Since there was a little interest in this topic created as a result of a throwaway pun in another topic, I thought I'd post this here in case anyone wanted to explore the topic in more detail.

One of my greatest regrets is that mammoths are extinct, because I want to meet a live one.

The cause of their extinction was when humans moved into their terrority, they brought a bloodborne infection to which they and their dogs were immune, but mammoths were not, which was transferred to the mammoths by fleas jumping off and biting them.
This is evidenced by the fact that the very last mammoths have the bone deformations resulting from this infection.
The disease causes excess calcium nodules to form on the bones and specifically the joints, which would have caused excessive joint pain and therefore, hindered the mammoth from travelling around to harvest their food sources.

For the record, humans did not hunt mammoths into extinction, the cooking fire/refuse sites from that era are full of deer bones, there are no mammoth bones to be found at any of them.
The reasoning behind this is a mammoth is a powerful foe, no hunting party would risk fighting a herd of them when there's smaller and easier animals to chase.
An elephant is a formidable opponent even today and they are much smaller then any mammoth was.


At the moment, the only hope for me to meet a live mammoth is that the cloning experiments are successful in bringing back at least one.
Although for the experiment to be very successful, they'd need to clone an entire diverse population, enough to be genetically viable and sire offspring the natural way.

The main problem with mammoth cloning is they need a specific specimen type, one that was flash frozen at time of death or shortly afterwards, because ice crystals slowly forming would destroy the DNA strand and make that specimen non-viable for cloning.

A while ago, there was a scientist who was specifically searching for such specimens, so he could extract the necessary genetic material and create a viable mammoth embryo, but I don't know if he ever found what he needed.
He was specifically needing two specimens, one male and one female, because it would enable him to adapt the artificial insemination process instead of making a genuine genetic clone.
I think he wanted to do that because it was much easier than cloning.

I do remember sometime in the early 80s, they found a mammoth who met those conditions, for 90 seconds, they actually managed to restart the mammoth's heart before it died (again).
A pity they didn't keep the samples the scientist needed, if the mammoth could be temporarily revived, then the internal organs were preserved enough to make that possible.