The true story of a daring band of 21st-century mammoth hunters and their fascinating search for the long-extinct beast. 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 nar rative, 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.
Richard Stone's
Mammoth offers a kindred scenario to that made famous by
Jurassic Park: the establishment of a "Pleistocene Park" in which long-extinct creatures like the mammoth, sabre-toothed tiger, and woolly rhino could be resurrected and given sanctuary.
This is not a science-fiction vision, we learn from science journalist Stone's absorbing journey into recent prehistory; already scientists from Russia, Canada, the United States and other nations are studying the possibility of restoring a stretch of northern Siberia to its Pleistocene condition, thereby creating what they call a "mammoth steppe" populated by bison, Yakutian horses and elephants--and one day, perhaps, creatures such as the woolly mammoth, genetically "summoned from the world of the dead". The materials are readily available, Stone writes, in the form of DNA-bearing "muscles and ligaments and fat" found in mammoths now buried in arctic permafrost; whether those remnants can be made to bring back to life what Siberians call the "rat beneath the ice" is another question, but one that many scholars are busily exploring.
While looking into what he calls "a watershed in efforts to study lost ecosystems", Stone provides a lively natural history of the mammoth and evaluates conflicting theories on its extinction. His book makes for a memorable journey into unknown scientific territory--and a glimpse at a possible future that is surpassing strange. --Gregory McNamee
