Pirate's Cove

You might burn yourself with this take from the UK Guardian

Could bringing Neanderthals back to life save the environment? The idea is not quite science fiction

In 2015, flooding exposed the frozen bodies of two cave lion cubs in the Yakutia region of Russia. Members of a species that vanished at the end of the last Ice Age, the pair were buried approximately 12,000 years ago when the roof of their den collapsed and trapped them in the frozen ground. In photos, their faces are so well-preserved one might almost believe they are only sleeping.

Yet despite their unusually perfect condition, the cubs are not the only such relics to have appeared in recent years. Throughout the Arctic and subarctic, animals and artefacts buried for thousands of years are reappearing, liberated from their frozen graves by the rapid warming in the region. In the Alps and elsewhere, bodies of people lost for decades in the mountains are emerging from the ice as glaciers melt. In Australia, towns submerged for generations are resurfacing as dam levels fall due to drought and heat.

As British author Robert Macfarlane has observed, these uncanny emergences or “Anthropocene unburials” are part of a larger process of unsettlement and unhinging. As human time and geological time collapse into one another, the deep past is erupting into the present all around us with terrifying and uncanny consequences. What was fixed is now in flux, what was settled is being swept away faster than we can save it. Nor is it just the past that has become unstable. The climate emergency is unsettling our future as well, erasing what we thought was certain, what we thought we knew. (snip)

Faced with this reality I began to ask a series of slightly different questions, questions about inevitability and the new reality we inhabit. At what point, I wondered, does what we are losing become unbearable? At what point does hope become just another form of denial? How are we to live in such a world

What about Neaderthals?

My new novel, Ghost Species, seeks to explore these questions by asking what it would mean if the deep past were to come to life in a literal sense, through a scheme to recreate a Neanderthal child from remnant DNA. Although this idea might seem pure science fiction, it isn’t, or isn’t quite. Many scientists believe cloning may offer a way to de-extinct species wiped out by human activity. Here in Australia researchers have already laid many of the building blocks to resurrect the thylacine, while in Russia scientists in Siberia are working on a scheme to hold back the collapse of the permafrost by recreating the ecology that existed in the region 12,000 years ago, complete with woolly mammoths.

12,000 years ago, when the seas were rising quite a bit and it was much cooler, still coming out of the ice age? Someone is just trying to sell a book while suffering from climate anxiety, to give other people climate anxiety. Books about aliens are more fun.