A mammoth mistake to recreate the past

I remember the picture books, the broad pages and sweeping landscapes, the colorful depictions of Earth thousands of years ago, the rocks and ice and creatures that inhabited the land, and most of all, in the center of it all, the woolly mammoth.

The mammoth on these pages was majestic, massive in bulk and hair, soldiering on in a forbidding environment, clumps of snow clinging to its thick fur. I suppose I was a woolly mammoth fanboy. I remember the yearning, the wondering what it would be like to see one.

But when news came this week that a Dallas biotech company had taken another step toward being able to genetically resurrect the mammoth, what I felt was more akin to fear than joy, more dread than celebration.

Nostalgia has many facets. Not all of them are warm and fuzzy.

The attraction to the past we humans share is a curious thing. It might not be love, but it is romantic. It clearly is girded by our general desire for knowledge, and our more specific thirst to know from whence we came. But we creep into a danger zone when we don’t see the past for what it was, when we seek comfort by evoking earlier times we like to think were simpler and easier. Reality has sharp edges.

Put aside for a moment the incredible and aggravating hubris of this quest — the belief that we can re-create that which is gone, in this case, for 4,000 years.

Focus instead on the mammoth.

One doesn’t have to have been a fanboy to understand that the beast is iconic. It stood 10 to 12 feet tall and weighed 6 to 8 tons, about the size of an African elephant. And it had those magnificent tusks.

While humans back then did hunt the mammoth, it largely was a victim of a changing climate; melting glaciers pretty much wiped out the vegetation mammoths needed to survive. Some carcasses were preserved well enough in the icy tundra that paleontologists were able to collect fragments of DNA, and by 2015, scientists had sequenced enough of the mammoth’s genetic blueprint to spark…