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00:00That will resurrect the mammoth.
00:30This barge is the base for one of the most unusual scientific expeditions of the century.
00:46Its leader is Professor Kazafumi Goto.
00:49His aim, to bring a creature extinct for thousands of years back to life.
00:56He wants to resurrect the mammoth.
01:04These icy cliffs may hold the key to this unique quest.
01:08Northern Siberia may have 10 million mammoth carcasses imprisoned in its permafrost.
01:17Goto has a Japanese film crew in tow.
01:21If he succeeds in bringing the mammoth back to life, they'll have the scientific scoop of the decade.
01:33There could be treasure trapped in this wall of ice and mud.
01:36The carcass of a perfectly preserved mammoth.
01:47Some of the last mammoths on earth roamed the shores of the Coloma River.
01:51But suddenly, along with an entire group of extraordinary megafauna, the mammoth simply vanished.
01:59To this day, scientists can't agree why the mammoths became extinct.
02:04And can't agree if it's right for Goto to try to bring the mammoth back to life.
02:08We can't agree.
02:09We can't prove to you, not only for the mammoth.
02:11We can't be the Banner of a bird's eye!
02:12And we can't prove to you, not only for the mammoth.
02:13A beautiful night of a bird's eye!
02:14To this day, we were still alive.
02:15After the day, we saw a bird's eye.
02:16We can't see, we can't see, we'll see.
02:17Scientific detective work is still trying to unravel the mysteries of these giants.
02:47This is the Condover mammoth, found in Shropshire.
02:53This is, as far as we know, the last mammoth that lived in Britain.
02:58In the Ice Age, it was one of the commonest animals in our globe, extending all the way
03:01from Europe, across Siberia, and even into North America.
03:06The lineage of the mammoth goes back more than five million years into Africa, so in
03:11fact mammoths have been around long before humans came on the scene, but they lasted right
03:16up until just a few thousand years ago.
03:20At the end, they were contemporary with humans, and indeed our human ancestors depicted mammoths
03:25very accurately on the walls of their caves, and possibly hunted them too.
03:30In the centuries after the mammoth disappeared, people who found their remains thought they
03:36must be the bones of giants, or colossal moles burrowing beneath the earth.
03:42It was in 1796 that the French paleontologist, Cuvier, drew the earliest accurate picture
03:51of the mammoth.
03:53He named it Elephas primogenius, the first elephant that ever existed.
03:58But Cuvier was wrong.
04:02Three species, the mammoth, the African, and the Asian elephant, are all descended from one
04:09common ancestor.
04:11It started in Africa about five million years ago.
04:17The mammoth evolved over the ages, adapting gradually to changes in the climate.
04:28As it migrated from Africa and moved north, its tusks grew longer than those of any other
04:33elephant.
04:42The hair on its body grew thicker, and more dense, to guard against the chill of colder
04:46northern climes.
04:56As the enamel layer of its teeth grew longer, the better to grind tough grasses and extract
05:01their nourishment.
05:08Its ears and tail shrank, to minimize the loss of body heat.
05:14As its numbers grew, the mammoth moved ever further northwards.
05:20Spreading at just four miles a year, the ancestral mammoth would have reached Siberia in just one
05:25thousand years.
05:31a few years ago, Professor Gotto's quest also takes him to the edge of the Arctic Circle.
05:47For four short weeks in August, the land is freed from the grip of ice and snow.
05:54Several complete frozen mammoth carcasses have been found here this century.
05:58A rainbow welcomes Gotto.
06:10It's a, I think, sign of the good start.
06:13I think we may find good frozen mammoth, hopefully, yes.
06:18This is just a starting point of the mammoth recreation, hopefully create mammoth at the end
06:25of 20th century.
06:28This is a remote and inhospitable land.
06:31Until recently, Siberia was closed to foreigners.
06:35The archipelago of Stalinist labor camps along the Colima River were kept a secret from the
06:39outside world.
06:41André Sherr has searched the area for mammoth remains.
06:52This, for example, is the famous Duvanni Yar bluff along the Colima River, which is about
07:0020 kilometers long, and it has a special kind of sediment called Yedoma.
07:07It includes a huge amount of ice inside it.
07:11So the total amount of water fixed in this sediment is up to 80 percent or even higher.
07:19The uppermost part is about 20,000 years old.
07:24And this sediment is very, very well environment to preserve organic remains of the past times.
07:36You can find a lot of bones and sometimes even frozen soft tissues of animals like famous mammoth carcasses.
07:50In contact with the air, the prehistoric remains immediately begin to rot.
08:03Yeah, that's smelt.
08:04Smelt of animals.
08:08When I found some pieces of bison meat on bone, it looked pretty fresh.
08:15It looked dark red and just like a steak.
08:19But what happens with this, when it goes out straight out of permafrost, it is wet.
08:26As soon as it dries, it loses its color and it's become like a dry mommy, like pemmican meat or something like that.
08:37Of course, I heard many stories how people ate this meat, but I wouldn't do that.
08:43Because if you've been at the Yedoma, you probably remember that smell, which is not very attractive.
08:50Parts of decaying animals are regularly released as the cliffs collapse, but Gotto has very specific requirements.
09:04He needs a mammoth in perfect condition and it has to be male.
09:15That's because of what lies at the heart of Gotto's scientific quest.
09:19He believes that the inert DNA of the mammoth is most likely to survive in its snap-frozen sperm.
09:26I think we may find intact DNA in spermatozoa frozen in permafrost.
09:34Gotto plans an experiment unique in science, to create life by injecting a dead sperm into the egg, the oocyte, of a living female elephant.
09:44We inject one spermatozoa into the oocyte. It's the only way to get fertilized eggs by dead sperm.
09:57Professor Gotto is the pioneer of a technique which could have profound implications for human reproduction.
10:04In 1990, he was the first to use dead sperm in the creation of a living animal.
10:09Although frozen sperm is often used in artificial insemination, his giant leap was to show that sperm injected into an egg could be successful even where the sperm showed no sign of life.
10:20This cough was the result of his technique, but success depends on the state of the DNA.
10:30Based on our bovine research, we kill the bovine spermatozoa and freeze them for several months.
10:39And we inject spermatozoa into the bovine oocyte. Then we obtain a live curve.
10:47So, you know, that indicates the spermatozoa DNA is very strong against freezing.
10:56The ultimate proof of the value of his work would be to use sperm frozen for thousands of years from an extinct animal to produce new life.
11:06Mammoth sperm with intact DNA would be ideal.
11:13But first, you've got to find it.
11:23The temperature is more than 20, so too many insects.
11:30Anyway, I cannot find anything.
11:38Each summer, the Yedema melts.
11:41The warmer river waters bite into the ice cliffs, which collapse in giant chunks.
11:47The rotting animal matter attracts swarms of flies and mosquitoes.
11:59For the scientists, more used to the clinical conditions of the lab, the sheer physical effort is gruelling.
12:05But the Japanese take full advantage of the Arctic summer with its 20 hours of light, working deep into the white night.
12:17But so far, the group has found only a mounting collection of old bones.
12:21Only eight entire mammoth bodies have been found this century.
12:33And the famous finds of the past have all been accidental.
12:40Local hunters, fishermen and gold prospectors stumbling across carcasses by chance.
12:44One such find, in 1901, was the Berezovka mammoth, spotted by a Lammut deer hunter.
13:00It was 30,000 years old, a male aged between 35 and 40, and still had food in its mouth.
13:06A post-mortem revealed that it had died from asphyxiation, which perhaps accounted for its erect penis.
13:14For Professor Gotto, this would have been a perfect find.
13:20The Berezovka mammoth was cut into 26 pieces and loaded onto a train of sledges.
13:28Getting to St. Petersburg took 10 months, a journey a third of the way around the planet.
13:45The Berezovka mammoth was reassembled, stuffed and given a replica head.
13:49It's still on display in St. Petersburg.
13:55André Scho is skeptical that the sperm would be usable even with a specimen as good as this.
14:02None of the famous carcasses actually has been studied immediately and conserved properly when it has been found.
14:11There was always a big time gap between the finding and the study.
14:20Even in the case of Dima, it was a long story.
14:26Baby Dima is the most complete specimen ever found.
14:30We can tell from his emaciated body that he was a sickly mammoth.
14:33When Dima was found in 1977, his internal organs were intact, but the chemicals used to embalm them limited their scientific value.
14:44And Dima was too young to have any sperm.
14:51Another baby, Masha, was found washed up on the river bank.
14:55How she got there, nobody knows.
14:58The body had been there some time and decay had set in.
15:01Horses, the harvest of prehistoric bones, gives the scientists something, at least, to work on.
15:19And Gotto is still optimistic.
15:20But the native hunters are uneasy.
15:30The ancient giants deserve more respect.
15:32Mamanthes, the local people, I'm from Tukty, they were called them the寒re.
15:42These are our people.
15:44The people called them the寒re.
15:46Yes, about Mamanthes, there is a very serious issue.
15:49If Goto ever finds his frozen sperm, he will use it to impregnate a female Asian elephant.
16:11Using only sperm carrying the X chromosome, he plans to breed a female hybrid, a new kind of animal, half elephant, half mammoth, an elemoth, a mammoth.
16:37Next, he would try to make this hybrid animal pregnant by using more of the frozen sperm.
16:52The third generation mammoth, also female and already carrying a majority of mammoth genes, would then be fertilized again with the frozen sperm.
17:07After three crosses, the resulting animal would be 88% mammoth.
17:14With a long gestation involved, the project would take at least half a century.
17:19But the scientific and practical obstacles seem immense.
17:22First, there's the problem of breeding across species.
17:30This has only been known to happen once between elephants.
17:34Motti was born at Chester Zoo as a result of an unplanned mating between an Asian and an African elephant.
17:40After only ten days, Motti died of internal bleeding.
17:49But the problems of cross species breeding didn't prevent the birth this year in Dubai of a karma, a cross between a camel and a llama.
17:56It was conceived by simple artificial insemination.
18:01The two parent species are separated by 30 million years of evolution.
18:06Substantially more than the five million years since mammoth and elephant diverged.
18:10Goto has a dream of reviving extinct life.
18:18As science advances, that dream is ever closer to coming true.
18:22The Siberian expedition is running out of time, luck and patience.
18:41Dr. Lazarov from the Siberian Mammoth Institute in Yakutsk suggests that they cut their losses and move on.
18:47The Japanese scientists have discovered that finding a carcass in the tundra is more of a hit and miss affair than they had expected.
19:06At greater risk from the collapsing cliffs, they work in more recent deposits nearer the top.
19:11And, at last, a breakthrough.
19:16Goto's team has discovered what looked like more mammoth bones, but this time perfectly preserved by the ice.
19:31And this material should contain some DNA.
19:52They will try to extract this from the bone marrow when they go back to Japan.
19:56Goto could, in theory, clone the animal, producing a new individual from a single body cell.
20:12But the cloning process demands fully intact DNA.
20:15And the longest continuous sequence of mammoth DNA yet found is a chain 545 base pairs long.
20:24A genetic drop in the ocean compared to the many millions of base pairs needed to code for an entire animal.
20:30If you imagine taking a book like the Bible, say, tearing all the pages out and mixing them up,
20:37then tearing out those pages into little pieces and mixing them all up into a box,
20:42and then asking someone who'd never read the Bible before to try and piece it together to recreate the complete book,
20:49that would be the sort of problem we're faced with trying to recreate a mammoth from the fragments of DNA that we have preserved in these bones.
20:55Goto knows he'll never find the complete DNA strand needed to clone a mammoth.
21:04The only chance is to find ancient sperm, which, although it contains just 50% of the animal's DNA,
21:11is capable, he claims, of delivering it intact to a living egg and so producing life.
21:16Many scientists are doubtful that ancient, frozen and defrosted sperm could fertilise an egg.
21:27But there are others who believe that while Goto's research into dead sperm injection is radical, it is entirely feasible.
21:35The genetic material that's contained within sperm is not like the genetic material that is contained in any other cell in our body,
21:40and it is less liable to damage than any other genetic material in our bodies.
21:45The genetic material in sperm is very tightly bound together,
21:49which makes it very robust in the sense that you can freeze and thaw it quite easily.
21:55So it's a very neatly designed cell, and it has a very single-minded purpose,
22:00which is to deliver the male genetic material to an egg.
22:02It almost is a protective mechanism, the freezing itself, once the temperature has been reduced.
22:11So it is conceivable, it is not inconceivable, that perhaps the DNA can be maintained.
22:19It would have to be below minus 30.
22:23That would be sort of the minimum temperature that one would expect to be able to maintain viability.
22:29And if everything was frozen relatively quickly, then that would be a perfect environment,
22:36because snap freezing is slightly more successful, even in the absence of a cryoprotectant,
22:40than a slow freezing process.
22:43So for some reason this mammoth fell into some freezing water, perhaps.
22:47Conditions in Siberia, with permafrost set at minus 30 degrees centigrade,
23:01should be as good as they get for the survival of sperm.
23:06We know that this was one of the last strongholds of the mammoth,
23:09but there's a riddle to solve.
23:12What ended the mammoth's time on Earth?
23:16There's a significant clue to the mystery of the vanishing mammoth.
23:20Its disappearance 10,000 years ago coincided with the spread of highly developed tribes of human hunters.
23:26It would be the supreme irony if man destroyed the Leviathan he now hopes to resurrect.
23:48Mammoth spread north-east across the Bering Straits into America, ranging as far south as Mexico.
24:13When man the hunter arrived in America around 11,000 years ago,
24:19this was a land filled with a marvellous multitude of giant creatures.
24:23Mammoth, ground sloth, sabre-toothed tiger, and dire wolves.
24:30But 10,000 years ago, almost unimaginably, 30 genera of great beasts,
24:36native for millions of years, simply ceased to exist.
24:39This is the wildest west there ever was.
24:44I'm envious of these people. They knew the continent as it truly was.
24:50Paul Martin is convinced that man drove the mammoth to extinction,
24:55an animal genocide, a blitzkrieg on the species.
24:58It looks as though what happened was fast, was massive, involving large numbers of large animals and many kinds, many species of them.
25:10It happened late in the geologic record, and it happened on the heels of human occupation of the New World.
25:16Paul Martin believes that the wild beasts provided such easy pickings for the hunter that there was a human population explosion.
25:25And so abundant was the prey that man simply killed these huge animals for their tastiest bits, leaving the rest to rot.
25:31I'm describing a pattern that applies to all successful invaders of new lands, animals or plants.
25:40Bands of highly skilled hunters swept into the Americas from the north, across the Bering Straits.
26:03Among them was Clovis man.
26:06By 10,000 years ago, these early human ancestors, with their superior hunting skills, were masters of the planet.
26:23Among mammoth bones, archaeologists have found the Clovis weapons that destroyed them.
26:43Clovis man remains an enigma.
26:46No skeletons have ever been found, and no sign of their dwellings.
26:53Mammoth slaughter on a large scale has been difficult to prove.
27:00Only about a dozen kill sites have been found in the whole of the United States.
27:05We're going down to what's called Murray Springs.
27:08And that particular site is important because there are three activities there.
27:13There's a place where they killed a mammoth, and then there's a place where they kill bison.
27:18But there's also an associated camp, campsite, where they process the mate they had gotten from this killing operation.
27:25Vance Haynes has pieced together evidence suggesting that Clovis man was a highly accomplished predator.
27:37He has been excavating here for 20 years.
27:42Each summer he returns, assembling the jigsaw picture of life and death 12,000 years ago.
27:47These are some of the tools that were found with this mammoth.
27:53Three Clovis points, two tips, and one complete one.
27:57This one was found essentially right here by the carcass.
28:01So I think that, you know, some people could argue that this was scavenged, but there's enough evidence here to suggest that it was brought down.
28:11Now this is how we think that they used a Clovis point and their atlatl dart.
28:26The point would be hafted onto a solid piece of wood like this, or maybe even bone.
28:31This foreshaft would then be put into a main shaft like so.
28:38And then the main shaft, this is the atlatl or spear thrower, just simply made from a stick with a knock on it.
28:47And this would provide the leverage to give you the range and distance and force you would need to get this to penetrate a mammoth effectively.
28:58Dr. Frison in Wyoming has used these on African elephants.
29:10When they cull these herds and bring down these elephants, he was then allowed to practice on the carcasses using Clovis points.
29:20And using both the atlatl and thrusting, and got very good penetration.
29:24But however much they had honed their hunting skills, Vance Haynes does not believe that man alone could have ended the mammoth's five million year existence.
29:36Certainly they had a hand in it. I mean the fact that they killed bison and mammoth was a significant factor.
29:42But sloth, camel, saber tooth cat, dire wolf, all of these other portions of the megafauna went out at the same time.
29:53My feeling is something else happened. I don't know what.
30:03Scientists are trying to establish what the mysterious something else might be.
30:09Can the ecology and lifestyle of the mammoth give them the forensic evidence they need?
30:13It's like piecing together a jigsaw without the picture on the box.
30:20We believe this to be one of the best reconstructions around.
30:24The hare, largely gorilla fur, is very good, very lifelike.
30:28To be honest, we haven't got a clue what colour they were.
30:33But this has now become the mammoth colour.
30:37This sort of rather red-y, tousled look.
30:40And hair on mummies tends to be red.
30:44Not because they're a proponents of redheads, but because that's how old hair goes.
30:49I have a famous slide here of mammoths living in an Ice Age landscape.
30:55There's a popular misconception of mammoths living in totally glacial conditions.
31:02You have mammoths here on bare rock, next to a glacial front.
31:09All I can say there is they've got a long way to go for breakfast.
31:14Mammoths and all other large mammals need prodigious amounts of food.
31:20And they just could not survive in that kind of environment.
31:22They would be living in environments where precipitation was actually rather low.
31:28And you would not have large quantities of snow.
31:32They were probably a long way away from glacial ice.
31:35They would have lived in environments which had rich and diverse vegetation.
31:41And we know that a lot of Arctic environments did have this mix of plants in the past.
31:45They would have consumed a prodigious amount of food a day, eating virtually everything.
31:55A young growing tree would have probably been a nice tidbit.
31:59They would have tended to keep the forests under control.
32:01This is the environment creator.
32:05This is the lawn mower that keeps the lawn flat.
32:08Everything else is living in micro-environments created by mammoths.
32:11Take mammoths away, the rest of the environmental structure collapses.
32:17The mammoth is almost symbolic of what can go wrong.
32:25It's not being able to take account of the unknown.
32:31That little factor that's chipped in that suddenly puts your survival at risk.
32:36There's a model for us there, I think.
32:37Our own future might well depend on identifying what that new risk is.
32:56The Japanese mammoth hunters have still had no success.
33:00The Yakutians come up with a new plan.
33:05They propose moving further upriver using smaller boats.
33:10While they search to give the mammoth back its life, the riddle of its death still remains unsold.
33:24If man was not guilty, could climate change be the key?
33:27It's even been suggested that a disastrous deluge, something as cataclysmic as the biblical great flood, triggered its disappearance.
33:45The mammoth had survived for five million years, weathering numerous ice ages, evidence of astonishing versatility and adaptation.
33:55But with the ending of the last ice age, they died out.
33:56Could the warming of the earth this time have produced conditions that the mammoth could not tolerate?
34:05The changeover from the last glaciation into the present interglacial was quite a complex one.
34:07The warming seems to have started about 15,000 years ago, and to have reached quite soon after that, a climate almost as warm as that of today.
34:08So the forests started to release a little bit.
34:09The warming seems to have started about 15,000 years ago, and to have reached quite soon after that, a climate almost as warm as that of today.
34:10So the forests started to return.
34:11But then we know that about 11,000 years ago, it would have been a very difficult time.
34:12But with the ending of the last ice age, they died out.
34:17Could the warming of the earth this time have produced conditions that the mammoth could not tolerate?
34:23The changeover from the last glaciation into the present interglacial was quite a complex one.
34:28The warming seems to have started about 15,000 years ago, and to have reached quite soon after that, a climate almost as warm as that of today.
34:35So the forests started to return.
34:38But then we know that about 11,000 years ago, there was actually a very sudden return over perhaps a few tens of years, or at most a hundred years, to a final very cold snatch, which was a kind of last gasp of the glaciation,
34:52when the world plunged into a time of very intense cold for just a few hundred years before the final warming up into the present interglacial.
35:03It's possible that that episode of very intense dry and cold could have played a major part in the extinctions.
35:10At the Murray Springs site, Vance Haynes has found dramatic evidence that could exonerate the hunters and point the finger firmly at the sudden reversal in the climate.
35:22As we come out of glaciation and the planet is warming up, suddenly there's this reversal where it gets cold again.
35:32And when that happens, you have a rise of the water table.
35:35And in this particular area, you develop this black organic mat.
35:42This contact between the base of the black mat and whatever it overlies anywhere in this region is the end of the Pleistocene large mammal fauna.
35:54There is no more horse, no more camel, there's no more mammoth, there's no more mastodon, big cats are gone, the dire wolf is gone.
36:04They become extinct at that point.
36:07There's never been any found in the black mat.
36:11Whereas these deposits below it, there's pretty abundant evidence of this.
36:16So it's just as if somebody just laid a big blanket over this landscape.
36:21Something happened 11,000 years ago that we don't yet understand.
36:27But why should this have killed off a species that had adapted so successfully for so long?
36:46Here in South Dakota, new clues are emerging from the bodies found in the most spectacular graveyard in the world.
36:57Larry Agenbrod is excavating mammoth remains preserved in natural traps like this.
37:03Pits were formed when warm underwater rivers ate away the soft underlying rock until it collapsed, leaving giant sinkholes.
37:16Tempted by lush vegetation and warm water, mammoths wandered into the sinkholes.
37:24Some never got out.
37:31We got 51 mammoths in the site so far, two woolies, 49 Colombian.
37:36And we just uncovered a skull this summer.
37:41We can't see if it has tusks or not.
37:43If it has even one tusk, we're up to 52 animals.
37:48You can't really see this concentration without realising how desperate these animals must have been.
37:55And preserving them where they died or where their bones were deposited, I think sends that message across in a powerful way.
38:04There are still 35 more feet of this pit to be dug out.
38:08But Larry has already learnt a lot about its victims.
38:10This trap tells us several things.
38:13First of all, it's like a time capsule.
38:15They died and were buried right here.
38:19And it has faithfully preserved even the most delicate bones.
38:24New research shows that nearly all of the hot springs mammoths died when the first autumn rains made the pit walls so slippery that they couldn't get out.
38:36Just as the rings tell the life story of a tree, the record of a mammoth's life is encoded in its tusks.
38:51Each year, as the tusk lengthens, more information is added.
38:56Examination with an electron microscope can reveal a mammoth's age, when it reached maturity, how many calves it had, and whether it was healthy.
39:05A tusk grows by addition of new material along the inner surface of this conical pulp cavity in its base.
39:18In life, this is situated within a socket in the animal's face, within its skull.
39:22And most of the new material of a tusk is added on this interface.
39:29The first material laid down in the animal's life is located out toward the tip of the tusk.
39:35What that leads to is a pattern of cones, cones stacked within cones.
39:40A tusk that grows in this fashion, adding layer after layer, time increment after time increment, really represents a record of growth in life history that is almost unparalleled in that we have an animal really almost from birth to death, the day of its death even.
40:01Dan has also been looking at the tusks of animals which died 10,000 years ago.
40:09Again, like tree rings, they should show variations in the climate.
40:13Hard times would show poor growth.
40:15If climate change was to blame for the mammoth's eventual extinction, do these tusks show signs of extreme environmental stress?
40:23I believe that the tusk records suggest that if anything, growth conditions were more benign, more favorable,
40:30for these animals towards the time of their extinction.
40:35They have thicker annual growth increments.
40:39They are growing in all respects in a normal fashion.
40:45They seem to be having offspring at a normal rate.
40:50In fact, at a high rate relative to what we know, for instance, of elephants under distressed conditions.
41:00Dan's work may prove to be crucial in steering experts away from the theory of climate change.
41:08The pendulum seems to be swinging back towards man's responsibility for the extinction of the mammoth.
41:14Using a mathematical model, that charge can now be put to the test.
41:17We're building a computer simulation of the colonization of North America and the spread of clovers hunters who then may choose to hunt mammoths.
41:32And we're trying to explore whether they might have pushed mammoths into extinction by their extent of hunting or not.
41:39Key variables are fed into the computer, such as human population density, mean rainfall and temperature.
41:48The red sequences show man as he passes through the corridor between retreating ice sheets.
41:54The green areas are mammoth populations.
41:56I've got a hunting intensity of 3% of humans on mammoths.
42:03Means every year, in any cell that humans and mammoths are present, 3% of the mammoths are killed by hunting.
42:11So that's a pretty low hunting intensity, isn't it?
42:12Yeah.
42:14Man's colonization of over two-thirds of North America took just 100 years.
42:19Mammoths have disappeared, haven't they?
42:23No, mammoths are still covering most of the continent.
42:26The mammoths are the dark green and also the dark red.
42:30The dark red shows people and mammoths in a cell.
42:33These turquoise and pink cells are cells without mammoths.
42:38At the moment, we've got coexistence between humans and mammoths.
42:42Okay.
42:44But man and mammoth do not coexist for very long.
42:47A little bit of hunting can have such a devastating effect on mammoth's populations.
42:54And when I say mammoth's populations, I basically mean elephant population,
42:57because that's the models that we're using.
43:00It's clear that these large-bodied animals are so sensitive to hunting almost any type.
43:07They're so sensitive because they take a long time to become sexually mature.
43:11And they're looking at a 24-month gestation.
43:14That's for African elephants.
43:15Probably would have been a bit longer for mammoths, perhaps.
43:18And then they need at least a year to recuperate from that before they can conceive again.
43:23So you're looking at a female only being able to produce a calf every three years at most.
43:29So you put those two factors together and you've got this very slow rate of reproduction growth.
43:34So you start taking out of some of those young females and you start seriously depleting the populations.
43:43But actually when you see it happen on the screen, when you simulate sort of 100 years or 500 years,
43:49and you see what had been a population at levels of perhaps a million or something like that,
43:54just collapse within a few decades to go extinct.
43:57It's such a dramatic picture.
44:06And I think it's just a serious warning of, you know, it just takes a little bit more poaching,
44:10a little bit more hunting and elephants might disappear, just in the same way that mammoths did.
44:13Parallels between the impact of man on the mammoth and the elephant make a compelling case.
44:23In 1979, the African elephant population was 1.3 million.
44:29A decade later, it had fallen to 600,000, a drop of more than half.
44:34Like the mammoth, elephants are being driven into smaller and smaller pockets by the expansion of the human race.
44:40The disappearance of the mammoth serves as a dire warning of the possible collapse of other species.
44:56But most scientists believe that resurrecting this ancient creature cannot atone for the mistakes of the past.
45:02The morality of trying to create an extinct mammal which has no environment to live in,
45:10and at a time when we're busy doing our best to exterminate its two nearest living relatives is pretty questionable.
45:17The story of the Jurassic Park's wonderful story, how they recreate the whole world.
45:28But you understand that the difference between the real thing which is discovered and the story is very, very big.
45:37I think it would be a bit of an insult to these marvellous creatures if we were to produce some sort of bizarre chimera, I suppose,
45:54of combining different bits of animals today with a bit of ancient DNA.
45:57I think so. I think we respect the mammoths by letting them have had their time and letting them rest in peace, really.
46:04I wish that there were a way to reverse the path of events.
46:11There isn't, however, and I think that the best that we can do is understand the processes that led to this extinction,
46:18and, if anything, use that understanding to monitor and appropriately intervene in the biology and ecology of fixed ant elephants.
46:28Professor Gotto justifies his work in the name of science, and for the sake of other animals at risk.
46:35By bringing the mammoth back from the dead, he could help protect living species from extinction.
46:39We are not thinking to make many mammoths. Just, we would like to know the gene is intact. Why?
46:50Because, nowadays, we are freezing sperm, egg, or fertilised egg of endangered species for future use.
47:03Scientists are already stockpiling the sperm of endangered species, such as chimpanzees, Siberian tigers, mountain gorillas, and the giant panda, to maintain the gene pool.
47:17Professor Gotto argues that this effort will be wasted unless we know more about the long-term effects of freezing genetic material.
47:23We don't know, after 500 years or after 10,000 years, how those genes are intact or not, you see. We don't know.
47:37So, the mammoth or other animal frozen over 10,000 years ago is a good specimen to know the future of genes.
47:48Gotto's work is inspired by the possibility of future extinctions.
47:55We may one day need to pull existing creatures back from the abyss.
47:59Then, his scientific work could be crucial.
48:03But this year, time has run out.
48:05The Siberian summer was too short. Not one frozen carcass came to light.
48:18The Japanese are reluctant to abandon their dream. The Yakutians are all too ready to leave.
48:36The Japanese are reluctant to abandon their dream. The Yakutians are all too ready to leave.
48:43The Japanese are reluctant to abandon their dream. The Yakutians are all too ready to leave.
48:50The Siberian winter is returning soon the Colima River will be covered with ice a meter thick
49:14We cannot find the proto-mamu this year but I think we will find someday
49:19So please, you know, don't, you know, give up and please support us and please continue to have dream
49:32Someday we will have success
49:39The Japanese are determined to return whether they eventually find their frozen mammoth or not
49:45It is certain that science will continue to try to reverse extinction and bring the dead back to life
50:04Next Tuesday at 9, Equinox explores the big G and explains the enigma of gravity
50:10The End
50:18The End
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