For the first time, scientists have unraveled much of the genetic code of an extinct animal, the ice age's woolly mammoth, and with it they are thawing Jurassic Park dreams.

Their groundbreaking achievement has them contemplating a once unimaginable future when certain prehistoric species might one day be resurrected.

The million-dollar project is a first rough draft, detailing the more than 3 billion DNA building blocks of the mammoth, according to the recent study published in the journal Nature. It's about 80 percent finished. But that's enough to give scientists new clues on the timing of evolution and the deadly intricacies of extinction.

Most woolly mammoths died out at the end of the Pleistocene, as a result of climate change and a shift in man's hunting patterns. In 2008 a study conducted by the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Spain determined that warming temperatures had reduced mammoth habitat to only a fraction of what it once was, putting the woolly mammoth population in sharp decline before the introduction of humans into the territory. (i) Glacial retreat shrank mammoth habitat from 7,700,000 km2 (2,970,000 sq mi) 42,000 years ago to 800,000 km2 (310,000 sq mi) 6,000 years ago. Although a similarly drastic loss of habitat occurred at the end of the Saale glaciation 125,000 years ago, human pressure during the later warming period was sufficient to push the mammoth over the brink. (ii) The study employed the use of climate models and fossil remains to make these determinations.(iii)

In the view of the Palm Oil Truth Foundation, the extinction of the woolly mammoth piles on the evidence that the alarmist cries of the current environmental movement on deforestation and global warming is based more on hyperbole than fact.  

It will be observed that global warming was already a cyclical occurrence at the end of the Pleistocene period, centuries before the agricultural and industrial revolutions that is often used as a whipping boy by the environmental movement and the likes of the grossly misnamed Greenpeace and the Friends of the Earth (FOE) as the leading causes of global warming.

Palm oil of course, in recent years had been a target for the incomprehensible and irrational attacks of Greenpeace and the FOE.  Both deviant environmental organizations have unjustly accused palm oil of causing massive deforestation leading to global warming and extinction of the orang utan.

This is a grotesque manipulation of the facts.  It is obvious to even the casual observer that it is illogical for palm oil to cause the massive deforestation that Greenpeace and the FOE attempts to lay at its feet.

First, palm oil is a crop with superlative productivity, in fact so productive that it yields ten times the yield of other oilseed crops!  It follows therefore that palm oil requires far less land to produce the same amount of oil as the competing oilseeds.

This explains why, Malaysia, which had been the world’s largest producer of palm oil for over a century still has an enviable forest cover of more than 65%.

Secondly, even when Malaysian planters such as United Plantations, which has an enviable record of compliance with sustainable planting practices for more than a hundred years, attempted to ship out its first consignment of RSPO (iv) certified sustainable palm oil, it came under attack from Greenpeace, for reasons best known to Greenpeace.

Which leads us to this very compelling question -just what is it that Greenpeace is after?  Is it truly concerned with ensuring that palm oil is planted in a sustainable manner or is the anti-palm oil stance of Greenpeace motivated by factors other than the publicly stated aims proclaimed by Greenpeace?  Factors that Greenpeace have to keep hidden and is so sinister that it would out-stink the carcasses of recently discovered woolly mammoths allowed to thaw and rot in the sun!  THE END.

References

(i) Nogués-Bravo, D.; Rodríguez, J.; Hortal, J.; Batra, P.; Araújo, M. B. (2008). "Climate Change, Humans, and the Extinction of the Woolly Mammoth". PLoS  Biology 6 (4): e79. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060079
(ii)  Sedwick, Caitlin (2008). "What Killed the Woolly Mammoth?". PLoS Biology 6 (4): e99. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060099
(iii) Granqvist, Eirik (2005). "Mammouth - from their discovery and how to bring them to life". Paper from the NATHIST annual meeting in Jakobstad.
(iv)  Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil