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The number of individual mammoths preserved in Siberia is something like half the human population of the US. Some are presumably not in good condition. However, right now many of them have been used for ivory with the problem that elephant often gets passed off as mammoth.
In historical times,
mammoth meat has been eaten. The largest weigh about eight tonnes. They are, of course, made of skin, bone, hair, ivory, meat and so on. Much of this is usable and has been used by people a long time ago. Similarly, woolly rhinos have substantial amounts of horn, which has a similar issue to ivory.
Russia is not doing well economically but has a whole load of this natural resource. Leather can be tanned using the biological materials present within the body of the animal such as the brains (mammoths have relatively large brains relative to their size) and the dung (a whole lot of dung in a mammoth colon, i suspect). I couldn't swear to this but it seems likely to me that many people in Siberia already have the skills to make leather in the traditional rather than the industrial way. They also presumably have a lot of other skills which enable them to use mammal carcasses efficiently, currently applied to the likes of horses and deer.
If they were to apply these skills to mammoths and woolly rhinos, there would be a considerable advantage. The products could be labelled as cruelty-free (though of course they wouldn't be as life is inherently violent), they would also provide an income for people understood to be indigenous and in need of economic support - that combination is particularly appealing to certain potential consumers - and since they would effectively be using a non-renewable resource, it would have a natural scarcity which would make it more profitable. It also provides the Russian economy with another source of income.
The problem is others passing non-extinct elephant and rhino stuff off as this stuff. That can presumably be addressed by something like amino acid racemisation dating, since most surviving mammoth and woolly rhino remains are of such an age as to allow that method and the temperature of the permafrost would either be established or easily ascertainable, allowing a high degree of accuracy. That same racemisation would render some of the products more resistant to decomposition.
Baked in the guitar world
http://www.guitarpa...roducts&cat=1&sub=1
[pocmloc, May 27 2011]
Ground sloth hide
http://fossiladdict...rehistoric-remains/
Second photo down, references elsewhere [nineteenthly, May 27 2011]
Off-topic grammer pedantry.
http://en.wiktionar..._gerund-participles
[mouseposture, May 28 2011]
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Totally baked, at least since the 17th century. |
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I find //life is inherently violent// a bit disturbing. I like the
idea though. With the supply being finite, as you point out,
it would be best to string it out for as long as possible. I
reckon making soup would be good as you could have only a
tiny bit of mammoth, then fill the rest up with vegetables. |
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// Totally baked, at least since the 17th century. // |
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Well, in a sense it's been totally baked since Palaeolithic times. However, the devil is in the detail. Is it, for example, baked in the sense that billiard balls and piano keys are sometimes made of mammoth ivory? Are there shoes currently being worn which are made of mammoth leather? If so, what about hormones extracted from mammoth glands, vellum made from mammoth gut or gold leaf made using it? |
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And yes, life is inherently violent. We kill countless microbes every day or we die. Doesn't mean it shouldn't be minimised though. |
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//We kill countless microbes every day or we die// you think
too much |
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Baked in the sense that mammoths have been mined. This could be more accurately titled "Mine mammoths more, and use them in new ways". It comes across as advocacy. Maybe I'm missing something. |
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From the title, I thought this was going to be a stronger (though bulkier) replacement for pit ponies. |
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Dang, [nineteenthly], I'm a bit disappointed here. I thought your idea was *MIME* mammoths... [edit] Just read your post below! Nice. [+] |
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Yes, ivory is certainly used. [NT], i'm tempted to
say you use a mammoth detector but i have no
idea how to design one. |
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My original thought on this was to use them as a
leather substitute. I then realised there's a whole
lot more to them than just leather and ivory, for
instance bone, presumably certain hormones and
hair. A mammoth fur coat is an ethical fur coat, a
mammoth trophy head hanging on the wall is a
whole lot more acceptable than a moose's head, a
yurt made of mammoth hide is almost certainly
baked to a fossilised crisp and so on. |
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Maybe make an industrial vacuum cleaner out of a
mammoth? |
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[Grogster], i'll get back to you on that. |
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Nein, zees are MINE mammuts. |
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Anyway. All well and good, but I am not at all convinced that mammoth
leather, glands or other squidgy bits are going to be much use. There
may be a few examples well enough preserved but I think that, in most
cases, the skin and internal organs will be too far gone to be much use. |
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Also, how does the economics work for leather, vellum and what-not? Is
it going to be cheaper to find, excavate (using hot water, presumably,
and a lot of it), assess and transport frozen mammoths than it is to grow
half a dozen cows? If people were forced to dig up frozen mammoths,
and somebody came along with this idea called "animal husbandry" and
worked out how to keep cows, wouldn't we all say "wow! What a great
idea comrade!"? |
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Mammoth meat has been known to be edible. For
that reason methinks 'tis useful otherwise. It
would surely at least apply to thyroid hormones
and bone matrix? |
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I still think we can agree on the feasibility for
knocking up a quick stuffed mammoth on wheels
for hoovering house to house. |
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In other news, forgive me for this one here but it's
not worth posting as an idea since it's just an
echo: |
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Take a standard nuclear DNA genome for
Mammuthus primigenius - doesn't have to be
complete or even particularly typical, just selected
arbitrarily. Record the differences between this
genome and a specific specimen of mammoth DNA.
Find whereabouts in the sequence they occur.
Then encode the differences by recording each
codon as a six-bit value, then let them sort of
"slip" into each other one bit at a time to fit them
into the seven bits of ASCII. This format can then
be used to send files representing mammoth DNA
as email attachments. |
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Some mammoth meat is alleged to be edible, but
I'm not sure how much (or how
desperate/publicity-
hungry the eaters were). There's a story that it
was served up by a Czar once, but if I were chef
who didn't want to be a dead chef, I would be
sorely tempted to just rough-up a bit of wild boar
and pass it off. |
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I could be wrong, though. Have you any evidence
to suggest that mammoth leather remains usefully
tough? |
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It might just be edible in the sense that it can be
chewed up, swallowed and passed through the
digestive system without being fatal, rather than
actually nutritious. |
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It wouldn't necessarily have to be usefully tough at
the stage of being part of a frozen mammoth, but i
would say that the presence of sabretooth buccal
mucosa and ground sloth hide in a tough state
counts as evidence that mammalian epidermis can
last many millenia without being frozen or falling to
bits. |
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I don't think tanning will make hide tougher - just
more pliable and less rottable. Interesting mention
of sabretooths and sloths - linky? |
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It's from a book by David Attenborough i read in the
'seventies. I'll have to have a bit of a root around.
The sabretooth thing's really obscure and i've just
Googled that without success. The groundsloth
thing is probably much easier to find. |
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Ah, but a ground-sloth hide doth not a ground sloth
lederhose make. |
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I seem to recall that long ago the presence of underground mammoths was attributed to the fact that they are burrowing animals in life and so are not generally seen on the surface. If this were the case, they might be used to produce excavations - for example, a tunnel to produce geothermal steam for purposes of tar sands extraction. |
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//undertaking// ... ? Is that a noun or a verb? |
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What i suggest could be described as an overtaking Mammoth unundertaking undertaking. |
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[lurch] Either it's a noun, or it's a gerund, which is grammatically a noun (but historically, in English, was able to behave as both a noun and a verb - sometimes at the same time!) |
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//at the same time// Cool! Can we have an
example? |
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From Robinson Crusoe - "a bloody putting to death with the sword". "Putting" takes the adjective "bloody", thus behaving like a noun, while "with the sword" is adverbial. |
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A simpler example might be "His quickly leaving surprised me". Here "leaving" behaves both as a present participle (a verb) when it is modified by "quickly", and as a gerund (a noun) as the subject of the verb "surprised", and by association with the possessive "his". |
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Apparently, it's a phenomenon unique to English, and came about because the gerund and the present participle happen to be spelled the same in most cases. (Source: a book called "The Development of the Gerund in Middle English", which I happened to pick up and read once when I really should have been studying something completely unrelated. The author is Japanese.) |
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Thank you. Apparently, in English, there's this thing
called the "gerund-participle" (try to imagine that
line being delivered by Stanley Kowalsky) <link> |
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I would be surprised by a mammoth's undertaking undertaking. |
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They're already dead and buried, right? So the
mammoth undertaking's undertaken. |
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I suppose one approach might be to clone a mammoth and get it to dig up others, but a Platybelodon would probably work better. Then the bits which can't be used could be buried again by the living mammoth, which would make it a mammoth undertaking. |
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