The most exotic animal seen since Herodotus wrote of India's gold-digging ants used to be Devil, the ‘Bengal mountain wolf’ of the Lee Falk universe. Phantom often corrected ignorant people about his companion’s status: “Not a dog, a wolf.” Now, Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences of the US has brought an even more exotic wolf into the world. En route to its major project, the ‘de-extinction’ of the woolly mammoth, the company has de-extincted the dire wolf, a long-lost North American cousin of the grey wolf.
The nomenclature is significant―the company does not claim to have resurrected the dire wolf. By editing the modern grey wolf DNA, it has created a being which physically resembles the lost species which, until now, had survived only in the Game of Thrones universe. The dire wolf, Aenocyon dirus, has not been reborn. Instead, the grey wolf, Canis lupus, has been coaxed into exhibiting the phenotypic characteristics of the extinct wolf. The genetic paths of the two species forked 3,00,000 years ago, and the archaic species died out about 10,000 years ago.
So, this is just another live demo of the revolutionary gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9, not a scientific breakthrough as advertised. But like other biological mashups from before gene editing was possible, it is a headline-grabber. The liger, a hybrid of a lion and a tiger, has been fascinating the public from early 19th century India. Zonkeys, crosses between a zebra and a donkey, have also been reported for as long. Charles Darwin recorded the existence of other zebroids.
But the dire wolf is more fascinating than these hybrids because it simulates an animal which our distant ancestors would have known. Three pups have been born and if you have connections, maybe you could play with them―touch living prehistory, even if it’s a bit inauthentic. This is as close as we can get to a time machine without breaking the laws of physics.
Perhaps time travel is fascinating because we all suspect that the historical record is partly misread and partly fictitious. We would like to see the original record with our own eyes, without the mediation of historians, archaeologists and paleontologists who reinterpret the record so radically and so often that it’s disorienting. For instance, it now appears that dinosaurs were feathered like birds, and maybe T-rex was less like the rubber lizards in Jurassic Park and more like giant parakeets. It’s a huge disappointment. The dramatic dinosaur mythologies of the last century stand undermined.
Colossal’s choice of wolves for its first foray is particularly smart. It is an excellent publicity vehicle because George R R Martin was on board, and because wolves have featured prominently in the foundational mythologies and cosmologies of Indo-European cultures and literature. Odin is accompanied by wolves, but in children’s stories like Little Red Riding Hood, wolves are killers. They evoke a complex set of emotions wavering between awe, kinship and naked fear.
The phenomenon persisted into modern times, long after wolf packs ceased to present a real threat to people. In Rudyard Kipling’s stories, Mowgli’s adoptive family is part of a wolf pack. In contrast, in The White Devil, the English playwright John Webster wrote: “But keep the wolf far thence, that’s foe to men, / For with his nails he’ll dig them up again.” Those lines were memorably inverted by T S Eliot in The Waste Land: “Oh keep the dog far hence, that’s friend to men, / Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!”
Friend, enemy, self, wolf. In the languages of northern Europe, where wolves enjoyed the greatest play in mythology, they were friends and exemplars. They were embedded in the given names of prominent figures like Cynewulf, one of the very few Old English poets whose work has survived, and Wulfstan, an 11th century bishop of London and Worcester. The wolf persists in modern Germanic names like Wolfgang (‘he who walks with the wolf’) and Adolf. Wolfram is another name for tungsten, a friendly word: tungsten filament bulbs kept away the dark until about 20 years ago, when LED lights became commonplace. But then, Wolfenstein is a series of shoot-em-up video games piloted by programmer Silas Warner. Associations with wolves remain mixed across centuries.
The recently resurrected dire wolves are indeed like time machines. But wouldn’t time capsules be more pertinent now? Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of species are being lost every year to climate change. Simultaneously, the melting of permafrost, polar ice caps, the permanent ice pack and glaciers at the Third Pole is bringing to light life forms that have been frozen since the last glacial maximum. They range from viruses and extremophiles to whole mammoth carcasses.
There is an argument to forget our obsession with time machines and instead make time capsules, so that the newly endangered or newly discovered biological material can be preserved for future science. Of course, time capsules aren’t immune to anthropogenic forces either. Indira Gandhi buried one at the Red Fort in 1973, containing a history of independent India that was to be exhumed after 1,000 years. It was dug up four years later by the Janata government and its contents were disparaged. In politics as in the natural world, climate change destroys everything.
Pratik Kanjilal | Fellow, Henry J Leir Institute of Migration and Human Security, Fletcher School, Tufts University
(Views are personal)
(Tweets @pratik_k)