Mammoth hopes

CLONING a large extinct animal has so far been limited to fantasy such as Jurassic Park, but Stone offers the exciting, and somewhat terrifying possibility of seeing a great beast walk the Earth once again for real.

Woolly mammoths are one of the most evocative of extinct creatures. Our ancestors hunted and ate the enormous furry elephants and recorded their images in numerous cave paintings.

This is a book about the unearthing of these giant animals from the Pleistocene era.

The woolly mammoth roamed Europe, Asia and North America and grew to huge proportions. Archaeological records show that Ice Age humans probably hunted mammoths, or at least scavenged their carcasses.

Various theories exist as to why the mammoth became extinct, one of which is the over chill theory - as the Earth became increasingly cooler there became less and less forage for the animal. Next there was the psychological change of being penned in by dense forest and glacier.

Another theory was that over hunting, or some horrible "hyper disease" to which, if we extract the behemoth from its icy sepulchre we might expose ourselves.

But Mammoth is not just a natural history. It is an adventure that takes readers on a trek of thousands of miles, from Tokyo and North Africa to the bone-chilling cold of the Siberian permafrost.

Stone, the European bureau chief of Science magazine, covered two separate expeditions to find preserved mammoth remains in the icy margins of northern Siberia.

The first, the brainchild of geneticist Kazufumi Goto and backed by eccentric millionaire Kazutoshi Kobayashi, took as its premise that if preserved mammoth semen could be recovered from the tundra, then the species could be revived via genetic engineering.

The second expedition, a consortium headed by French adventurer Bernard Buigues, was also out for a frozen mammoth, which, ultimately, the team did recover.

The expedition was the focus of two Discovery Channel documentaries, which covered the team airlifting an ice block containing the remains of a mammoth back to base.

The Buigues expedition gave new hope to those bent on cloning mammoths. In fact, there are plans to create a Pleistocene park in northern Siberia, the centrepiece of which would be a herd of cloned mammoths.

"Whether it is five years, five decades or five centuries from now, woolly mammoths will once again walk on earth", Stone writes.

A provocative book, one that forces the reader to ponder the possibilities of what lies beneath the ice and wonder at the ramifications and moral dilemmas of seeing such a great beast walk the Earth once more.

Beverly Abbs