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For Didier van Cauwelaert, mammoths can save our planet

2021-05-10T03:51:06.587Z


A gifted cat, an avalanche bitch, a loving parrot, a healing horse and healthy prehistoric mammals ... The writer believes in the power of animals. He even made a whole novel out of it ...


The return of the mammoth could prevent the end of the world.

Didier van Cauwelaert assures us and demonstrates it in watermarks in the pages of his new novel,

The power of animals

which appears by Albin Michel.

Before imagining this love story between an ice explorer and a young biologist, he carried out a long investigation on a subject little known in France, considered, in other countries, as an important avenue to avoid the risk. of a premature end of the world.

Read also: Didier Van Cauwelaert, botany novelist

He was thus interested in the research currently being carried out in the heart of the Pleistocene Park, a nature reserve, created in 1977 in Siberia by Sergei and Nikita Zimov.

For more than four decades, these two brothers have worked on the principle of restocking herbivores in the Tundra.

Actions carried out by humans led to their disappearance at the end of the Pleistocene, that is to say the first geological epoch of the Quaternary era.

The absence of animals that constantly tread the snow in the heart of this forest is thus at the origin of a thaw with potentially cataclysmic consequences.

The nuclear experiments carried out in Siberia would have aggravated the phenomenon.

Research to avoid the worst is currently being carried out at Harvard University by the teams of Professor George Church, and at that of Kyoto, by Professor Akira Iritani. From the remains of animals dating back several millennia, they reconstructed, thanks to digital technology, the profile of the woolly mammoth, considered the king of the steppe, whose race died out around 4,000 years ago. They are seriously considering its cloning with the Asian elephant, with similar characteristics. His resurrection would give the signal for the return of other animals which, by treading on the snow, would allow the soil to regenerate, and resuscitate a forest considered dead. An identical process will then be adaptable to other lands where the ground is frozen, starting with Alaska.

In the eyes of van Cauwelaert, all hopes are allowed, thanks to the experiment tried and successful by the speleologist, Janot Lamberton, known as the

“Greenland glacionaut”

. In 1996, he brought back to life a tardigrade measuring about one millimeter, frozen 130,000 years earlier. Just three years ago, Japanese researchers Hashimoto and Horikawa discovered that the protein properties of this tiny, indestructible, near-immortal aquatic animal could cure Alzheimer's disease or theoretically impossible to cure cancers. Complementary studies, scheduled for the coming decade, require multi-million dollar funding, which is ongoing.

This research which, according to the novelist will make it possible to solve what he presents as

"the greatest mystery of nature"

are at the heart of a resolutely joyful story in which a gifted cat, an avalanche bitch, a parrot in love mingle. and a horse therapist. A fiction showing that the animal can one day become the future of man.

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2021-05-10

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