Reintroduction of animals such as the wolf to certain areas has been a hot topic recently. Martha Foley and Dr. Curt Stager take the idea one step bigger and ask "What if we brought the elephant back to North America?!"

Martha Foley: So you have a friend, a scientist, who wants to bring the elephants back. The wolves are not big enough, this guy wants elephants. Why?

Curt Stager: It’s kind of tongue and check, but it’s also half serious. His name is David Bernie, he’s a former colleague of mine from grad school, and he’s at Fordham University right now, and his specialty is studying ancient environments, but especially extinctions of large mammals in Madagascar, and North America. So I was recently talking to him about this idea, bring back the elephants.

MF: You’ve got a long way to go with that one I think.

CS: Well, yeah, but it raises some interesting questions I think. There’s a lot of interest in restoring wild habitats that we recently had a controversy in the Adirondacks about whether we should reintroduce timber wolves. Other places they want to reintroduce things like cougars, or whatever. So the logic would be if people of European decent came in and disturbed the landscape killed off the predators, it would be nice to restore some places to their supposedly natural conditions.

MF: Right.

CS: So taking that idea to its extreme then is David Bernie who looks on longer time scales, over thousands or millions of years and says, if you add up the full length of time that you could say large mammals have been in North America, and then look over the last 10 million years, we had five species of elephant, in North America for most of the last 10 million years. And it’s only the last 10,000 years that we didn’t have them.

MF: So lets take this a step further, you can’t just find a mastodon, which you can reintroduce to say Minnesota.

CS: Yeah it’s actually funny, he had an article in “Natural History,” where there were pictures of bison on the plans with the mountains behind them, and then they had this computer technology to throw a few elephants in there with them. It was actually kind of funny, but actually we do have two surviving elephants in the world. There’s the African one, and the Asian one, and they’re actually in different genre not just different species, and if you look at them genetically, and compare the genes to frozen mammoth, or mammoth hair you can find in certain deposits, Asian elephants are more closely related to mammoths than to African elephants. So they’re not all that far.

MF: So if they were here for 10 million years, what happened to them?

CS: Well that’s a really interesting aspect of David’s research too, there’s an ongoing controversy of was it climate that killed them off, or disease, or did people do it? And David is of the school that it was people, and he’s really sure, and actually the weight of evidence seams to clinch it for him as a recent study he and his colleagues are doing, they’ll take sediment cores from places where mammals used to be, including North American llamas, and giant ground sloths, and all these other things too, and there are fungi that live only on the manure of large mammals. So in his sediment cores, he can find the spores of these fungi, which when he showed me were actually pretty easy to identify, and towards the end of the last Ice Age, you can find types of those spores in the sediments, in his cores. Then suddenly they drop off, and it’s about 11 thousand years ago, and that’s right when clothes people, the mammoth hunters came in, and you can see layers of charcoal from fires, maybe lit by these people, and all of those spores just drop off right there, and then the pollen evidence of natural climate change comes right after that.

MF: So it probably wasn’t the climate change that precipitated that, it was probably the people.

CS: Probably the people, and actually you can see the spores coming back in the last few centuries of sediment, which makes sense because of the cattle ranching, and reintroducing horses to North America.

MF: So when we think of wild North America, we’re thinking of an already degraded set of animals and plants.

CS: Yeah according to David, North American wild life has never been so impoverished in mammals as it is now, or the last 10 thousand years, as in any time in the last 50 million years. Even what we think of as classical large mammals, wolves, moose, grizzlies, arrived here after humans did, kind of moving into the niche right next to where the large mammals were killed off.

MF: We’ve changed things a lot. Thanks very much Dr. Curt Stager of Paul Smith’s College, I’m Martha Foley.