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Did Mammoths really go extinct or are Indian elephants just hairless Mammoths

Giordano said:
My understanding is that dogs yes, people not clear. But even if people did eat this as a dare or to tell a story, remember that the usual diet of arctic explorers might might the leap to rotting Mammoth meat not too hard.
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And starving prisoners in the Siberian Gulag even less of a leap.
 
ddt said:
I'm not sure what the OP meant, maybe he'll clarify it.
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The OP commonly does not return to post in threads that he has started. But I know what he is talking about and he took the movie Jurassic Park too seriously.

In that movie they have incomplete dinosaur DNA but they want to clone them. They end up taking portions of frog DNA and splicing it to the dino DNA to make a completion.

The OP is posing the question based on the science fiction of JP. If we have incomplete mammoth DNA, can we get the missing portions from an Indian elephant and splice them together to make a complete mammoth DNA?

He went further and said, well if we can do that then aren't the mammoth and the Indian elephant the same species after all?
 
From Wikipedia...

It has been proposed the species (Woolly mammoth) could be recreated through cloning, but this method is as yet infeasible because of the degraded state of the remaining genetic material.
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In 2005, researchers assembled a complete mitochondrial genome profile of the woolly mammoth, which allowed them to trace the close evolutionary relationship between mammoths and Asian elephants, Elephas maximus. African elephants, Loxodonta africana, branched away from this clade around 6 million years ago, close to the time of the similar split between chimpanzees and humans. Before the publication of the Neanderthal genome, many researchers expected the first fully sequenced nuclear genome of an extinct species would be that of the mammoth. A 2010 study confirmed these relationships, and suggested the mammoth and Asian elephant lineages diverged 5.8–7.8 million years ago, while African elephants diverged from an earlier common ancestor 6.6–8.8 million years ago. In 2008, much of the woolly mammoth's chromosomal DNA was mapped. The analysis showed that the woolly mammoth and the African elephant are 98.55% to 99.40% identical. The team mapped the woolly mammoth's nuclear genome sequence by extracting DNA from the hair follicles of both a 20,000-year-old mammoth retrieved from permafrost, and another that died 60,000 years ago. In 2012, proteins were confidently identified for the first time, collected from a 43,000-year-old woolly mammoth.
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The existence of preserved soft tissue remains and DNA of woolly mammoths has led to the idea that the species could be recreated by scientific means. Two methods have been proposed to achieve this. The first is cloning, which would involve removal of the DNA-containing nucleus of the egg cell of a female elephant, and replacement with a nucleus from woolly mammoth tissue. The cell would then be stimulated into dividing, and inserted back into a female elephant. The resulting calf would have the genes of the woolly mammoth, although its fetal environment would be different. To date, even the most intact mammoths have had little usable DNA because of their conditions of preservation. There is not enough to guide the production of an embryo.

The second method involves artificially inseminating an elephant egg cell with sperm cells from a frozen woolly mammoth carcass. The resulting offspring would be an elephant–mammoth hybrid, and the process would have to be repeated so more hybrids could be used in breeding. After several generations of cross-breeding these hybrids, an almost pure woolly mammoth would be produced. The fact that sperm cells of modern mammals are potent for 15 years at most after deep-freezing is a hindrance to this method. In one case, an Asian elephant and an African elephant produced a live calf named Motty, but it died of defects at less than two weeks old.

In 2008, a Japanese team found usable DNA in the brains of mice that had been frozen for 16 years. They hope to use similar methods to find usable mammoth DNA. In 2009, the Pyrenean Ibex (a subspecies of the Spanish ibex) was the first extinct animal to be cloned back to life; the clone lived for only seven minutes before dying of lung defects. As the woolly mammoth genome has been mapped, it may be possible to recreate a complete set of woolly mammoth chromosomes in the future by adding mammoth-only sequences to elephant chromosomes. If the process is ever successful, there are plans to introduce cloned woolly mammoths to Pleistocene Park, a wildlife reserve in Siberia.

Mammoth expert Adrian Lister questions the ethics of such recreation attempts. In addition to the technical problems, he notes that there is not much habitat left that would be suitable for woolly mammoths. Because the species was social and gregarious, creating a few specimens would not be ideal. He also notes that the time and resources required would be enormous, and that the scientific benefits would be unclear; he suggests these resources should instead be used to preserve extant elephant species which are endangered. A 2014 article about potential cloning also questioned the ethics of using elephants as surrogate mothers, as most embryos would not survive, and noted that it would be impossible to know the exact needs of a resurrected calf.
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Another reference.

Two Penn State University professors have mapped much of the genetic code of the woolly mammoth, a possible first step toward re-creating the extinct beast in the next 10 to 20 years...

It could include as many as 4.7 billion base pairs -- or about 1.7 billion more than the human genome...

Drs. Miller and Schuster said their work also proves that the woolly mammoth and the African elephant are 99.4 percent identical, with the woolly mammoth containing gene changes that allowed it to survive the cold temperatures of Siberia and northernmost North America.

Similar in size to the elephant, the mammoth had a shorter rear end and a hump on its back, along with long hair and curling tusks. The mammoth separated from other elephant lines about 6 million years ago, about the time the human species separated from ancestors of today's primates...
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Red Baron Farms said:
And starving prisoners in the Siberian Gulag even less of a leap.
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Can you quote a bit. I can't find the book online. I'm sure it's a fine work of his experiences in the gulags, but I'm a little strapped for cash this close to the holiday season.

It's my understanding that the claims of those proponents of the edible mammoth steaks story is that it was as palatable as anything else in their arctic provisions.

Now it's a starvation diet/dogs breakfast.
 
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John Jones said:
Can you quote a bit. I can't find the book online. I'm sure it's a fine work of his experiences in the gulags, but I'm a little strapped for cash this close to the holiday season.

It's my understanding that the claims of those proponents of the edible mammoth steaks story is that it was as palatable as anything else in their arctic provisions.

Now it's a starvation diet/dogs breakfast.
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Unfortunately no. I read the book borrowed from a friend's quite extensive personal library. (you could call him a book hoarder with many thousands of books) I no longer live in the same state as him now. I seem to remember the book saying the taste wasn't bad at all. However, considering the state the prisoners were kept in, a continuous starving state, that may be partly explained by the body craving anything at all. A person's taste will change in such conditions.
 
Fascinating stuff. My reading today suggested a closer affinity (i.e., more recent divergence) between Asian elephants and woolly mammoths than Asian elephants to either of the African elephants. Still, we're three different genera here.

One other prospect of mammoth recreation I saw on some documentary years ago was to simply use artificial selection to breed Asian elephants with the most archaic traits. The idea here is that something like 99% of the DNA that makes a mammoth a mammoth is in Asian elephants and that artificial selection could be used to express more and more of that 99%. The goal is to make something like this guy but with fur. It wouldn't be a mammoth, but it would be a facsimile no less "true" than some kind of clone-hybrid.

I assume the idea would be some form of breeding back as has been used to produce the Heck cattle as Aurochs approximation.
 
Giordano said:
I think it has already been touched on in this thread, but the definition of species is a bit hazy around the edges: as noted, an offspring is always the same species as its parents, but with time, offspring may diverge enough from its great, great, great... grandparents as to be considered a distinct species.
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To complicate matters, there are also ring species. That happens sometimes around a mountain range. Each population can freely interbreed with the next one, which can interbreed with the next, and so on, but when you get to the ends, they can't interbreed.

As far as wolly mammoths, no, modern elephants probably aren't their direct descendants. It's probably more like it is between us and chimpanzees and bonobos. We have a common ancestor, but one modern group isn't directly descended from another. Wooly mammoths were almost modern, not too long ago in evolutionary terms.
 
Giordano said:
I think it has already been touched on in this thread, but the definition of species is a bit hazy around the edges: as noted, an offspring is always the same species as its parents, but with time, offspring may diverge enough from its great, great, great... grandparents as to be considered a distinct species. So the change from one species to another is gradual, and there is often debate if two individuals are variants of one species, or two distinct species.

I wish it was even as simple as defining a species as composed of the individuals that can produce fertile offspring when bred- this is an valid criteria, but the barriers to interbreeding may be other than infertility when two different individuals are artificially crossed. Perhaps an adequate definition is that the members of one species do not typically interbreed in nature with members of another species. This may be for biological reasons, behavioral ones, or geographical ones (e.g. a big ocean between them). They are genetically isolated in nature.

Given what I know, the Mammoths and current elephants are so different in their phenotype and appearance that I would doubt that they could produce fertile offspring if they did try to interbred. That alone would make them different species (indeed, they are now judged as belonging to different genus). Just like sabertooth tigers and today's tigers. But even if Mammoths were still alive and could artificially breed with elephants, I suspect that due to their different geographical locations alone, they would seldom interbreed in nature, and this genetic isolation and their very different appearances would alone be enough for most people to call them different species.

I don't know: are Asian and African elephants considered the same species?
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No, different Genus. The Asian Elephant is Elephas maximus, the two African species are the African Bush Elephant Loxodonta africana and the African forest elephant Loxodonta cyclotis. The Asian Elephant is closer to Mammuthus than to Loxodonta.
 
Giordano said:
I think it has already been touched on in this thread, but the definition of species is a bit hazy around the edges: as noted, an offspring is always the same species as its parents, but with time, offspring may diverge enough from its great, great, great... grandparents as to be considered a distinct species. So the change from one species to another is gradual, and there is often debate if two individuals are variants of one species, or two distinct species.

I wish it was even as simple as defining a species as composed of the individuals that can produce fertile offspring when bred- this is an valid criteria, but the barriers to interbreeding may be other than infertility when two different individuals are artificially crossed. Perhaps an adequate definition is that the members of one species do not typically interbreed in nature with members of another species. This may be for biological reasons, behavioral ones, or geographical ones (e.g. a big ocean between them). They are genetically isolated in nature.
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But by this criteria, Australian Aborigines, Africans, and Europeans could have all been considered different species, which I think is clearly not the case.
 
Doghouse Reilly said:
But by this criteria, Australian Aborigines, Africans, and Europeans could have all been considered different species, which I think is clearly not the case.
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I think that if we know one thing about human nature, it's that interbreeding is considered a fairly fulfilling hobby by some.
 
ddt said:
But what all members of a species - say, humans - have in common is not that they have exactly the same genome, but that their chromosomes do have the same layout (*): how many chromosomes there are, and where the genes are located in the chromosomes...

(*) Barring all kind of copying mishaps, such as trisomy of chromosome #21 (Down syndrome), or excessive replication of a part of a gene (as in Huntingdon's disease).
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Chromosomes have been known to break into smaller chromosomes or fuse into bigger ones, and those changes have been known to stick in separate lineages, which is why it's possible for different mammal species to have different chromosome counts after having descended from the original mammal common ancestor. A species in which one of those transitions in chromosome count is still underway will consist of some individuals with different chromosome counts.

For example, domesticated horses have 64 chromosomes apiece (32 pairs), and their wild counterpart, Przewalski horses, have 66 (33 pairs), and they're perfectly interfertile. Their offspring have 65 chromosomes: the 31 pairs that both "species" have in common, and single chromosomes apiece from each of the other leftover pairs that only one parent had (1 from the domesticated parent, 2 from the Przewalski parent). That leftover chromosome in the domesticated horse corresponds with both of the leftover chromosomes in the Przewalski horse, containing the equivalent genes in the same order, with the two Przewalski chromosomes in a single line end-to-end. During mitosis in the offspring's cells, the two lone Przewalski chromosomes even physically line up end-to-end next to the single longer chromosome from the domesticated parent.

Nobody knows whether this situation resulted from the long chromosome breaking apart in Przewalski ancestors or the two shorter ones fusing in the domesticated population's ancestors. But, whichever population the change happened in, it must have experienced a stage in which there were individuals with three different basic chromosome layouts:
  1. 64, producing gametes with 32
  2. 66, producing gametes with 33
  3. 65, producing gametes of both kinds
And, taking both together as a single population living today, that is still the current situation.

Similarly, humans have a single chromosome pair corresponding to two chromosomes pairs in other living great apes. We can tell that it got that way by fusion of two in our ancestors who had had 24 pairs til then, not only because the 24-pair arrangement is common to other living great apes, but also because a degraded form of the caps that normally go on the ends of chromosomes is still stuck in the middle of it. So, at some point in the last few million years, our ancestral population consisted of a mix of individuals with 46, 47, or 48 chromosomes, producing either 23-chromosome gametes, 24-chromosome gametes, or a mix of 23-chromosome and 24-chromosome gametes.
 
Doghouse Reilly said:
But by this criteria, Australian Aborigines, Africans, and Europeans could have all been considered different species, which I think is clearly not the case.
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Good point, and I don't think you will like the answer I can give. I should have said that to get two different species from one, you need to genetically isolate one from another. That can be geographically or by other means. In terms of the people you named, the period of genetic or cultural isolation has been way too short to allow separate species to form. Now we have enogh international travel, that simply will not happen in the foreseeable future. But given enough time and isolation, different species can eventually form (Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons have, for example). So when do they diverge enough to be considered separate species? Complicated and controversial. Even Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons probably interbred to form modern Europeans, even though they are commonly considered different species. Evolution is a like like an ever crossing and branching tree. Very little linear and definitive. Anyone else with a more definitive explanation?
 
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William Parcher said:
If you throw away the taxonomy and labels, how are you supposed to talk about animals to anyone?
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Perhaps the way everyone managed prior to the current binomial system which dates from the 1750s?

My point was that simply saying "They are different species " is hardly a sufficient response to the OP, especially as one of the two groups is only known from carcasses and fossils. It's simply a restatement of the question.
 
ddt said:
That surprises me. There are quite a number of mammoths that have been well-preserved in the permafrost, and their extinction was so recent - more recent than the extinction of the Neanderthal - that DNA likely has been preserved. I'd think that someone would have sequenced the DNA by now.

And actually, there is a team that is trying to clone the mammoth.
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There certainly are ongoing attempts. Last I heard (several months ago) they were a long way from having the full genome.
The thing is, even if they do get the whole thing - and even if we assume it's a perfectly representative sample, (whatever that means), and even if it can be reproduced and implanted in a modern elephant, what emerges at the end of the gestation period will not be a mammoth; it will be what emerges when synthesised mammoth DNA is fertilised (?) and implanted in the womb of an elephant. That might be so like a mammoth that even another mammoth couldn't tell the difference, or it might not. There's more to babies than DNA.
 
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