Customer Reviews

Mammoth: The Resurrection Of An Ice Age Giant

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This book is enjoyable to read and packed with information. Richard Stone does a great job with the mostly scientific material while keeping it entertaining with descriptions of travel to Siberia. This book is an excellent primer on mammoths--their biology, their fossil record, the history of their discovery by humans, the theories of their extinction--and it has a bibliography if you would like to know more. But it is more than that. In discussing current research on mammoths, he covers paleontolgy, arctic exploration, Russian history, genetics, molecular biology, biogeography, and anthropology, and handles all of them equally well. The center piece of the book is the expedition to unearth the Jarkov mammoth and thaw it slowly to find out how intact it is (you would be surprised how many intact frozen mammoths have gone on record as having been left to the wolves to eat or fed to dogs, or just left to rot--what a waste!). The book ends with some uncertainty about how valuable the Jarkov mammoth will be, but that did not distract me from finding this a very satisfying book.

One small thing that would have made this book better is a graphic depiction of a timeline of the Pleistocene. I have trouble keeping my dates straight.

I liked this book because, as every great book should, it stimulated my curiosty and imagination. It made the little-known,long extinct animal come to life. I could picture Dima, the baby mammoth, as he lay dying in a frozen Siberian steppe 40,000 years ago, starving without his mother's milk. I could also feel the bitter-cold howling winds as explorers were searching for mammoth remains.
The book raises questions to which there are no answers yet, such as how did mammoths become extinct and could they be "brought back" with the help of modern technology. This makes one ponder the ethics of cloning and then breeding pre-historic animals in today's environment.
Last but not least, the book made me realize that even in this age of ever-present internet there are still true hands-on adventurers out there, determined and dedicated individuals who are conquering new frontiers in search of unknown and little-known phenomena.
And, of course, there are writers to write about it.

Mammoth: THe Resurrection of an Ice Age Giant written by Richard Stone is a book about adventure, but not just your oridinary adventure. The Adventure here is about the unearthing of giant animals from the Pleistocene Era... Giant Wooly Mammoths in the permafrost of Siberia. This is a very provocative book as the science is beautifully clear.

The Wooly Mammoth roamed Europe, Asia and North America and grew to huge proportions, but later became extinct and all that we know of their existance is being uncovered by some very good scientific research. Now, a new generation of explorers has taken up the challange, to find out more about the mammoth and the life and times that existed during their lifetimes. Armed with ground-penetrating radar, GPS, and helecopters the large expanse of Siberia is begins to yield some interesting finds and the clues that go along with more and more information.

There is promiss in this book that once again the mammoth may live... how you say can this happen... well through DNA and cloning. This book takes you on a rigerous adventure through frontiers of science. Yes, theoretically it can be done, but this book examins both the profound philosophical questions about the risks and morality of executing these efforts. Liken to "Jurassic Park," you say.. and you would be correct.

Theories exist as to why the mammoth did out and became extinct... one of which is the overchill theory as the Earth became increasingly cooler the food supply for the mammoth became less and less forage for the animal, next the psychological change of being penned in by dense forest and glacier. Mammoth were used to living in the Northern cooler climates as is evidece in the finds of today. So much so, as there are finds in the small islands of the Arctic Ocean.

This book tells a riveting adventureus tale that is fascinating to read. The prose flows well as you, the reader, are now in the hunt for the mammoth. The text treats the reader to a review of the wide variety of information Stone has learned about the Mammoth while doing research.

This book is a very interesting discussion of three topics:

1) Why did the mammoths go extinct?

2) Is it possible (and desirable/ethical) to bring back the mammoths via cloning or interbreeding with modern elephants?

3) How did the demise of the mammoth and similar large mammals affect the vegetation and climate of the areas in which they lived (in this case Siberia). Russian scientists theorize that when the mammoths no longer grazed and churned up the ancient grasslands, the vegetation changed completely, into the tundra-wasteland that it is today.

Overall a very enjoyable short book that does not try to puff up the page count with hundreds of pages of irrelevant material.

TMR

This fascinating little book is about a large and extinct creature, the mammoth. Evidence of this creature, which last walked the earth 37 centuries ago, seems to be scattered all over the place in North America and in Siberia. This book describes the work of a mixed band of mammoth enthusiasts as they search for mammoths frozen in the tundra of Russia's Far North.

There is an international cast in this story-a French arctic travel guide, Russian academics, Japanese experts in reproductive science, a Dutch amateur with a house stuffed with mammoth bones and, of course, the folks at the Discovery Channel trying to make this all into Good Television or, at least, Show Biz. Unfortunately, this book comes a bit too early--biotechnology has not advanced to the point where a mammoth might be cloned from scattered remnants of DNA and a superb specimen, frozen in the ice with useful bits intact, had not been found by the time the book went to press. Instead, author Richard Stone does an admirable job in sewing parts together to tell this story.

We learn that the inhabitants of Siberia believe that digging up the bones of mammoths brings bad luck, but there is nothing wrong with taking tusks when they are found. Huge numbers of tusks, estimated from 50,000 animals, have been shipped out in the last century. Scientists made arduous journeys trying to discover more about mammoths and our strong interest in them continues to this day. The book details how mammoths probably lived and alternative explanations about how they became extinct--through climactic change, being hunted or wiped out by disease.

This is quite interesting and the sections about cloning mammoths are highly imaginative and entertaining. Mr. Stone has done good research and writes engagingly of his voyages beyond the beyond. And he does not shy away from commenting on the ethical question of cloning extinct species. But at the end of the day, one has to wonder about the resources invested into the quixotic expeditions he details when there are pressing issues in habitat conservation today, including the protection of that much-loved and much-decimated relative of the mammoth, the elephant.

Recommended for those with an interest in science on the fringes...

Richard Stone's "Mammoth" opens the mind's eye to vivid and unexpected worlds of discovery - past, present, and future, from Pleistocene hunting parties who pursued the woolly colossus for sustenance, to 21st-century scientists who seek the still fugitive hunk of flesh from which, they hope, they will find themselves able to extract an unadulterated archive of genetic material; to those dreamers who would not only resurrect a creature that nature and history have conspired to bury beneath the snow but also to reconstruct around it a "Pleistocene Park," an entire ecosystem of the kind in which the ancient animal flourished.

What, indeed, caused the mammoth's disappearance in the first place? Stone asks. Was it climate change, for instance, or was it overhunting - or was it some horrible "hyperdisease" 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 also a front-seat adventure that takes us on a trek of thousands of kilometers, from locales as diverse as Tokyo and North Africa to the vast whiteness and bone-chilling cold of the Siberian Arctic. It is an expedition that marries gleaming Western technologies to creaky post-Soviet gear and traverses the chaos and corruption of today's Russia. It is a quest, too, that brooks the terror of indigenous peoples that the latter-day grave-robbers about whom we read might expose themselves - and all of us, in their heedless arrogance - to some ancient curse or unpredictable calamity.

There is surprisingly little about the project of cloning mammoths. I'm not really sure what it's about; it's disorganized and kind of all over the place. There's some about the mammoths themselves (as living animals), some about the various adventures to find frozen mammoths in Sibera, and some about the science behind the cloning. While mildly interesting, it wasn't especially informative.

Not terrible but not recommended.

The Woolly Mammoth, long gone from the world but not yet forgotten, was a major source of food, fuel and material for our early ancestors. Our early culture must have understood them but to us are still, in some way, a mystery.

How did they die, was it overchill or overkill? Did we do them in or did a germ do it? How come they lived through so so much to finally die in what seems a blink of an eye? This book is the tale of trying to find out the answers and, maybe, just maybe, find a way to bring them back to life. Yes, maybe if we could find a frozen body to get undamaged, useful, Mammoth DNA from we could do more than just understand them - we could clone them.

This book has many tales. The Mammoth Hunters trying to find a whole creature, the Scientists who want to understand the myster, the Discovery Channel trying to get a story and the Russians just trying to make a living and a quick buck.

Fun, but the ending was clear before I opened the book. As there is no baby Mammoths running about I know that they failed to clone them. Yet the book does give you a good overview of the history of Mammoth research and our knowledge of them. And some of the ideas, like bringing Canadian bison to Siberia

and African rhinos and elephants to North America are both amazing and risky.

This was a fascinating book - though, I suppose, rather disappointing in the end since the scientists still haven't found the mammoth tissue they need, or have found the real case for the mammoth's extinction. Still, it was a book full of fascinating facts and an absolute pleasure to read. This was published in 2002, so I wonder what progress they have made in this research in the last seven years...

This book contains valuable references to and quotations from across the tundra of perspectives of how/why/when the mammoths died off. Like so many Evolutionists, the author stands firm in the mire of peers who keep finding more and more physical evidence of the immediate death and preservation of mammoths (and their environments). Yet, Stone and his peers remain united in their scoffing at a literal interpretation of the Biblical account of the Flood in the days of Noah.

The reader must wonder why the Biblical, "young Earth," account is not treated as a valid explanation, after the author debunks contrary theory after contrary theory.

For example, Stone only makes passing reference to the many mammoths which have been unearthed in Florida. The reader must realize on her/his own that this fact alone refutes almost all of the variations of Evolutionary postulating that gradual climate changes killed off these magnificant creatures.

The thinking reader will wonder how the theories ever get past the mammoth-size problem of herds of mammoths having been found under what is now land too far north to produce the food supply needed for even one of them for a day, let alone herds of them for life-times. The eons of gradual change required in the theories of Evolution cannot account for the repeatedly-found evidence of healthy, well-nourished, gluttonous, quick-frozen mammoths. Stone discusses this evidence, but stears clear of giving serious credence to that 40-day dumping of rain and ice as claimed in the Bible.

Stone never addresses the cellular evidence in these mammoths which conclusively shows that they were quick-frozen at temperatures far below any temperatures existing on Earth. This fact demands an explanation which includes the injection of temperatures found only in outer space, (or in substances such as liquid nitrogen).

Nor does Stone discuss the problem of lack of evidence of internal decay. Mammoths killed by slow starvation would die and decay on the inside while their outer layers froze, if dropped in current-day arctic regions. Once the blood stops pumping, this process of inner rot happens far quicker than a huge beast would freeze to its core. Yet, mammoth after mammoth has been found in these northern regions frozen entirely.

Most glaringly absent is discussion of a mammoth found in the far north with sub-tropical vegetation found still in its mouth. That discovery should have narrowed the amount of valid theories by enough to make this book a lot shorter. (Hint: they did not find a chewing tobacco can in its back pocket.)

Stone's recounting of the 1887 writings of Sir Henry H. Howorth are more formidable than Stone admits to. Stone admits that Howorth's cataclysm theories have been vindicated more and more during Stone's professional career, yet that bias against a literally accurate Biblical account is treated like laughing-stock material.

My suggestion is that if the mammoth fits, wear it!

As for the presentation of the book, it is not a heavy-read. Stone's writing style is understandable, even to folks like me who simply want to think and learn.

The pictures are a bit of a letdown. I had hoped for more pictures of mammoths and their body parts. You can find more such pictures on ebay than in this book.

Overall, a valuable resource for the thinking descendant of Noah.