Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Discovering the Mammoth
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://mammothtales.blogspot.com/
CITY: Anchorage
STATE: AK
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://pegasusbooks.com/books/discovering-the-mammoth-9781681774244-hardcover
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2017107575
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2017107575
HEADING: McKay, John J.
000 00766nz a2200205n 450
001 10532727
005 20170817073537.0
008 170816n| azannaabn |n aaa c
010 __ |a no2017107575
035 __ |a (OCoLC)oca10941006
040 __ |a OCoLC |b eng |e rda |c OCoLC
100 1_ |a McKay, John J.
370 __ |c United States |e Anchorage (Alaska) |2 naf
372 __ |a Technical writing |2 lcsh
372 __ |a Woolly mammoth |2 lcsh
373 __ |a University of Washington |2 naf
374 __ |a Writers |2 lcsh
375 __ |a Males |2 lcdgt
377 __ |a eng
670 __ |a Discovering the mammoth, 2017: |b title page (John J. McKay); dust jack flap (has a Masters in History from the University of Washington; a technical writer by trade, he is the “Mammoth Guy” by vocation; lives in Anchorage, Alaska)
PERSONAL
Male.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, science journalist, technical writer, and blogger.
WRITINGS
Also author of a blog, Mammoth Tales.
SIDELIGHTS
John J. McKay is a science journalist, technical writer, and blogger. He frequently writes and blogs about science topics and, especially, paleontology as it relates to the woolly mammoth, a hulking creature that resembled a large, curving-tusked elephant with a thick coat of hair. In his book Discovering the Mammoth: A Tale of Giants, Unicorns, Ivory, and the Birth of a New Science, McKay presents the story of how the fossils of these giant creatures were treated and interpreted in eras that didn’t have the benefit of well-developed vertebrate paleontology and other sciences.
McKay relates how, during the period from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, science evolved to provide the tools that allowed experts to determine what mammoth fossils were and what they meant. In earlier times, mammoth fossils and the bones of other prehistoric creatures had been interpreted in terms of fable, religious faith, and history.
For example, the ancient Chinese believed fossils were the remains of dragons. Romans thought they were the bones of giants, and others believed they were examples of the cyclops, misinterpreting the large hole in the skull for the animal’s trunk as an eye socket. Europeans with a Christian worldview interpreted them as remains of creatures who perished in Noah’s Great Flood. Some sources thought that mammoths were underground creatures who couldn’t survive exposure to conditions on the surface of the planet. McKay provides detailed discussion about these theories and how they affected science of the times and, in some cases, challenged religious faith and interpretations of scripture. “Readers will find it humbling that the greatest minds of past centuries were adamantly wrong” about the mammoth, remarked Elissa Cooper in a Library Journal review.
To understand the mammoth, McKay notes, it was necessary for science to develop concepts such as evolution and extinction. He notes how the idea of extinction would clash with the religious viewpoint that God made all creatures with a purpose and with perfect clarity; a group of animals that completely vanished would run counter to this idea, revealing a fatal flow in God’s divine design. The concept of evolution would also contradict religious ideas of creation and the timeline of life.
McKay also examines early scientific mistakes about the mammoth, ranging from inaccurate sketches to unlikely interpretations of the evidence. Many early specimens were lost to factors such as fires, shipwrecks, and improper storage that destroyed material rather than preserved it. The author also covers the revolution in thinking when a complete mammoth skeleton was discovered in the early 1800s.
However, science did eventually prevail over these early misidentifications, and McKay clearly explains how this happened and puts it in the context of the origins of paleontology. “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,” observed Donovan Hohndec, writing in the New York Times Book Review.
The search for answers about the mammoth represents a hallmark of human intelligence and curiosity, McKay told Randy Dotinga in an interview in the Christian Science Monitor. Solving mysteries like those surrounding mammoth fossils is “human nature. We’re homo sapiens, we’re a smart animal, but it would really be better to call us a curious animal. It’s not enough to just accept things as they are. We want to make integrated sense out of them,” McKay stated. Though the book is largely centered on the woolly mammoth, McKay makes it “clear to the end that his story is not about ancient creatures, but about how humans approach the world’s mysteries,” commented a Publishers Weekly writer.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Christian Science Monitor, August 8, 2017, Randy Dotinga, “How Woolly Mammoth Bones Baffled Previous Generations,” interview with John J. McKay.
Library Journal, July 1, 2017, “Mammoth Discoveries,” Elissa Cooper, review of Discovering the Mammoth: A Tale of Giants, Unicorns, Ivory, and the Birth of a New Science, p. 98.
New York Times Book Review, December 27, 2017, Donovan Hohndec, “When Woolly Mammoths Roamed the Earth,” review of Discovering the Mammoth.
Publishers Weekly, June 12, 2017, review of Discovering the Mammoth, p. 55.
ONLINE
Nature Online, http://www.nature.com/ (April 16, 2018), review of Discovering the Mammoth.
BOOKS BOOK REVIEWS
How woolly mammoth bones baffled previous generations
John McKay, author of 'Discovering the Mammoth,' talks about the theories that earlier generations developed in their struggle to understand woolly mammoth bones.
What Are You Reading?
Tell us about the book that's currently on your bedside table.
Randy Dotinga
AUGUST 8, 2017 —Scientists know woolly mammoth bones when they see them, and that's a good thing. In the US alone, every year or two brings the discovery of mammoth bones uncovered by the construction of a subway, stadium, or parking lot. They don't stay mysteries for long.
But imagine it's 100 or 200 or 500 years ago, and you've just discovered the fossilized bones of a humongous creature with a 10-foot skull.
What would you think it was? A human giant from biblical times? You might. Or perhaps you'd look at the gaping hole in the front of the skull and think: Eek, Cyclops! Or a unicorn. Or, if you're extra-creative, a sea monster that somehow ended up on land (double eek!).
In his new book Discovering the Mammoth: A Tale of Giants, Unicorns, Ivory, and the Birth of a New Science, technical writer and self-described mammoth enthusiast John McKay digs deep into human history to explore how we tackled the perplexing mystery of these extraordinary fossils.
"Everybody has their own way of looking at the world," McKay says, "but almost everywhere, people had no problem believing these were real animals or monsters that once lived."
Are you scientifically literate? Take our quiz
In an interview with the Monitor, McKay talks about the evolving fossil theories, the challenges that the bones posed to faith, and what this all says about the human drive to understand.
Q: So what was a woolly mammoth? A kind of prehistoric giant hairy elephant?
That's pretty much what it is. They're related to elephants, part of a big and complex family tree.
As they moved into colder areas, they got progressively stockier and hairier. They were still running around after the pyramids were built, and the final ones to go extinct were on an island north of Siberia. They seem to have mostly died from inbreeding. They were terribly inbred and started to develop genetic problems.
Q: How did people come to think these bones were of giant humans?
They're trying to make sense of something that has no analog in the world around them because they hadn't seen elephants yet. They'd know what the typical big animals in their area are like, and they'd notice that these aren't like any of the animals they hunt or see.
They'd find a femur or a thigh bone and start laying the bones out: Here's the legs, the hips, the ribs and 5-fingered feet that look like human hands. They'd put it all together and make it into a human.
Q: Sometimes they'd assume these were giant humans from the bible. But they'd also come up with out-there ideas like the Cyclops. How did they figure that?
If you look at an elephant's skull, there's this giant opening in the front for the trunk. It looks like a giant eyehole, so they developed the Cyclops idea. And the tusks looked like fangs, perfect for a monster.
Q: How did some Europeans figure that the bones weren't from actual animals?
Some people in the medieval and early modern periods thought these were just rocks that resembled bones. There was a little bit of mysticism mixed in it too, the belief that there were forces within the earth that could cause something to take on the appearance of something else.
Q: How did the sea monster theory develop?
There was a belief that for every animal on the land, there was an equivalent animal in the sea: There were sea cows, sea horses, sea dogs.
Q: How did mammoth fossils challenge religion?
There was an idea that goes all the way back to Aristotle of the sacred chain of being: Everything in God's creation is neatly ranked, there's a place for everything, everything is in its place, because God is perfect.
Whatever God creates will also be perfect because there's no room for superfluous parts. Extinction would be somewhat sacrilegious, almost heretical. God didn't make things without a purpose.
Thanks to the fossils, people also came to the conclusion that the past had taken more time than the standard biblical chronology. There needed to be more time for all of these things to happen. That made a lot of religious authorities uncomfortable.
Follow Stories Like This
Get the Monitor stories you care about delivered to your inbox.
E-mail address
Q: What can we learn from your book about the human desire to solve mysteries?
It's human nature. We're homo sapiens, we're a smart animal, but it would really be better to call us a curious animal. It's not enough to just accept things as they are. We want to make integrated sense out of them.
ME AND MY MAMMOTHS
My name is John J. McKay. I write this stuff. I'm also writing a book about early discoveries of mammoth bones and carcasses and how Enlightenment thinkers figured out what they were. I use this blog to try out ideas share science news and trivia and ramble on about whatever seems appropriate at the moment. I discovered mammoths at the age of five when I found a small green mammoth among the dinosaurs in a set of plastic prehistoric animals. Fifty-three years later, the dinosaurs are all gone but I still have the mammoth.
If you have any questions or comments that you don't want to share with the world, you can write to me at mammothtales at gmail dot com.
MONDAY, MAY 15, 2017
It's me
I don't usually post pictures of myself online. None of my social media avatars are pictures. But, the publisher needed a dust jacket photo, so I may as well share it. After all, it's going to be printed by the millions when my book becomes an international, runaway bestseller.
3/23/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1521867647656 1/3
Print Marked Items
Discovering the Mammoth: A Tale of
Giants, Unicorns, Ivory, and the Birth of a
New Science
Publishers Weekly.
264.24 (June 12, 2017): p55.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Discovering the Mammoth: A Tale of Giants, Unicorns, Ivory, and the Birth of a New Science
John J. McKay. Pegasus, $27.95 (256p) ISBN 978-1-68177-424-4
Technical writer McKay positions the mammoth as a "focusing problem for a scientific revolution" between
the late 17th and early 19th centuries, taking the idea that figuring out what mammoths are "required new
tools and new ways of looking at nature and the past." It's a well-organized history of science, with McKay
delving deeply into primary sources, some uncovered quite recently, to trace the development of thinking
about the prehistoric origins of northern ivory and massive bones. That thinking, McKay posits, was driven
by disparate worldviews that led, for example, ancient Romans to envision such bones as derived from
giants and devout Christian Europeans to see them as remnants of the Flood; by lively intellectual debate
based in both personality and science; by trade-driven cultural exchange; and by physical discoveries that
culminated in the 1801 recovery of a complete mammoth skeleton. McKay shows how, in order to
understand the mammoth, natural philosophers needed to develop the concepts of evolution and extinction
and to make advances in anatomy, classification, and geology. He keeps his narrative human centered,
maintaining respect for scientists' discovery processes even when their ideas turned out to be incorrect.
McKay avoids probing modern research on the mammoth despite his personal enthusiasm for the subject,
making it clear to the end that his story is not about ancient creatures, but about how humans approach the
world's mysteries. Agent: Jessica Papin, Dystel & Goderich (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Discovering the Mammoth: A Tale of Giants, Unicorns, Ivory, and the Birth of a New Science." Publishers
Weekly, 12 June 2017, p. 55. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495720706/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=aa79d5fb. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495720706
3/23/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1521867647656 2/3
Mammoth discoveries
Library Journal.
142.12 (July 1, 2017): p98.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No
redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
McKay, John J. Discovering the Mammoth: A Tale of Giants, Unicorns, Ivory, and the Birth of a New
Science. Pegasus. Aug. 2017. 256p. illus. notes. bibliog. index. ISBN 9781681774244. $27.95; ebk. ISBN
9781681774817. NAT HIST
When people first encountered the extinct mammoth remains, opinions varied on what these creatures were.
In a thorough look at the beginning of paleontology, especially cultural influence and assumptions, technical
writer McKay traces how people interpreted this mystery. The author organized centuries of sometimes
messy findings into a coherent report spanning continents. History enthusiasts will appreciate learning how
the mammoth and other discoveries were documented or lost. Shipwrecks, fire, and improper preservation
destroyed evidence; inaccuracies in maps, sketches, and written descriptions impeded comprehension.
Readers will find it humbling that the greatest minds of past centuries were adamantly wrong and will enjoy
reading about their rationales: of course, it made sense to believe that mammoths lived underground and
couldn't survive upon reaching the earth's surface. Similarly, those who held to a literal interpretation of the
Bible assumed that the mammoth skulls belonged to giants who once roamed the land (the concept of a
defunct species would have implied a flaw in God's design, a heretical thought). VERDICT For those
seeking a scholarly, straightforward examination of paleontology's origins and key players.--Elissa Cooper,
Helen Plum Memorial Lib., Lombard, IL
Mezrich, Ben. Woolly: The True Story of the Quest To Revive One of History's Most Iconic Extinct
Creatures. Atria. Jul. 2017. 304p. bibliog. index. ISBN 9781501135552. $26; ebk. ISBN 9781501135576.
NAT HIST
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
What's the point of bringing an extinct animal back to life? Mezrich (The 37th Parallel) tells the story of
geneticist George Church and others working to create, not clone, wiped-out species, including mammoths.
Such endeavors are not for our amusement--the author readily acknowledges and dismisses the parallels to
Jurassic Park. Rather, they are intended to help in today's world. Mammoths, for instance, could balance the
ecosystem by trampling the permafrost in places such as Siberia's Pleistocene Park, thus lowering the
permafrost's deadly carbon emissions. The ethically minded Church is well known for his open and
3/23/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1521867647656 3/3
collaborative spirit in mainstream media, and the idea of "science fiction becoming science" is intriguing.
However, despite the intellectual matter at hand, the narrative is simplistic and often gets bogged down in
details that make the story seem unfocused. VERDICT Readers unfamiliar with Church's work and looking
for a lighter touch of science might be able to power through the superfluous bits. Still, its commercial
appeal, furthered by a movie already in the works, will attract popular science readers. [See Prepub Alert,
2/6/17.]--Elissa Cooper, Helen Plum Memorial Lib., Lombard, IL
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Mammoth discoveries." Library Journal, 1 July 2017, p. 98. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497612739/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=23f6943a.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A497612739
BOOK REVIEW | NONFICTION
When Woolly Mammoths Roamed the Earth
By DONOVAN HOHNDEC. 27, 2017
Continue reading the main storyShare This Page
Share
Tweet
Pin
Email
More
Save
Photo
Credit Mark Pernice
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.
Continue reading the main story
RELATED COVERAGE
Under a Farmer’s Field: A Woolly Mammoth in Michigan OCT. 2, 2015
The Mammoth Cometh FEB. 27, 2014
The Woolly Mammoth’s Last Stand MARCH 2, 2017
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.
Photo
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?
Newsletter Sign UpContinue reading the main story
Book Review
Be the first to see reviews, news and features in The New York Times Book Review.
Enter your email address
Sign Up
You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services.
SEE SAMPLE PRIVACY POLICY OPT OUT OR CONTACT US ANYTIME
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.
Donovan Hohn is the author of “Moby-Duck.”
A version of this review appears in print on December 31, 2017, on Page BR14 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: When They Roamed the Earth. Today's Paper|Subscribe
More detail
Books & Arts
Books in brief
Barbara Kiser
Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week's best science picks.
Discovering the Mammoth
John J. McKay
Pegasus (2017) 9781681774244
Long before mammoths were described by science, wild debates raged over their hulking fossils. From classical Greece to China, claims that they were dragons' teeth or giants' bones sprang up. As John McKay vividly relates, the scientific saga began in the seventeenth century, when the evocative remains became pivotal to the evolution of vertebrate palaeontology. Among the turning points, he shows, was Siberian tribesman Ossip Shumachov's discovery of a near-complete mammoth carcass around 1800 — later reconstructed, in a stupendous feat of guesswork, by Wilhelm Gottlieb Tilesius.