- 2 days ago
A journey to Siberia for the biggest ever Ice Age dig, unearthing a treasure trove of animals buried in the ground for thousands of years.
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AnimalsTranscript
00:00:00Northeast Siberia, 30,000 years ago, the last ice age.
00:00:07You would have seen 100,000 mammoths or more.
00:00:11A dangerous world of mammoths, woolly rhinos, and tenacious predators.
00:00:18You're entering this intimidating and dangerous world.
00:00:23Now, the frozen soil of Siberia is melting, revealing these mega-beasts and their secrets for the first time.
00:00:33Oh, my God.
00:00:34A team of scientists is on the hunt for these creatures and their DNA.
00:00:39I feel like I'm about to jump inside of a time machine.
00:00:42On a mission to unravel their mysteries.
00:00:46I don't know of any other specimen like this.
00:00:49And perform a mammoth autopsy.
00:00:53In the wild.
00:00:55The mammoth may be extinct.
00:00:59But if scientists can harness its DNA.
00:01:02Everybody ready?
00:01:04They will bring it back to life.
00:01:07It is a bit like science fiction.
00:01:09In a groundbreaking experiment that could change the course of history.
00:01:21Russia, north of the Arctic Circle.
00:01:29It's a hostile wilderness, covered in pine forests.
00:01:33Today, few creatures live here.
00:01:37But at the height of the Ice Age, millions of mega-beasts walk the land.
00:01:45Today, the mightiest of them, mammoths, rhinos, step wolves, are all extinct.
00:01:58Now, four of the world's leading Ice Age scientists are here.
00:02:02In search of these lost giants.
00:02:05Because in summer, temperatures are now warm enough to melt the frozen soil.
00:02:10Revealing the mummies of Ice Age animals.
00:02:14So many unusual specimens are coming out that have never been seen before.
00:02:21Previously, I think, the number of pristine herbivorous mummies found were really rare.
00:02:25But that number just seems to be increasing year on year on year.
00:02:29The team wants to find high-quality DNA.
00:02:33And that means finding near-perfect Ice Age mummies.
00:02:39We are going to have access to incredibly preserved specimens
00:02:43that otherwise would just be impossible to find.
00:02:49They're going to a place called Balayagara,
00:02:53where astonishing discoveries are occurring on an almost daily basis.
00:02:58It's incredible.
00:03:00I feel like I'm getting closer to the Ice Age, every step I take.
00:03:05They are finding some really amazing mummified or frozen babies of various animals
00:03:10and a lot of mammoth remains.
00:03:17Spearheading the quest for Ice Age DNA is Harvard professor George Church.
00:03:22I think this is for a knife.
00:03:25That's okay.
00:03:26Finding the best preserved ancient mammoth DNA in Siberia
00:03:30is crucial to the most ambitious scientific project of his career.
00:03:35Bringing the mammoth back to life.
00:03:40It is a bit like science fiction.
00:03:43The hope is we'll have one initially,
00:03:46then many individuals with a great deal of genetic diversity.
00:03:49Certainly the first one will look like a mammoth,
00:03:52and we hope it will be comfortable in the cold.
00:03:55This part of the country is the best place to find ancient DNA.
00:04:04That's because it's the main center for tusk hunting in Siberia.
00:04:10Locals on the search for valuable ancient mammoth tusks tunnel into the frozen river banks using water pumped from the
00:04:19river.
00:04:21And if they're lucky, they find the treasure they seek.
00:04:24They must carefully wash away the surrounding soil to avoid damaging the prehistoric ivory.
00:04:31A pair of tusks can be worth up to $75,000.
00:04:37Many end up in China as carved ivory ornaments.
00:04:54But while they're hunting for tusks, they are also finding the remains of Ice Age animals,
00:05:00such as woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos, and cave lions.
00:05:06To see what's been found this year, the team leaves for a dig site upriver.
00:05:17The holy grail for this mission, a mammoth so well preserved that its DNA is relatively intact.
00:05:27Getting around this landscape isn't easy.
00:05:37We appear to be stuck in the mud.
00:05:47So we're trying to navigate up a sort of small channel that gets shallower and shallower and narrower and narrower.
00:05:54So we're hitting the sort of very soft clay bottom.
00:05:57So it's a race engine trying to push it forward and we're creeping.
00:06:07But the boats can't make it through the shallow water.
00:06:10The team has to walk the rest of the way through quicksand mud.
00:06:17Something there.
00:06:20We've got a bison skull. There's more than one.
00:06:23Yeah, a little one.
00:06:25Walking to the camp, everywhere you look there's bone from one animal or a horn from another animal.
00:06:31We've got some mammoths here.
00:06:32Yeah.
00:06:32There's a jaw, a part of a tooth.
00:06:34Oh, wow.
00:06:35There's another big tooth.
00:06:36That's this guy.
00:06:37Right.
00:06:37Right.
00:06:37This is a piece of pelvis.
00:06:39Yeah.
00:06:39Professor Dan Fisher is not just looking for the mammoth.
00:06:43He's also eager to find evidence of Ice Age humans.
00:06:46I'm always sort of primed to look out for evidence of human interaction with these animals.
00:06:54Right.
00:06:55This is younger.
00:06:56What caused these animals to go extinct?
00:07:01Evidence of humans in Ice Age Siberia is rare.
00:07:05But a few sites have revealed stone tools and butchered mammoth bones.
00:07:15Some with the tips of stone weapons still inside them.
00:07:19Dan is on the lookout for evidence that humans were hunting in this region over 30,000 years ago.
00:07:29A couple of tusks were recently discovered here within the hillside.
00:07:34Could the rest of the mammoth be nearby?
00:07:39Finding a whole mammoth in situ in the place where it was deposited seems like a ridiculous dream.
00:07:47But all signs seem to be suggesting that Balayagora has got really special material.
00:07:54The tusk hunters get to work.
00:08:14Bubbling up in that pool that's being created is something that I thought was a bit of pelvis, a bit
00:08:19of hip bone.
00:08:20It's almost impossible to see.
00:08:23They move some of the bones around.
00:08:28I mean there's a lot of foaming in the back.
00:08:30Like there could be some soft tissue or something in there.
00:08:33It's possible. It's possible.
00:08:42Oh my goodness.
00:08:44It looks like it might be a foot.
00:09:03A team of scientists is in the Siberian wilderness looking for the remains of Ice Age creatures and the blueprint
00:09:14of ancient life, Ice Age DNA.
00:09:18Oh my goodness. It looks like it might be a foot.
00:09:21They found mysterious remains in the permafrost.
00:09:25You can see quite a lot of the skeleton basically.
00:09:29You can see a bit of pelvis jumbled up with a fragment of upper jaw and a bit of lower
00:09:33jaw.
00:09:35Amazing.
00:09:36It's just, wow.
00:09:41Suddenly what you had in this depression was a mess of, I guess, permafrost mammoth soup.
00:09:47At last, Tori and Luva get to inspect their ancient find.
00:09:56It is a mammoth's foot.
00:09:58Yeah, bone.
00:10:00Uh-huh.
00:10:10That looks like muscle.
00:10:13The foot could contain the DNA they are looking for.
00:10:17You can see the toenails.
00:10:20Yeah.
00:10:20Toenails.
00:10:21If we roll it towards me.
00:10:23Mm-hmm.
00:10:25So here, if you push your finger in.
00:10:27Yeah.
00:10:27It's really squishy.
00:10:28So I think that's probably the foot pad.
00:10:31Finding a foot means there might be a leg and even the rest of the mammoth in the pit.
00:10:37It could give the team clues to how the mammoth moved in life.
00:10:42We have a little bit of fur down at the bottom.
00:10:45Quite nice, actually.
00:10:46This foot is thousands of years old.
00:10:49But it's still covered in fur.
00:10:52Was this the true colour of the woolly mammoth?
00:10:55The genetics have suggested that a lot of mammoths were very dark coloured.
00:10:59And this reddish colour might just be how the fur colour degrades over time.
00:11:04The genetics behind the mammoth fur colour is very weak.
00:11:07We know very, very little about this.
00:11:09So I'm starting to think that maybe this was their colour.
00:11:12You end up with reddish mammoths in cave paintings.
00:11:14That may be a coincidence or it may not.
00:11:17I just love these toenails.
00:11:19Look at that.
00:11:20It really smells, though.
00:11:21It does.
00:11:24Professor Dan Fisher and Siberian paleontologist Dr. Valery Plotnikov find more remains of the creature.
00:11:30Could they provide clues to what this mammoth was like when it was alive?
00:11:35We've got a humerus.
00:11:36Here's the femur.
00:11:37We've got another humerus.
00:11:39That's a lunar right there.
00:11:41Yeah.
00:11:42There are enough parts that we should be able to put together a whole animal.
00:11:47But this is like an engine that's been disassembled and the parts scattered all over the workroom floor.
00:11:52The fragments of the skull might help them figure out the mammoth's size.
00:11:56This is an upper molar and the front of the animal here, so it's like on my right side.
00:12:03Is this a tusk alveoli?
00:12:04Yes.
00:12:05This is a portion of the tusk socket.
00:12:09This rough texture relates to the ligament fibers that actually suspend the tusk within its socket.
00:12:16Oh, yeah.
00:12:17It's like it's attached to springs within the bony cylinder.
00:12:22Its curvature shows us, if we project that around, the approximate diameter of the tusk.
00:12:30A little smaller than that.
00:12:31There we go. That's better.
00:12:34The mammoth had massive tusks.
00:12:36But how big was the animal itself?
00:12:39Okay.
00:12:41To find out, the team starts putting the mammoth back together.
00:12:49Can we extrapolate the height to the shoulder?
00:12:53It would be nice.
00:12:54Dan and I decided to try to estimate the shoulder height of this particular mammoth.
00:12:59You can do that if you have all the bones, from the foot through all the way up to the
00:13:04scapula, the shoulder bone.
00:13:06Nice.
00:13:07I think we're seeing this animal at more or less its adult size.
00:13:12That's 41 centimeters.
00:13:14And it's a big animal.
00:13:15Only by measuring the leg bones can Dan figure out its height.
00:13:19It's about 69.
00:13:21Our mammoth was 3 meters, 23 centimeters at the shoulder.
00:13:27That's right.
00:13:28Way up there.
00:13:29That's right.
00:13:29That's a big, big mammoth.
00:13:35Adding the head and hump to the shoulder height.
00:13:39That's a 12 foot tall mammoth.
00:13:52This is one of the largest mammoths the team has ever seen.
00:13:57About the size of the biggest African elephant on earth today.
00:14:04It has male tusks, it has a male pelvis, it has male size.
00:14:08It's a male.
00:14:10Very strong and big male.
00:14:12Yes, yes, yes.
00:14:14This mammoth was at the upper scale of how big male mammoths came.
00:14:19The team has calculated its size.
00:14:23But to decode the story within its genes, they need to search deep within its body.
00:14:34The scientist at the forefront of mammoth DNA research is Harvard professor George Church.
00:14:40His ambition is to bring the mammoth back to life.
00:14:45He thinks adding mammoths back to the ecosystem could help stop the Siberian permafrost from melting.
00:14:55He's one of the world's leading geneticists and among Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in 2017.
00:15:04He's reprogramming genes to fight disease, reverse the aging process, and since 2008 bring the mammoth back from extinction.
00:15:16George uses a cutting edge technology called CRISPR.
00:15:21CRISPR works by searching through the genome and finding that one needle in the haystack place to make a cut.
00:15:29Using CRISPR, George can take the genome of one animal and turn it into something new.
00:15:37He's looking for critical genes that are unique to the mammoth's DNA to swap into modern-day elephant genes.
00:15:46Everything about the mammoth gene restoration project has gone quickly.
00:15:50We didn't have to work that hard at recruiting people.
00:15:52It seemed like everybody wanted to participate in one way or another.
00:15:54He wants to take the Asian elephant, replace key parts of its genome, and turn it into a mammoth.
00:16:03But to do that, he needs very well-preserved mammoth DNA.
00:16:08By swapping genes for fat covering, tusk shape, ear and tail size, and of course fur, he hopes to create
00:16:19an elephant-mammoth hybrid.
00:16:29George's cutting-edge science depends on healthy mammoth DNA from places like Balayagora.
00:16:42There, the team decides to visit a second site, a tunnel dug deep into the permafrost.
00:16:50Remains could be even better preserved here.
00:16:53It's a complete leap into the unknown. We don't quite know what to expect.
00:16:56The only thing we feel certain about is that we'll find something remarkable.
00:17:04The tunnel is a dangerous place.
00:17:07The tusk hunters had to create a new entrance after the first one collapsed due to heat.
00:17:12And it's human beings that generate these high temperatures, as their body heat makes the permafrost thaw and lose stability.
00:17:21To prevent another collapse, the team will go underground just two at a time.
00:17:28Torrey and Luva are the first to enter.
00:17:33These sites where they do excavate are gold mines in the sense that there are so many precious specimens coming
00:17:39out.
00:17:40We've seen this acceleration in this last five, ten years.
00:17:43It's really, it's an exciting time.
00:17:50Now the entrance is small, it's cold, then you're heading underground.
00:17:59Is it getting narrower?
00:18:01Yeah.
00:18:02You're winding through it, it just feels like you're entering this dark and rather intimidating and dangerous world through a
00:18:08claustrophobic tunnel.
00:18:10This is like pure ice.
00:18:11I'm supposed to go to the right here.
00:18:15Oh, okay.
00:18:16Oh, wow. Look at that.
00:18:19Wow.
00:18:20That is nice.
00:18:22Yeah.
00:18:22What's the teeth?
00:18:23Need to identify that with it.
00:18:24To me, this feels like a bison.
00:18:26It's awesome. Cool.
00:18:28I'm going to have a look.
00:18:28Yeah.
00:18:30I get the sense we're approaching Rich's.
00:18:35The cramped conditions continue for 200 feet.
00:18:39But then the tunnel opens up.
00:18:46Oh, wow.
00:18:48Look at this.
00:18:50This is enormous.
00:18:52Yeah.
00:18:53It's like being in a real cave, you know.
00:18:56I was not prepared for this giant chamber to feel this vastness of space and abundance of large bones and
00:19:06skulls just lying around and sticking out of the walls.
00:19:11I just, you won't appear in every cranny because I'm sure that's something amazing.
00:19:17To the right of the tunnel is a large chamber.
00:19:21As they explore, they come across a twisted mass of bones.
00:19:27You've got one mammoth leg mixed up with other animals.
00:19:30Yeah, definitely.
00:19:31One arm there.
00:19:33Yeah.
00:19:34And I thought I spotted another one over there.
00:19:38The bodies have been broken apart somehow.
00:19:40These animals would have died on the surface and their bones would have been picked clean by scavengers or whatever.
00:19:45And then later on, these bones might have ended up burning the permafrost.
00:19:54A bit more mammoth.
00:19:55But then Tori notices an intact creature camouflaged on the rock.
00:19:59It's a baby of one of the mammoth's deadliest predators, an Ice Age cave lion cub.
00:20:16That looks pretty awesome.
00:20:18That is amazing.
00:20:21This baby cave lion died tens of thousands of years ago.
00:20:26It's a remarkable find.
00:20:28But how did it remain in such perfect condition after thousands of years underground?
00:20:49Hundreds of miles from civilization, two Ice Age experts are deep inside a tunnel hunting for frozen mummies and their
00:21:00DNA.
00:21:02This movie is a cool place.
00:21:04They've found a perfectly preserved creature.
00:21:11It's definitely a baby, isn't it? It's a cub.
00:21:13Yeah.
00:21:13Very young.
00:21:16The cave lion cub is something you would never, ever, ever expect to find.
00:21:20It's just in fantastic preservation.
00:21:24Oh, jeez.
00:21:26I think there's a tongue, yeah?
00:21:27It's a tongue.
00:21:28It was pristine.
00:21:29It was pristine.
00:21:30It was exquisite.
00:21:30I have seen nothing like it in my entire life.
00:21:34Every little detail, right?
00:21:36Yeah.
00:21:36Yeah.
00:21:37It's really amazing that something that's been frozen for like 30, 40,000 years still retains the whiskers.
00:21:44How that can happen, that they don't break from being frozen for that amount of time is just incredible.
00:21:49The back feet must have been, you know, a bit flattened.
00:21:53Oh, yeah.
00:21:53By the weight of some ice or something, but the front paws are perfectly preserved.
00:21:58You can see this little claw.
00:22:00This is so rare.
00:22:02Obviously, look, this would not have been quite so adorable as an adult.
00:22:06No.
00:22:06Because cave lions were bigger than an African lion.
00:22:09Yeah.
00:22:10They were significantly bigger than a modern lion.
00:22:14African lions are big.
00:22:16They come up to about hip height on a human.
00:22:20But cave lions were up to 20% bigger.
00:22:31This predator was feared and respected by the Ice Age humans that painted them on the walls of their caves.
00:22:38But despite their name, they would have lived in open grassland.
00:22:45The cave lion cubs' fur and whiskers are so perfect.
00:22:50How did they survive tens of thousands of years?
00:22:54The fact that we find it so preserved suggests that it must have, you know, become frozen very quickly and
00:23:00buried very quickly.
00:23:01If it died and was lying around on top of the grass, then it would have been eaten by maggots
00:23:05and bacteria and so on.
00:23:07The cub died at a young age.
00:23:10It could have become trapped in a muddy pit and frozen within hours as temperatures dropped.
00:23:17One would have to guess that it's fallen into a bog or into water or something like that, which then
00:23:22has frozen relatively quickly.
00:23:24Because if they are in water for a long time, then the fur comes off, right? But this one has
00:23:27everything.
00:23:29Luva is eager to gather its DNA.
00:23:33But taking samples from the cub could mean ruining its near perfect condition.
00:23:38It's a difficult question whether to sample a specimen like this. It's so well preserved and, you know, you really
00:23:45don't want to do any damage to it.
00:23:48The team decides to leave the cub intact.
00:23:57Meanwhile, work continues on the mammoth leg where Luva rejoins Dan.
00:24:09For Dan, the presence of flesh is exciting.
00:24:13The knee is twisting a little bit on its joint.
00:24:17It means he can carry out a prehistoric autopsy.
00:24:23He wants to investigate a part of a mammoth that he has only ever seen as bone.
00:24:29The kneecap.
00:24:33So this is the front aspect of the femur.
00:24:38Our kneecap should be right inside there. I can almost feel it.
00:24:42We just need to maybe get some of this connective tissue out of the way.
00:24:50It's really tough.
00:24:52And going to a place where things are preserved so perfectly, essentially as it was within days, weeks, months of
00:25:01the animal's death, that's a real opportunity.
00:25:04You might be the first person who's ever cut out a kneecap from a mammoth.
00:25:10Let's say I don't know of anyone else who has.
00:25:13The thickness just gives you this really dramatic sense of how powerful their legs must have been.
00:25:19Yes. You know?
00:25:20Yes. This is what he stood up with.
00:25:23Right, right.
00:25:24You could lift it and bend it that way, and that will open up the knee joint here.
00:25:30Oh, good. That's good.
00:25:32Having only worked with the skeletons of these mammoths and go and see one in the flesh, literally, brought these
00:25:40animals to life for me in ways that has never happened before.
00:25:46And I'm tearing up thinking about it now, because in that moment, I was like, oh, my God, these were
00:25:55real.
00:25:58There's the kneecap right there.
00:26:00And in fact, I've just opened into the joint capsule here.
00:26:07A little of the synovial fluid.
00:26:08Oh.
00:26:10Yeah.
00:26:12That smells, uh, ripe.
00:26:19Yeah.
00:26:20Yes.
00:26:21There.
00:26:22It's a boy.
00:26:36The kneecap is a precious find.
00:26:38It is the key to understanding how the mammoth moved.
00:26:42This is how the mammoth kicks that front foot forward or straightens his leg.
00:26:48And this is where the muscle is attached to pull back on that, to make that lower mammoth swim forward.
00:26:57With all the soft tissue around it, I wanted to be sure I understood the details of its form.
00:27:02And that's something that, before I went on this trip, I didn't feel I was 100% solid on.
00:27:08Now I think I do understand that.
00:27:11There's a clue in the foot and the leg to how this mammoth met its end.
00:27:16There were these feet that were well preserved, still with soft tissue around them.
00:27:21It's entirely possible that that is an indication that somehow the animal became, uh, caught, trapped,
00:27:28there being a mud flow.
00:27:30That mud then freezes.
00:27:32And, uh, you can be sure then that the parts that are down in that mud,
00:27:37they may be among the best preserved parts of that animal.
00:27:40It's entirely possible, and that would leave then other parts available to scavengers,
00:27:47you know, susceptible to being disarticulated and scattered.
00:27:57The Tusk Hunters show the team a new Ice Age animal.
00:28:03A bird that looks like it's just fallen out of the sky.
00:28:08I don't speak Russian, but I just have these people coming up to me and shoving this bird in my
00:28:13face,
00:28:13and my first thought is, yeah, that's nice, you found a dead bird.
00:28:17They were like, no, no, no, no, like, this is from the cave.
00:28:19With the help of translators, we were able to determine that, yeah,
00:28:23they had actually taken it out of the permafrost.
00:28:25Even to have the feathers is really special.
00:28:28This is a bird that would have flown over these vast herds of mammoths.
00:28:35If I could just have, you know, one minute seeing through that bird's eyes,
00:28:40it would tell me more than an entire lifetime of study could possibly tell me.
00:28:45This is an Ice Age lark.
00:28:52It is the only mummy of an Ice Age bird ever discovered.
00:28:59Delicate finds like this are a sign that these tunnels have the potential
00:29:04So many bones in the ceiling.
00:29:05to reveal even more extraordinary Ice Age creatures
00:29:08and the mammoth DNA that could change the course of history.
00:29:13Oh, look at that!
00:29:21Every summer,
00:29:24these remote riverbanks reverberate
00:29:27with the sound of tusk hunters
00:29:32blasting tunnels into frozen permafrost
00:29:35in search of mammoth ivory.
00:29:39For the first time, scientists are joining them underground
00:29:45to look for the frozen remains of Ice Age creatures
00:29:49and their precious DNA.
00:29:51They could bring the mammoth back to life.
00:29:54Most tusk hunting operations are illegal.
00:29:57In most parts of the Russian Federation,
00:30:00this hydraulic mining is strictly against the law.
00:30:05It happens, but it's not sanctioned formally in any way.
00:30:09But this group of tusk hunters has been specially authorized to hunt for mammoth ivory.
00:30:15As long as any Ice Age animals they discover
00:30:18are flagged for inspection by the Academy of Sciences.
00:30:23What was interesting about this opportunity,
00:30:26it was all in the open that was above board.
00:30:30There was an intention to collaborate.
00:30:34We really shared common interests
00:30:36in what was it they were finding.
00:30:39What history does it represent?
00:30:44Descending into the darkness,
00:30:46it's Jacqueline's first time in a tunnel like this.
00:30:52It was actually scary at first.
00:30:54I've never been in an environment like that.
00:30:57And then suddenly you turn a corner and everything opens up.
00:31:01Oh, my God.
00:31:02There's so many bones in the ceiling.
00:31:05There are.
00:31:05It's glittering and there are bones everywhere.
00:31:08And it's like the closest you could come to just stepping into a time machine.
00:31:11There's more coming up.
00:31:13It's possibly the most exciting thing I've ever experienced in my life.
00:31:20Among the endless scatters of animal bones,
00:31:22they find a mammoth skull.
00:31:25But it's in bad condition, so unlikely to have good DNA.
00:31:33We could see evidence of tracks of bone into the sediment.
00:31:36We could see evidence of them checking for the presence of additional bone,
00:31:42sort of left and right, up and down, along the main line that they had followed.
00:31:48Walking in through these twisting, turning tunnels,
00:31:51you know, you look up at the ceiling and the walls and there's sort of bone coming out everywhere.
00:31:54But there's also this sense of layering.
00:31:56You could read those layers like a storybook and get a sense of the changes in the ecosystem over time.
00:32:03There's bison on our right.
00:32:05Many bones are from large animals like bison, horse and mammoth.
00:32:09Looks like a fair collection of bones on this side.
00:32:12And at last, a frozen mummy.
00:32:16Then right in front of us here is, I suspect...
00:32:19Look at that.
00:32:20A hare.
00:32:22Oh, my gosh.
00:32:30Unlike the mammoth and cave lion, the arctic hare still exists today.
00:32:38It is perfectly adapted for extreme cold.
00:32:42And is one of the largest hares known to science.
00:32:47These little nose and whiskers.
00:32:51There's a shiny set of incisors.
00:32:54You can almost imagine him twitching that nose.
00:32:58We've got a couple of ears, it looks like.
00:33:00Yeah, ears.
00:33:01Wow.
00:33:02Oh, that's wonderful.
00:33:03Small animals like the hare, Ice Age bird, and predators like the cave lion paint a picture of the wide
00:33:10range of wildlife that shared the Ice Age world with the woolly mammoth.
00:33:15But Dan and Jacqueline are searching for evidence of mammoths and the environment they inhabited.
00:33:26As an Ice Age ecologist, what really excites me about the possibility of this landscape is that it would capture
00:33:32so many different aspects of the ecosystem from top to bottom, from predators to plants.
00:33:41So many bones.
00:33:43So many bones.
00:33:44In the rear part of the ledge here, we've got more of our horse and bison.
00:33:51Aha, this is probably mammoth fecal material.
00:33:56A coprolite.
00:33:57Right.
00:33:57Fossil poop.
00:33:58I want to flip it.
00:33:59Let's try to keep it together.
00:34:03There we go.
00:34:04Now it looks like a poo.
00:34:18I'd really like to sample this.
00:34:22Along with the mammoth dung, Jacqueline bags up a sample of permafrost.
00:34:37Back at base camp, she gets a closer look under the microscope.
00:34:45So we're looking at some of the fragments of plants that have come out of this mammoth dung.
00:34:49And you can see that a lot of it's just vegetation, very fibrous, lots of sort of grassy, rooty bits.
00:34:56There's some fun things in here, like a little fragment of a seed and something that feels much tougher, maybe
00:35:03a bit woody.
00:35:04It might be a small bit of twig.
00:35:08The mammoth dung reveals a high-definition image of Ice Age Siberia.
00:35:14Not just grasslands, occasional trees and bushes, too.
00:35:21This sample will have come from some time in the last 50,000 years.
00:35:27And because it's so well preserved, it helps us paint a picture of the landscape that this mammoth was wandering
00:35:32through.
00:35:34Imagine this vast, rolling grassland with little clumps of trees here and there, lots of flowers, very rich, diverse habitat.
00:35:43And this incredible ecosystem was able to support anything from 20,000 to 100,000 woolly mammoths just in this
00:35:50part of Siberia.
00:35:54And there's more to be found in the permafrost sample.
00:35:58Oh, look at that. It's an Ice Age moth.
00:36:03You know, you can see its little antennae, its little mouth parts, the little hairs on its legs.
00:36:11I mean, that's incredible.
00:36:14The moth is tens of thousands of years old, but still as perfect as the day it died.
00:36:24Insect finds like this, that are as intact as a specimen is, are incredibly rare.
00:36:30And so, this is really exciting.
00:36:33This little guy is going to make some insect scientists really happy.
00:36:42It's funny how quickly you adjust to things, how fast the new normal comes.
00:36:50There's a very fast and very bumpy ride to the boat.
00:36:54Once we're here, there's usually kind of a scramble to get off and then a kind of a long trek.
00:37:02When I first got here, I was like, oh my gosh, you know, the ground is slippery or even I'm
00:37:08going to get stuck.
00:37:10It's like an obstacle course, right? It's like you're walking on logs, you're kind of sliding around in the mud.
00:37:15It's like a stick.
00:37:17Walking a mile in that terrain is like walking 10 miles somewhere else, just in terms of the exertion and
00:37:22the complexities of that landscape.
00:37:25And then, you know, me walking to the camp, into the wild.
00:37:29Okay everybody, listen up.
00:37:31Just so everybody knows, last night there was a bear and two bear cubs sighted.
00:37:37We have got some protection today, we have Vasili who's armed, just to make sure that nothing surprising happens.
00:37:50This was my first permafrost tunnel and I didn't really have a lot of expectations going in.
00:37:55So first you just, you're walking in this mud and this darkness, then suddenly you turn a corner and everything
00:38:01opens up and it's glittering and there are bones everywhere and bits of grass hanging from the ceiling.
00:38:05And it was like walking into some kind of fairy wonderland.
00:38:10For an hour afterwards, I've just felt like I'm on some kind of high and do it all again the
00:38:15next day.
00:38:17I don't even have words to describe it.
00:38:19It's like it's a living thing, it's real.
00:38:21Yeah, I could get used to this life.
00:38:24The team is building a picture of a prehistoric world, from mega beasts right down to tiny insects.
00:38:31But how did all these animal remains end up together in this one small area?
00:38:37Could it have been the result of an ice age disaster?
00:38:41A disaster that resulted in the preservation of the animals like the lion cub, hare and mammoth.
00:38:48And could this site also hold the most valuable treasure, viable mammoth DNA?
00:39:08These permafrost wastelands in Siberia are revealing the bodies of ice age creatures to a group of mammoth experts on
00:39:21the hunt for ancient DNA.
00:39:24But as they explore, they're not just finding mega beasts, they're finding every size of animal frozen underground.
00:39:37One of the things that's so remarkable about that cave was that you would have everything from bones that were
00:39:44completely clean to a completely intact cave lion cub with its fur to insects like that moth.
00:39:51All focused and located in the same place.
00:39:54I mean, we really were sort of tripping from one animal to the next as we went through the tunnel.
00:40:01Dan and Jacqueline want to know more about how the tusk hunters find mammoth ivory.
00:40:07Boris Berezhnov has found five pairs of tusks this past summer, worth nearly half a million dollars.
00:40:14What's the secret of locating mammoth remains?
00:40:17On our way in, we saw some caves along the river. How do you decide where to start digging?
00:40:25It depends. If there's ice, then we go at the ice. If there are big bones, then we direct the
00:40:31water at the bones.
00:40:33If we find bones, it's what we call a gold rush. That's the way we go, along a river of
00:40:38bones.
00:40:45So the key is to find big concentrations of bones, which are likely to include mammoth remains.
00:40:53There's a phrase that sticks out to me, which is river of bone.
00:40:57So this idea that you're following this meandering stream of bones that have accumulated through time.
00:41:04There could be some natural processes that are causing these bones to aggregate in just this way.
00:41:10It was so easy to see why forests use those words, river or roadway of bone.
00:41:20To solve the mystery of why all these bones and mummies are in one place,
00:41:25the team deploys their drone to film the surrounding area.
00:41:30When you get narrowly of the landscape, you realize how big it is.
00:41:34How vast Siberia is. It's just insane. You just can't see the end of it.
00:41:40Going through the drone footage, Jacqueline observes unusual shapes in the permafrost.
00:41:45This is a series of mounds of permafrost.
00:41:49Bones might be accumulating in the spaces between these mounds.
00:41:54You actually have trees growing where the ice used to be between these hills.
00:41:57These shapes in the forest-covered permafrost are the remains of ancient ice wedges.
00:42:06V-shaped cracks that can plunge 30 feet deep into the ground.
00:42:11They are created by water expanding as it turns to ice.
00:42:16And criss-cross the landscape throughout this region.
00:42:21This landscape that these Ice Age animals would have been wandering through would have been very dangerous.
00:42:30Perhaps all these animals that we find that are perfectly preserved are actually animals that fell down into these wedges.
00:42:36That would explain why they still have the fur because they would have been frozen quickly.
00:42:42During Ice Age summers, as ancient ice wedges melted, they would have become natural animal traps.
00:42:51Invisible and deadly in this muddy world to an unsuspecting mammoth or cave lion.
00:42:57Ice wedges could explain the Tusk Hunters' rivers of bone that they seek out to locate mammoth ivory.
00:43:06But do the Tusk Hunter tunnels that follow the path of the ancient ice wedges also hold well-preserved DNA
00:43:14that could bring mammoths back to Siberia?
00:43:24Tori and Luva are back in the tunnel, searching for remains of woolly mammoths.
00:43:30They're looking for evidence of the land surface the mammoth herds once walked on.
00:43:36They're about 30 feet underground.
00:43:40Colder in here, right?
00:43:41Lots of roots hanging.
00:43:44Look at all this!
00:43:45It's like hay!
00:43:48They're finding what look like fresh roots and grass.
00:43:52It's the surface of an Ice Age meadow.
00:43:56It's like dried up grass and roots that have been on the surface growing maybe tens of thousands of years
00:44:02ago,
00:44:02and then it's been buried over the ages by various organic material and so on.
00:44:08These deep layers of permafrost confirm that the Siberia of the past was a world of open grasslands.
00:44:18Very different from today's forests that cover the same area.
00:44:26This is at the surface that maybe a mammoth once walked across.
00:44:29Yeah.
00:44:30Now we are in this type of permafrost where you can find mammoths.
00:44:35A real sense of different eras in one place.
00:44:38So the search continues for more evidence of mammoth life.
00:44:53Look at that hair!
00:44:54Yeah.
00:44:55This is absolutely amazing.
00:44:57The new discovery?
00:44:58A mammoth scalp.
00:45:01Straight off, just with that one fragment of fleshy material, you've got insight into, you know, an ancient beast.
00:45:07This real mammoth, real mammoth skin is much thicker here and thinner here.
00:45:14It's a section of scalp from the left side of a mammoth's head.
00:45:20Look at this ear!
00:45:24It looks so human-like.
00:45:35Maybe the skull's gone already.
00:45:38Yeah, the skull's gone.
00:45:40It had more or less like a mullet, you know, with a really short cropped hair on top and then
00:45:45longer hair in the neck.
00:45:47Well, this would be the sort of forehead region and there would be an eye around here somewhere, I guess.
00:45:51And then, of course, it would continue out to the trunk.
00:45:55Frozen since it died.
00:45:58And it's just starting to thaw out.
00:46:01It's a great find, but mysterious.
00:46:05How did the scalp get separated from the head?
00:46:09Dan Fisher has an astonishing theory.
00:46:12To my eyes, this looks cut.
00:46:15By somebody using a stone tool.
00:46:17That's right.
00:46:18The team is finding out more and more about the Ice Age world the mammoth inhabited.
00:46:24But have they found evidence of humans here, too?
00:46:28I would be tempted to say it's like nothing I've ever seen in my life.
00:46:46This remote, desolate landscape is revealing the frozen remains of mammoths.
00:46:53Look at my head!
00:46:54Yep.
00:46:55Oh!
00:46:55Ice Age animal mummies for DNA sampling.
00:46:58Goodness.
00:46:59And now, a mammoth murder mystery.
00:47:02I think this is a really unusual piece.
00:47:05What's interesting, there's these areas where it's been cut.
00:47:10I say that because it simply does not look torn.
00:47:14And then we have these series of scallops.
00:47:17By that I mean a concave area coming out to a point.
00:47:21A small concave area coming out to a point.
00:47:24And it's not just a smooth surface.
00:47:27It's a series of little incisions.
00:47:29I would be tempted to say it's like nothing I've ever seen in my life.
00:47:33To Dan's highly trained eye, the cuts aren't made by a modern steel knife.
00:47:39To my eyes, this looks cut.
00:47:42The light here catches these little incisions.
00:47:45They're offset from one another by about, say, three millimeters.
00:47:49This looks like a cut made by a stone tool.
00:47:52What we're basically saying is you think this was processed, butchered.
00:47:56And that implies this was an Ice Age person, because this is an Ice Age creature.
00:48:01If this is real evidence of humans butchering mammoths, it is an incredibly important find.
00:48:09But why scalp a mammoth?
00:48:13There is on the top of the head, at least some of what we're dealing with here, a fat pad.
00:48:19So you could be peeling back the skin to gain access to that mass of fat,
00:48:25preparing to break open the cranium to remove the brain.
00:48:30The brain is full of nutritionally important material.
00:48:44That's pretty remarkable and exciting because the actual evidence, direct evidence of material from Siberia
00:48:51that has been processed by humans is pretty rare.
00:48:53It's very rare.
00:48:55Little is known about the humans that could have scalped this mammoth.
00:49:00But archeological evidence suggests they were nomadic hunter-gatherers who hunted big game.
00:49:08With stone and bone-tipped spears.
00:49:23A scalp removed by humans is big news.
00:49:27Because there is ongoing controversy on the cause of mammoth extinction.
00:49:33Some argue that the end of the Ice Age, caused by a shift in the Earth's orbit, killed the mammoths.
00:49:40They think that as the Earth warmed about 12,000 years ago, the grasslands the mammoths needed for food were
00:49:50overrun by forest.
00:49:53Forced further and further north, they died out 4,000 years ago.
00:50:00Others say that human hunting of mammoths was the key cause of the decline in their numbers and their eventual
00:50:07extinction.
00:50:08For me, this has extreme importance.
00:50:11It could be humans doing something on mammoth skin.
00:50:20Dan wants to do more research back in the US to check if he's right.
00:50:24But if humans really did this, it supports the theory that we drove the mammoths to extinction.
00:50:31Giving some scientists the justification to bring them back.
00:50:37But mammoths weren't the only Ice Age mega-mammal to go extinct.
00:50:47Luva and Tori are exploring the furthest depths of the tunnel.
00:51:00This is weird. I mean, we've got like three rhinos.
00:51:05These rhino skulls were found close together in this part of the tunnel by the tusk hunters.
00:51:10Yeah, it's a bit weird that you find so many woolly rhinos in one single location.
00:51:14The tusk hunters have already removed the valuable horns from the skulls.
00:51:28Could this group of skulls found in the same section of the tunnel mean that woolly rhinos lived in herds?
00:51:36First of all, I mean, one wants to know if this is an accumulation occurring over many thousands of years.
00:51:40And dating them would allow us to see if they all came into this cave at the same time.
00:51:45If you did find evidence which might suggest herding behaviour, that would totally change the way we viewed woolly rhinos.
00:52:02The huge African rhinoceros is the same size as the woolly rhino.
00:52:08But genetic analysis shows its closest living relative is the tiny Sumatran rhino.
00:52:13Two thirds the length of the woolly rhino with much smaller horns.
00:52:18It looks nothing like its ancient relative.
00:52:21Until you look closely at the fine red hair that covers its body.
00:52:26A reminder of its ancestors from the ice age.
00:52:30The Sumatran rhino is endangered.
00:52:33Only 80 are left in the wild.
00:52:35It's a solitary animal that doesn't live in herds.
00:52:41Could the woolly rhino really be so different?
00:52:47To unravel the mystery, Luva wants to carbon date the three rhinos to see if they all lived at the
00:52:54same time.
00:52:57But how do you get clean samples from a skull that's been buried for thousands of years?
00:53:04Petrus bone, it's part of the ear bone.
00:53:07Yes.
00:53:07And this is the holy grail.
00:53:09This is what everyone wants.
00:53:11What's so special about the Petrus bone?
00:53:12The Petrus bone has a part of it that is very, very high density.
00:53:16But it's very, very difficult to get at because it's inside the skull so you have to break it.
00:53:21Except in rhinos. In rhinos they are actually exposed.
00:53:24You can see it sticking out here.
00:53:26And you can fairly easily get them out.
00:53:28It's a bit loose but we need to use a chisel.
00:53:36Now we should be able to pull it out.
00:53:39And there you go.
00:53:41And in here is probably where the really dense part is.
00:53:44And we can sample that.
00:53:46Then we sent three of them for radiocarbon dating.
00:53:48With the idea being that if they all were from the same age then maybe they would have been related.
00:53:55Siblings for example.
00:53:57The carbon dates reveal the truth about the rhinos.
00:54:01One of the rhinos was 41,000 years old and the other two they were beyond the limits of radiocarbon
00:54:08dating.
00:54:08Meaning that they are at least 45,000 years old.
00:54:12So we can actually reject the idea that they all died at the same time.
00:54:17And therefore they were not close relatives.
00:54:21The rhino dates show that this place was trapping animals, big and small, for tens of thousands of years.
00:54:29When you think about it, Belayagora is actually a very, very small area.
00:54:34And even though it's so small, there are so many carcasses.
00:54:39And that means that when you think about how big Siberia is, you realize that there are millions and millions
00:54:45of frozen carcasses across the northern hemisphere.
00:54:50There must be a hundred or a thousand or a million other caves.
00:54:56And each one of those could have an incredible array of riches.
00:55:01It's not something you can find anywhere else in the world.
00:55:08The remains of the most extraordinary ice age creatures from all over northeast Siberia are brought here to the capital
00:55:16of the region.
00:55:17Tori Herridge and local paleontologist Valeri Plotnikov have left Belayagora to visit his collection of frozen mummies at the Academy
00:55:26of Sciences.
00:55:28They're here to search out the very best specimens to add to the mammoth parts they found in the pit.
00:55:33These could contain the intact DNA needed for the mammoth regeneration project.
00:55:39Its leader, geneticist George Church, is coming to Siberia to take samples from frozen mammoth mummies.
00:55:45There is so much stuff here.
00:55:47Yeah.
00:55:49Is it all from one place?
00:55:50Yes, it's 90% from Belayagora.
00:55:59This is our freezer.
00:56:02The freezer room contains some exceptional specimens.
00:56:16What?
00:56:17This is the head of the Yukagor mammoths.
00:56:19Ah.
00:56:20And the whole carcass of the Yukamammoths.
00:56:24About six, seven years old maybe?
00:56:26Yes, yes.
00:56:26This has been truly, truly spectacular.
00:56:29Yes, yes.
00:56:29It's like it's walking in life.
00:56:32I can see its legs, its trunk, and the tail.
00:56:35Yuka has large cut marks on her back.
00:56:40Experts have identified them as evidence of human butchery.
00:56:58How did something as amazing as this come to be discovered?
00:57:02By the tusk hunters.
00:57:05They are looking for a tusk and they found many, many things.
00:57:09This is better than a tusk.
00:57:10This is so much better than a tusk.
00:57:13It's one of the best specimens in the collection.
00:57:16Part of the leg and muscle tissue will be made available to George Church for sampling.
00:57:22Everybody ready?
00:57:22But will it contain the DNA needed to bring the mammoth back from the dead?
00:57:42Huge advances in genetic engineering have allowed one scientist to attempt what was once thought impossible.
00:57:50Resurrecting a long extinct species, the woolly mammoth.
00:57:55Harvard professor George Church is the key architect for the project.
00:57:59He and his associate, Dr. Ariona Hisoli, have come to Siberia to find near-perfect ancient DNA to make it
00:58:07happen.
00:58:08Siberian paleontologist Dr. Valery Plotnikov is giving Church access to the famous mammoth mummy, Yuka,
00:58:16that could provide the DNA George needs.
00:58:21This is a rhino.
00:58:23Oh, wow!
00:58:23Full carcass of bison.
00:58:26It's a rhino, it's a rhino.
00:58:28Is it just mammoth you want?
00:58:30Yes.
00:58:31I think for us it's mammoth, isn't it?
00:58:33We have some forward legs and a hind leg and we have a full carcass of baby mammoths.
00:58:38Do you have any preference?
00:58:40Not really, no.
00:58:41You can take one of the legs.
00:58:42The ones that died most recently, yes.
00:58:45We are actually very, very excited that we can take our pick, basically.
00:58:49We'll take samples from roughly four mammoths and we're very excited to bring them back.
00:58:58It was quite surprising, the selection that they had.
00:59:01We don't know for our purposes what part is going to be the critical determining factor for quality,
00:59:06but we hope that by having a diverse set, we'll be able to get our best shot at high-quality
00:59:11specimens.
00:59:17While hopes remain for fresh DNA from the field, these are among the best mammoth samples in the world.
00:59:24Moment of truth.
00:59:26Yeah.
00:59:28George and Ariona are genetic engineers.
00:59:31This is the first time they have sampled directly from mammoth remains.
00:59:36They start by choosing which part of the mammoth to target for the best DNA.
00:59:46Where would you like a sample to be taken?
00:59:48I think maybe from here, maybe the bone marrow.
00:59:51Exactly.
00:59:52Everybody ready?
00:59:53Okay, fingers, everyone clear?
00:59:55Right here.
00:59:56That's good.
01:00:00The marrow within the largest bone in the mammoth's leg, the femur, may have the best chance of containing well
01:00:07-preserved DNA.
01:00:08Wow.
01:00:11The main purpose of this is to get high-quality tissues, and it's great to be doing it with my
01:00:17own hands as well.
01:00:18It's just very exciting.
01:00:19Oh, there you go.
01:00:21Oh, great.
01:00:22Look at that.
01:00:23Oh, this is our first sample.
01:00:24Cool.
01:00:25You've got material that's been frozen for up to 30,000, 40,000 years.
01:00:29That tissue's been beautifully preserved.
01:00:32Fantastic.
01:00:33I think that should make for a good specimen.
01:00:36I've been involved in many human tissues, but not an elephant or a mammoth.
01:00:41It's quite something, quite thrilling, quite emotional.
01:01:01Next, he extracts a piece of yucca's muscle tissue.
01:01:06Despite being so ancient, the smell isn't too bad.
01:01:10There we go.
01:01:10It doesn't smell unpleasant.
01:01:12It's sort of meaty, I guess.
01:01:14Yeah.
01:01:14It seems fresh.
01:01:15I mean, it doesn't strike me as something that's 20,000 years, at least.
01:01:20I haven't been stated, but you can smell the organic nature of it, can't you?
01:01:23Yes, yes.
01:01:23Alongside the bone marrow, Church takes samples of different tissue types, like fat and skin, or muscle.
01:01:29By comparing the DNA in each of them, he can identify the genes that code for features like its woolly
01:01:35coat, fat layers, and tiny ears.
01:01:39Everything you learn about these genomes makes you curious.
01:01:43You say, well, how does the changes in the genome produce from fat to muscle to bone?
01:01:49Wow.
01:01:50Awesome.
01:01:51This is kind of like a very softer tissue.
01:01:53Yeah.
01:01:54The goal of this trip was to find samples for our experiments.
01:01:57The quality matters to us a lot, and so I think we are very confident that some of these samples
01:02:02will work very well for us.
01:02:05When an animal dies, its DNA begins to break apart.
01:02:11If freezing does not take place quickly enough, DNA disintegrates into tiny pieces, like confetti.
01:02:20George hopes these mammoth specimens froze as soon as the animals died, and that the DNA inside is in much
01:02:29longer pieces, making it easier to build the mammoth genome he needs.
01:02:37The day in the lab has been a success.
01:02:40Oh, you've got a bit of bone there as well.
01:02:41From five different specimens, he's got 15 different types of mammoth tissue, including fat, bone marrow, skin, muscle, and even
01:02:50fur.
01:02:51This is fantastic.
01:02:53The project really feels like it's leaping forward.
01:02:55But how confident is George that he can create a mammoth hybrid?
01:02:59In 2018, he managed to genetically engineer a pig with the potential to grow human organs for transplant.
01:03:07We've changed dozens of genes in the pig and brought them all the way from some molecules in the lab
01:03:14to embryos to piglets to adult pigs.
01:03:17And so it seems like it's not that daunting, really.
01:03:21He won't find out if he can create an elephant-mammoth hybrid until he gets these samples back to his
01:03:27lab in Boston.
01:03:34A tusk hunter has brought a mysterious package to the base camp.
01:03:38He says it's something that has never been found before.
01:03:50Oh, boy.
01:03:51Yeah.
01:03:52There were a lot of specimens that were notable, but one that sticks out is the wolf head.
01:03:58Oh, wow.
01:04:00Yeah, there we go.
01:04:02There's a set of teeth.
01:04:03The wolf looks like it could have died a week ago, but it was discovered deep inside the ancient permafrost.
01:04:10That means that it has to be from the Ice Age.
01:04:13The wolf head was beautifully preserved.
01:04:17Even the little bump, bump to its lip was just there as it would be in the live animal.
01:04:24I was just looking at this wolf.
01:04:26I was asking myself, what is this?
01:04:28This mass.
01:04:28This sort of mass of tissue that's sort of disorganized.
01:04:31Yeah.
01:04:32There's one thing that could be in that place.
01:04:34And it looks to me, in fact, like this mass is the tongue.
01:04:38Right, what's left of it.
01:04:39And so the tongue is sort of hanging out to this side.
01:04:44I mean, the fur is really thick.
01:04:45It's tough.
01:04:58The mysterious wolf could be related to the modern wolf or an Ice Age steppe wolf, another extinct species.
01:05:06Similar to the massive dire wolf that lived in North America during the Ice Age.
01:05:13The dire wolf was 25% bigger than modern gray wolves, with the strongest wolf bite known to science.
01:05:22Only by taking a sample for analysis can they find out what it is.
01:05:27If it turns out to be an Ice Age steppe wolf, it will be the only preserved adult head known.
01:05:34It could be a historic find.
01:05:36But the closer they examine the head, the more mysterious it becomes.
01:05:42There's quite a bit of skin here.
01:05:44It's a little odd to find something so well preserved and yet somehow apart from the rest of the body.
01:05:52Right.
01:05:53So that could be because scavengers come along, they tear apart the main body, they tend to leave the head.
01:05:59There are scavengers present on the landscape, but those could include humans.
01:06:05Yes.
01:06:06The big question for the team is what, or who, could have removed this head so neatly?
01:06:13Could it be an attack by an even more fierce predator?
01:06:17Or were human beings responsible?
01:06:22Maybe a lion, for instance, attacked the wolf and maybe consumed much of the carcass and just left the head
01:06:28and neck?
01:06:28Well, in that case, I would expect to see some broken bones, some bones that were gnawed, crunched through.
01:06:34The break where the vertebrae was, was really clean. It was as if it had been twisted off. And that
01:06:41is not something that you typically see in nature unless you have, you know, people processing that corpse.
01:06:50I have never seen a wolf head chopped off.
01:06:54Yeah.
01:06:54Yeah.
01:06:55An ice age hunter walking along the landscape might see this wolf as an animal that's going after the same
01:07:00resources that we would have been.
01:07:02Right.
01:07:03The head could well have been severed by a human, adding to the evidence that human hunters were in the
01:07:09area.
01:07:12It was a beautifully preserved head.
01:07:16More of the fur perhaps lost from the skin on one side of its face, but the other side of
01:07:22its head almost perfect as it would have been at the time of death.
01:07:27To identify the species, Dr. Luva Dahlin joins Dan to determine an accurate carbon date.
01:07:34The key question is how old is it? Does it belong to the ice age wolf or does it belong
01:07:39to the modern wolf lineage?
01:07:42A piece of flesh the size of a fingernail is enough to do the job.
01:07:47We just got the results back and they show that this wolf head is 32,000 years old.
01:07:53And so in all likelihood this wolf is actually an ice age step wolf. It belongs to this extinct type
01:07:58of wolf.
01:07:59So that's really exciting.
01:08:02The ice age step wolf was a precision hunting machine, evolved to eat the biggest prey, larger teeth than a
01:08:11modern wolf and a heavier, stronger jaw.
01:08:31This Belaya Agora head is the first frozen specimen carcass from an adult.
01:08:40It allowed us to actually get a glimpse of the fur color, for example, which I don't think has ever
01:08:46been seen before.
01:08:48They were most certainly hunting step bison, probably horse as well.
01:08:53And then you had reindeer, you had musk ox, maybe also baby mammoths or very old and sick individuals.
01:09:08It's even possible that humans could have been among the step wolves' victims.
01:09:15I think it would have been quite a large and terrifying carnivore that I wouldn't have wanted to encounter.
01:09:25It's not just the wolf head suggesting that humans were here in the ice age.
01:09:31When it comes to the mammoth's scalp, I notice this scalloped margin all the way around.
01:09:43What is going on with this strange incision?
01:09:47An experiment to recreate the cuts on the scalp could help confirm that humans were responsible.
01:09:54What we're doing here is set up a sort of experimental setting where we can study what it would be
01:10:02like if we had a piece of fresh mammoth skin here to try to cut.
01:10:06Pig skin is nowhere near as thick as mammoth skin.
01:10:09It's as if we have the skin attached to the animal here and we'll do our cutting here and see
01:10:16how it goes.
01:10:17Dan is an expert in ancient technology.
01:10:21He has studied the marks that ancient humans made on their prey.
01:10:26This is certainly in general the sort of tool that they could have been using to cut this adult mammoth
01:10:33hide.
01:10:33I'll start right here.
01:10:36You can try to cut skin but basically nothing happens.
01:10:41The job can be greatly simplified if you can place the hide under tension.
01:10:46A reindeer antler inside a horse leg bone is used to tension the skin.
01:10:52It's a classic stone age technique.
01:11:10This is very, very close to what we saw on the mammoth scalp.
01:11:15Certainly we have a broad series of arcs here.
01:11:18with all the series of cuts where the tool moves relative to the skin.
01:11:26It's almost certain the cuts were made by a flint tool.
01:11:31What was gratifying I guess is that doing it physically yielded something that I expected.
01:11:40This very characteristic cutting pattern on mammoth hide is something that is best explained as a result of human activity.
01:11:49In that sense it helps us to understand human interaction with these animals.
01:11:56The experiment shows that humans were almost certainly responsible for scalping the mammoth.
01:12:03The structure of mammoth tusks can tell us a great deal about their individual life histories.
01:12:11Our intention is to get data from this portion of the tusk above the support.
01:12:19We'll hope to find some good settings for the scanner that will allow us to see the internal structure of
01:12:26this tusk.
01:12:27And hopefully get data on the animal's life history.
01:12:33Female mammoth tusks preserve a record of their growth.
01:12:38Their growth, their health, their nutrition, and ultimately records of reproduction.
01:12:43That is, there's a calving record in tusks.
01:12:47We can interpret that calving record by CT scanning of whole tusks.
01:12:51There are patterns of conception, the birth of individual calves, and weaning of those calves,
01:12:58and the conception, birth, and weaning of the next calf, and the next, and the next.
01:13:06This is wonderful to see.
01:13:08It shows us that freshly excavated tusks give us really quite clean data.
01:13:13Here you can see how there's a gradient in density, a change from bright white to dark gray.
01:13:26When she is pregnant and sending a lot of her calcium and phosphate to make the bones of the fetus,
01:13:33she has less to invest in her tusk, so the years in her tusk are thinner when the fetus is
01:13:40forming.
01:13:46The timing of reproductive events, the rate at which an animal can turn over another offspring and another one and
01:13:54another one,
01:13:56that's a very sensitive indicator of the quality of the environment and the kind of ecological stresses they were responding
01:14:03to.
01:14:04And that will solve the big question of what caused the mammoth extinction.
01:14:15It's further evidence supporting the theory that humans hunted mammoths to extinction,
01:14:20which is one reason some scientists want to bring them back to life.
01:14:30It's here, at the edge of Siberia, that the first mammoth will be released.
01:14:36If the regeneration project is successful,
01:14:41this is Pleistocene Park, the Ice Age version of Jurassic Park.
01:14:54George Church is on his way to see the park for the first time and to meet the Russian ecologists
01:15:00behind it.
01:15:02They are Father and Son Team Sergei and Nikita Zimov.
01:15:07Sergei and Nikita and I like to act like we're independent of each other,
01:15:11like they don't need mammoths and I don't need the Siberian wilderness.
01:15:16But really, we're quite codependent.
01:15:20To recreate the Ice Age world in Siberia,
01:15:23the Zimovs will need to repopulate the landscape with huge numbers of big grass-eating beasts.
01:15:32Ones that can cope with the worst winters in the world.
01:15:40If you would come here 30,000 years ago and you would walk from this place,
01:15:44you would right now see two to three thousand animals at the same time.
01:15:48And now you can come here every day and you will not see nothing.
01:15:54Our goal here is to return to the way it was before the first humans came here.
01:16:02The grasslands of the mammoth steppe is rich with animals.
01:16:08And you just really get the feeling that something was missing from the environment.
01:16:13These things were missing.
01:16:15And now they're back.
01:16:17The Zimovs have already begun rebuilding the Ice Age.
01:16:22Herds of reindeer, horse, yak and bison have been let loose in the park.
01:16:30Adding a herd of mammoths would be a great tourist attraction.
01:16:34But the Zimovs and George Church think it's much more important than that.
01:16:40They believe that bringing the mammoths back can help stop permafrost from melting
01:16:45and save the world from disaster.
01:17:04The food, the food, the food.
01:17:17People basically use it without a kitchen or while you eat the food.
01:17:24The food is Русь, the food is precious.
01:17:28The food is for the folks who still want to eat?
01:17:33The other people get the food.
01:17:35We've used this tip to touch and smell and grasp.
01:17:39It's the personality end of a mammoth.
01:18:07At the edge of northeast Siberia, a bold idea is taking shape.
01:18:19George Church's Mammoth Regeneration Project has joined forces with the mission of ecologist
01:18:25Sergei Zimov and his son Nikita to return today's forests to the grasslands of the Ice Age.
01:18:34By reintroducing the animals that once lived here.
01:18:3930,000 years ago, you would probably see some mammoths, horses, bison, reindeer.
01:18:44Some woolly rhinoceros would roam around.
01:18:46There would be some predators you would see.
01:18:47And now we want to revive how it was here in the Arctic in the past.
01:18:54The team that runs the park thinks that bringing the mammoth back to Siberia could reduce the impact of a
01:19:00warming world.
01:19:02To test their theory, they released grass-eating animals into a fenced-off area of forest.
01:19:10One bison, a few yaks, and some reindeer quickly turned the park from forest into lush grassland.
01:19:20Making it look like it did in the Ice Age, 30,000 years ago.
01:19:25And this grassland, the founders of Pleistocene Park believe, could help prevent a catastrophe.
01:19:33The key is what's happening deep underground.
01:19:37So, we are now going to the Permfrost Key to get better perceptions of what we are dealing with.
01:20:01The frozen soil helps keep the climate stable.
01:20:05What we care about is actually these top 40 meters, which is full of carbon.
01:20:09Here it's frozen, and it's been staying frozen for tens of thousands of years.
01:20:14And we need to find a way to keep it this way.
01:20:18If Permfrost like this melts, the consequences could be very serious.
01:20:26You can see some fine little tiny roots.
01:20:29These roots will be decomposed and converted to methane.
01:20:33The warming effect of the greenhouse gas methane is 20 times stronger than carbon dioxide.
01:20:40And with Permfrost currently covering 25% of the Earth's land surface.
01:20:46If it thaws, millions of tons of methane could enter the atmosphere.
01:20:51It would be a global disaster.
01:20:56Right now, the Permfrost is still cold enough to prevent this from happening.
01:21:01But Nikita is seeing Permfrost melt at an increasing rate.
01:21:09Some places out here, where right now it's stowing soils, which never thawed in many thousands of years.
01:21:17And we don't know how fast it will go.
01:21:20And potentially it can go very fast.
01:21:24Their belief is that forests add to the problem.
01:21:28Because they trap heat, raising the temperature of Permfrost and causing it to melt.
01:21:37Resurrecting the mammoth could create herds that reduce the amount of forest more quickly than smaller animals.
01:21:43Which would allow grasslands to spring back more rapidly.
01:21:48With mammoths it will be much better and probably it will be way more aggressive.
01:21:52Because mammoths can just go and knock down trees.
01:21:56And that's how elephants do it in Africa.
01:21:59The theory is that less forest cover could keep Permfrost colder.
01:22:04Preventing the release of methane.
01:22:07And helping to keep the climate safe.
01:22:11George Church is already thinking about the mammoths he needs to release in Siberia to save the Permfrost.
01:22:19The size of the herd that might be sufficient for maintaining the Permfrost is about 100,000.
01:22:25One of the biggest risks you can have is the risk of doing nothing.
01:22:29The arrival of the mammoth hybrid depends largely on the quality of the DNA sampled by George and the team
01:22:36in Balaya Gora.
01:22:40The woolly mammoth remains, found in the pit by the scientists and tusk hunters, has relatively well preserved flesh, muscle
01:22:48and fat.
01:22:48Dan Fisher was even able to conduct a mammoth autopsy.
01:22:53But ancient DNA expert Louva Dahlin believes that the best quality DNA is likely to come from one of its
01:23:00teeth.
01:23:01When you have a freshly frozen carcass, typically the DNA is better in the teeth or the bones than it
01:23:09is in the soft tissue.
01:23:10I think one of the best targets is this anterior root right here.
01:23:28The thick enamel on the mammoth's tooth protects the DNA within from thousands of years of freezing and thawing.
01:23:35Yeah, that's it. That's it.
01:23:37That's it. Here it comes.
01:23:38Comes out on the curve.
01:23:41So this is more than enough that we need for both DNA and dating.
01:23:45Right.
01:23:46After extracting the DNA from the tooth, it's set off for sequencing.
01:23:53The results will show how well it's been preserved.
01:23:56And from its genetic code, Louva can determine much more about its origins.
01:24:03When we got the sequence back, we could then place this into the family tree of woolly mammoths.
01:24:08This animal could be from one of three branches of the mammoth family tree.
01:24:14It could be European, Siberian, or North American.
01:24:20About 65,000 years ago, some of these North American mammoths, they expand across the Bering Land Bridge.
01:24:28During the Ice Age, Siberia and North America were linked by a frozen land bridge, creating a region called Beringia.
01:24:37And some North American mammoths used it to cross from America and breed with Siberian mammoths.
01:24:45The DNA results will reveal what kind of mammoth it was.
01:24:51The mammoth in the pit belongs to this lineage.
01:24:55So the mammoth in the pit traces its maternal ancestry to North America.
01:25:01Along with discovering that the mammoth had its origins in North America, Louva has good news about its DNA.
01:25:09We have analyzed many, many hundreds of mammoth specimens.
01:25:13And in terms of DNA preservation, this particular mammoth from the pit is among the top three so far.
01:25:21So I think we will have a really good chance to sequence the entire genome from this mammoth.
01:25:32The high quality of the DNA specimen is great news for George Church's mammoth regeneration project.
01:25:40His team will be able to use the genome of the pit mammoth to move forward with their project.
01:25:47Dr. Ariona Hisley has also analyzed the samples they took in Siberia.
01:25:53There is that interesting signal that we see there is DNA there.
01:25:57It's a very strong indication that we might have a mammoth DNA.
01:26:03We will probably be the first people to show that we can visualize ancient DNA in situ, that is in
01:26:09the cell or in the tissue.
01:26:12The raw DNA needed to create a new hybrid mammoth is there in the Siberian samples.
01:26:20Potentially, we can extract that DNA later on and use it to actually swap into the elephant genome in order
01:26:31to create these elephant-mammoth hybrids.
01:26:35With permafrost thawing more quickly than ever, how long will it be before we see the first mammoths arrive at
01:26:42Pleistocene Park?
01:26:44Everything that my lab has worked on over the last two decades has arrived far faster than anybody expected.
01:26:52About a year ago, I felt that we were two years away from making embryo-like structures.
01:26:58I think we're still on track for that.
01:27:02Ancient DNA may well bring the mammoth back to Siberia.
01:27:07For the team, the expedition has also deepened their understanding of the Ice Age world.
01:27:13Look at that!
01:27:14It's absolutely amazing.
01:27:16The trip to Blyagora really had an impact on how I think about what we can do in the future.
01:27:22And the reason is that there are specimens inside the permafrost that are so exceptionally well preserved.
01:27:30And clearly, if we want to really sequence the genome from specimens, we want to get the best ones, the
01:27:38ones that have the best DNA.
01:27:39A new frontier for science has opened up in Siberia that could revolutionize our picture of the Ice Age.
01:27:47And by reversing the extinction of the woolly mammoth, the DNA found there could truly change history.
01:27:57To be continued...
01:27:59To be continued...
01:27:59To be continued...
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