Scientists retrace steps of Ice Age mammoth over its entire lifetime | Hacker News Reader

Scientists retrace steps of Ice Age mammoth over its entire lifetime

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48 pointsworldvoyageur16 comments

Seeing some comments about how they didn’t actually trace the steps. Okay, yeah, they didn’t. But what they did do is so damn cool — science at its best. I’m kind of in awe that we roughly know what happened in a mammoth’s life from 17,000 years ago — including [spoiler alert] the fact that it eventually starved to death at 28.

You can find the map showing the path of the mammoth from the paper here:

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/373/6556/806/F2.l...

This map is in line with what I would expect from the head line. I don’t get what the other commenters are complaining about. Did they expect a literal path showing exactly where the mammoth walked down to millimeter precision 24/7 for the whole life of said mammoth? This map is nice and good and interesting.

>> Did they expect a literal path showing exactly where the mammoth walked down to millimeter precision 24/7 for the whole life of said mammoth?

I know, it's not like it had an iPhone.

They didn't retrace steps, they analyzed isotopes concentrations in different parts of tusks, which were constantly growing through the lifetime of the mammoth.

Well, there is a map with a traced path.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/373/6556/806/F2.l...

To be fair, it doesn't have the resolution to show the actual steps...

... but c'mon...

> ... but c'mon...

I have read this literally. Honestly. And I have really imagined big footprints and a scientist tracing them with a hand lens. My mind was blown away.

I've read then comments here, and now I see, that it is a metaphor. To be fair it is even known to me. And I think, that I had a moment of uncertainty at a first glance, but somehow my mind of non-native English speaker chose another interpretation. Probably because it had blown away not just my mind but the metaphor as well.

Maybe if you claim it in a head-line and it isn't true, you should be forced to perform the act indicated. I'm smiling while thinking of the scientist hiking through Alaska over a distance that took the Mammoth 28 years. Of course, the disconnect here was probably introduced by a disconnected reporter or editor.

This is so bad. Words are losing their common meaning due to journalists freewheeling attitude towards clickbaiting.

At least with "Bat-boy" stories of yore, you _knew_ it was made up entertainment and "serious" journalists would not touch such with a ten foot pole, if they could avoid it.

Is it that bad? Or is "retracing steps" a commonly used metaphor for analyzing data at hand to ascertain a fuller picture about where something has been / what it has done? Headlines have always been like this. Before clickbait, front-page headlines were optimized to earn quarters at newspaper boxes.

Yeah, this headline seems egregious in that it's not just sloppy, imprecise, or inaccurate, it's purposefully meant to mislead you into believing something that isn't true. So, a lie.

You can retrace the steps of x without x having feet.

I think you need classes in how to read the news.

https://www.npr.org/2021/08/12/1026993142/illinois-is-the-fi...

They do this to a lesser degree with human teeth and bones, but not with a precision of long, continuously growing tusk.In addition human tarter reveals diet.

I still wonder if recreating mammoths will ever be possible, and of course if you could, would they survive in the modern climate in the wild.

Sure they would. The area that would support them would just be shifting.

So what a mammoth needs?

-- food

-- no predators that kills them all (remember, it's humans that killed it)

-- not too hot climate.

Does it require actual ice? Of course not. It is unlikely it lived on ice, it still needed to eat something and that means most likely tundra of some kind.

There is still a lot of tundra today available.

I suspect a wooly coat is particularly maladaptive in this era of fires sweeping the global north...

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