

Anyway, the topic is intriguing, but I'm not convinced that this is the best book on the topic. Let's just say that this will not be a book that I re-read.

[Vaidya · Rating 4 out of 5]

A surprisingly gripping book about "mammothology".
This is less about mammoths themselves and more about the field work into finding Mammoth remains for various purposes. The questions being asked are how did they go extinct? Can they be brought back to life through cloning?
Of course, there are no easy answers yet. Although many scientists believe that it was the arrival of humans that did them in, there seem to be at least 3 answers - climate change in Eurasia, humans in America, and possibly pathogens from humans. This book was written in 2000 btw, so there is a lot that has added to our understanding since then. Humans are more or less implicated now in the extinction of mammoths in the New World, and it is believed that they did it over centuries. But they also were helped by changes in climate that favoured them and didn't favour the mammoths.

[Colleen Villasenor · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book not only discusses the possibility of cloning a mammoth, but it also talks about the pros and cons, the possible use of cloning to preserve endangered species, the possible causes of mammoth extinction, and one man's attempt to create a Pleistocene Park in northern Siberia. The book also talked about some of the other animals that went extinct. I was especially intrigued by the thought that an attempt at cloning a mammoth could possibly introduce dangerous pathogens from that time period. While the title is about bringing back a mammoth, the book actually covers a lot more

[Kristi Thielen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Richard Stone’s book is a great read, especially for those (like me!) who live close to a celebrated mammoth burial ground. The Mammoth Site of Hot Springs South Dakota is a few hours from my home and is a terrific place to visit. Mammoths are much on the mind of South Dakotans interested in paleontology.

Intrepid science writer Richard Stone follows two teams of explorers into Arctic cold and primitive living conditions to explore for mammoth remains – and especially mammoth DNA. The goal? To perhaps clone this creature and bring it back to life.

The perils of these efforts (some of the flights to far-away locales are hair-raising) and the practical and ethnical problems with bringing a long dead creature back into the world are considerable.

The book was written in 2001 and I first read it near its publication date, when Stone expected that breakthroughs with mammoth DNA would surely happen in the next decade. Alas, that decade and more have passed with no such resurrection of this Pleistocene beast. Still, the story of what was undertaken by the two teams and the million-dollar question: what really killed off these enormous beasts – makes for engrossing reading.

[Franz · Rating 4 out of 5]

The reviews I read pointed out that this is not really a book about the animal, but instead a story of discovery. Nevertheless, I quite liked the book as it contained a lot of interesting facts about all things peripheral to the mammoth. Did I know that the Asian and African elephant can't be easily and successfully crossbred, or more to the point, did I ever think about it? Clearly not everybody's cup of tea, but I love learning about these facts.

I also enjoyed the descriptions about how Siberia had changed since the last ice age - again, not exactly on my radar but an interesting contribution to the dynamics of climate change.

The political and social aspects of working in Russia at the end of the millennium were interesting also, more so as Russia is once again off limits.

I wonder what happened to mammoth research and the scientists Richard Stone wrote about since the book was published. Will mammoth roam again? Probably not in my lifetime, but then again, who knows.

[dejah_thoris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mammoths and remote parts of the extreme North appeal to me and Stone did not let me down. If there have been any new developments in cloning or preserving mammoth DNA in the past twenty years, he should really consider publishing a second edition because I think the idea of a herd of mammoths roaming newly reclaimed tundra in Siberia is very romantic. There is also some tongue-in-cheek critique of science television and its need for a compelling shot. Read if you think mammoths are neat.

[Nikki · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this. It has the problem all pop paleontology books have, in that it raises a lot more questions than it can answer! It does suggest at the beginning it might answer them by the end, even though this was clearly impossible. But it was an enjoyable journey around various mammoth projects nonetheless.

[TC · Rating 2 out of 5]

Two stars ("it was okay") purely because it took me a lot of persistence to keep picking it up to read all the way through - over the span of four months (!). It's by no means a bad book, I just think I'm maybe not the right audience for it, despite the overall topic being an interesting one.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 1 out of 5]

Eh, DNF. Dumb hunt for frozen mammoths in Siberia. Avoid this one, is my advice.

[Arjun Boddu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was this a goodread? No. Am I a good reader for finishing a book in 3 days? Yes

Funny reading a book about scientific discovery published two decades ago

[Nana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning book, I wish mammoths were brought back from extinction but jokes aside. I highly recommend this one and follow it with MacPhee’s book “End of the megafauna” from 2019.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

(review originally written for bookslut)

Honestly, I don't think that I'd ever given the wooly mammoth all that much thought, before this year. Of course when I was five I was obsessed with dinosaurs, as nearly all children that age are, but I don't remember that obsession ever spilling over to anything with hair - except maybe the saber tooth tiger.

Which is why it's fairly remarkable that I've found myself reading about mammoths twice this year. Somehow mammoths have become the new great sexy beast when I wasn't looking. First the mammoth rated pretty much its own chapter in The Ghost With Trembling Wings by Scott Weidensaul. Then I picked up Mammoth: The Resurrection of an Ice Age Giant by Richard Stone, which obviously made the mammoth its main character.

There actually is a reason for all of this sudden interest. Two of them, to be precise. The first was an attempt by Arctic explorer Bernard Buigues to excavate a mammoth entire, while still in its protective block of frozen tundra soil. If successful, such an attempt would allow the removal of the frozen cube to a controlled environment where the mammoth could be defrosted more slowly, with less damage to the tissues that had been preserved for thousands of years.

Of course the advantage of such a well-preserved specimen is not just a lovely museum exhibit, but it also would hold great promise for eventually cloning the mammoth, an endeavor that Japanese scientist Akiri Iritani is poised to pursue. This is the second reason for the new interest in mammoths. Cloning a large extinct animal has so far been limited to fantasy worlds like Jurassic Park. The recent success of cloning sheep inspires hope in these researchers, but the obstacles to cloning a mammoth would be huge even if intact mammoth cells were discovered.

Perhaps more realistic is the alternative route pursued by Japanese researcher Kazufumi Goto, who hopes to find intact mammoth sperm which he could use to impregnate an elephant. The possibility of creating a hybrid has a big advantage in that a sperm cell does not have to be alive in order to impregnate an egg. However there are a lot of obstacles in this path as well.

The most interesting thing about Mammoth is the quandary such research creates. If one day it were possible to create a mammoth clone or hybrid, should we do so? What are the moral and ethical implications in raising an extinct species from the dead? Especially an extinct species whose habitat no longer exists on this Earth. What would be the point? Just to prove that we can? And would we just create a single individual, or try to recreate a sustainable population? Given the difficulties in creating even a single mammoth, the odds against being able to create enough individuals with sufficient genetic diversity to maintain that population seem insurmountable at the present time. Would it be more tragic to see the mammoth flicker and die out for a second time, or would the glory of seeing such a great beast walk the earth again be worth the work?

There are people in Mammoth who have great faith that one day there will exist a park in Siberia where mammoth will roam with buffalo and reindeer once more. It is certainly true that science has brought about many wonders that no one believed would ever come to pass. However I do not believe that I will ever see a live mammoth in my lifetime. Personally, I find the idea of a living museum exhibit to be a bit disturbing. While the quest for the mammoth has led to some interesting science, we live in a world in which the majority of species alive today are uncatalogued and unidentified. If these species were to go extinct tomorrow no one would even notice, yet their absence could be potentially more devastating than more charismatic megafauna like the mammoth.

As for the book itself, Richard Stone writes with a clear and logical style. Although he is the European News Editor of Science magazine, he doesn't even suffer from magazine writer's disease too badly (where each chapter feels more like a feature in a magazine rather than an integrated chapter in a larger book.) I also appreciated that although Stone brings up the moral dilemmas inherent to the research he discusses, he never beats you over the head with the fact that they are dilemmas, nor his opinion of them. Rather, the reader is left free to make up their own mind. Of course, the reader may also choose not to commit to 215 pages on a single extinct mammal, for which I would not blame them. In that case, let me recommend to them The Ghost with Trembling Wings as a well-written treatment of vanished and vanishing species.

[Michael Schmidt · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Pleistocene epoch has intrigued me more than any other, almost including my own, because it was here, on the edge of the last great Ice Age, that my ancient ancestors mutated into what we today call human, interbreeding with a few Neanderthal cousins along the way.

Why did the initial Alien movie strike such a chord with audiences, if not because it tapped into a primordial proto-human horror of the sabretoothed nemesis haunting the deep reaches of the cave at whose lip those ancestors trembled with their slender spiral of fire?

It must be true, I sense, that those beasts, both predators and prey, that haunted the dreams of those who painted the caves and crevices at Lascaux or Ayers Rock were creatures that shaped who we became as humans almost as much as the forests, or steppes of our environments.

So the several projects to resurrect those creatures who shaped our primordial brains and thus our cultures and our selves, are electrifying in their import. Richard Stone guides us with a perfect blend of science and passion through the moral arguments of what I'll call the Pleistocene revivalists and their naysayers, those who fear that releasing Ice Age megafauna from their subzero genetic prisons will perhaps unleash unknown pathogens on us.

In favour of the revivalists is, ironically, that global warming is returning parts of the tundra back to the sort of environment that the big woolly critters found pretty comfy. And their plans don't stop there, for if mammoths will roam the steppe again, the rest of the antediluvian fauna - from bighorned elk to those sabretoothed nasties - needs to be recreated too, with the help of their modern descendants such as musk oxen.

And this will irrevocably alter the punted reserve in the Siberian far north, as mammoth feet turn over tundra liberally fertilised by deer dung, and predators return to prey to the carrion birds and beetles. Pleistocene Park is a far less scary prospect than Jurassic Park, but for me the issue is not really the moral "should we play god?" but rather the philosophical "what will a resurrected mammoth teach us about our early selves - and about the ethics of where we are headed?"

[Graham Crawford · Rating 3 out of 5]

This slim book has as much meat on its bones as its featured excavated mammoth. The journalistic style seems more suited to a magazine article - there is not enough in-depth/ hardcore science - The general overviews seemed more suited to a TV program than a written work. A more in-depth analysis of the characters of the mammoth hunters could have also helped to stretch this out to a decent read - from the little I read, they certainly seemed an odd bunch of fringe scientists.

The book briefly comes into its own as a travelogue when the author goes to the Russian dig - but it mostly feels like the bare bones script for the Discovery Channel program that held most of the rights to the story.

There is an interesting tale between the lines here - that of the problems trying to finance Science via TV entertainment. I had the feeling that at the end of this sorry relationship everyone had lost out. I'd still like to know how it's possible to miscalculate the weight of a block of ice by nearly 10 tonnes! They were so lucky people were not killed during this maverick misadventure. Or maybe that would have boosted the TV ratings.

[Victoria · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fascinating book as Stone presented his research into the possibilities of cloning mammoth’s from DNA samples found in the frozen tundra, as well as some speculation into the cause of extinction for these large mammals. The book contained a lot of facts - fascinating ones! - making it a pleasure to read. The ending wasn’t as satisfying as I had hoped hoped - and with a 2002 publication date, it would be interesting to see where the research has progressed. I wonder if Stone has published any sort of follow-up in the intervening years or if he is planning on it. I would certainly read more on this interesting topic!

[Nicholas Griffith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Richard Stone beautifully illustrates the obsession that strikes mammoth enthusiasts the world round. From professors to amateurs to businessman looking for ancient ivory, Mammoth is a story about what has been, what is and is to be in this highly eccentric realm of study. Dishing out delicious stories that mix paleontology with discovery, extinction and genetic resurrection, Stone navigates his way around each topic with a flair for narrative and a flawless sense of place. Finessing the aesthetic of science in a way that's not only palatable but exquisite, this book comes highly recommended for those interested in hairy beasts of yore.

Fancy a Pleistocene read? Look no further!

[Sheila · Rating 3 out of 5]

A non fiction book, it discussed different expeditions in Siberia, searching for frozen mammoth remains, in the hopes of some scientists someday cloning a mammoth from frozen DNA.

[Benedict Reid · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing account of the discovery of frozen Mammoths in Northern Russia.

[Tom Oman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very speculative and tries its best to make the most of limited information and content. It is short which is to the authors credit. This book is probably irrelevant by now.

[Edward Fenner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really cool, easy-to-read, science fact book. Fascinating accounts of mammoth archaeology.