Monkey King (4)

From that day on, the monkeys played by day and slept in the cave by night. They accepted the stone monkey as their king. The stone monkey started to call himself "Monkey King", casting off, for all time, the word "stone".

  ¶ 9:56 pm

  Cloneable Mammoth Cells Discovered in Russia

A 30,000-year-old engraving of a woolly mammoth by people who saw the creature firsthand.

Feb. 5 — Russian scientists said Wednesday that they've found living cells in a frozen ice-age mammoth that could provide the DNA needed to resurrect the long-extinct tuskers.

Cells obtained from the well-preserved legs of a mammoth found last summer in Russia's far-northern Yakutia region are "conditionally alive," said Vladimir Repin of the Vektor Research Center for Virusology and Biotechnology.

The cells were fixed in formalin, an aqueous solution of formaldehyde, immediately after the finding, said Repin.

The inner structure of the cells is undamaged, "so we suggest that the rest of the frozen tissues contain similar cell layers which could be unfrozen," Repin explained to the Informscience news agency.

Repin said that the living cells could prove to be good for cloning purposes.

"The cell material is unique because it contains not just intact mammoth DNA but whole cells which have been perfectly preserved for 10,000 years," the Vektor press service said.

The latest finding comes as a boon to a group of Russian and Japanese scientists who are planning to revive the mammoth once they can find usable DNA material.

The team, led by Japan's Kazufumi Goto, a former professor of reproductive physiology at Kagoshima University, said last August that it would be "technically possible" to produce mammoth calves using the DNA and artificially inseminating an elephant cow.

The mammoth remains — still covered in reddish fur — were found frozen in the soil next to a riverbank near Yakutsk.

The research team washed the remains using a water jet before placing them in a freezer and transporting them to Yakutsk's Mammoth Museum, Informscience said.

Goto hopes that by using good DNA from an ice-age mammoth he will be able to produce a hybrid of a mammoth and an elephant.

By impregnating each female hybrid with mammoth DNA, Goto believes he can produce a mammoth-elephant hybrid in which the original mammoth would predominate in its genetic constitution.

The Japanese researcher hopes that the resurrected mammoths will live in a sanctuary in an uninhabited area north of the remote, frozen Kamchatka peninsula in Russia's Far East, where present conditions resemble their original habitat.

  ¶ 9:53 pm

  Rama’s bridge is only 3,500 years old

The ongoing interest in this story never ceases to amaze me. Hardly a week goes by without receiving several hits via Google from people looking for information about this remarkable "find". So for all those people who continue to find this site by searching for "monkey + bridge + over + Palk + Straits + from + ramayana" (and then hopefully stick around for the other stuff), I have this update:

The Adam’s bridge over Palk Strait, said to be the remains of a bridge built by Lord Rama, dates back to only 3,500 years and not 1.7 million years as claimed earlier.

A team from the Centre for Remote Sensing (CRS) of Bharathidasan University, Tiruchi, has come up with startling facts about this ‘‘bridge’’. Led by Professor S.M. Ramasamy, the team is studying the geological changes that took place along the Tamil Nadu coastline in the past 40,000 years.

Speaking to The Indian Express, Ramasamy said the CRS findings will give a clearer picture of the bridge connecting Dhanushkodi in India to Talaimannar in Sri Lanka.

A NASA satellite picture had brought the land strip under focus and some reports had mentioned that this was only a coral reef dating back 1.7 million years. Historians also do not subscribe to the claim linking this stretch to Ramayana. Besides NASA pictures, those taken by Indian Remote Sensing satellites also showed the bridge clearly.

Ramasamy says the satellite pictures and carbon dating of some ancient beaches between Thiruthuraipoondi and Kodiyakarai show the Thiruthuraipoondi beach dates back to 6,000 years and the Kodiyakarai beach to 1,100 years. In other words, the sea was near Thiruthuraipoondi 6,000 years ago and reached Kodiyakarai around 1,100 years ago.

Ramasamy explains that the land/beaches were formed between Ramanathapuram and Pamban because of the long shore drifting currents which moved in an anti-clockwise direction in the north and clockwise direction in the south of Rameswaram and Talaimannar about 3,500 years ago.

The sand was dumped in a linear pattern along the current shadow zone between Dhanushkodi and Talaimannar. Later, corals may have accumulated over these linear sand bodies, Ramasamy adds.

Good, well I'm glad that's settled...but wait a second...if we re-jig the date of the Ramayana¹ maybe we can blow this whole thing open again!

But as the carbon dating of the beaches roughly matches the dates of Ramayana, its link to the epic needs to be explored, he adds. Declining to comment whether the bridge was indeed built by Rama, Ramasamy says he would leave that to the experts to answer.

Other references to the blessed bridge may be found here, here, here and especially here.

---

¹ - originally reported to have occurred about 1.75 million years ago (!)  ¶ 11:48 pm