Would You Eat a Mammoth Spaghetti and Meatballs?

Okay, what’s all this about? Well, an Australian cultivated-meat company took a DNA sequence from a mammoth muscle protein and filled in the gaps with genetic material from a living creature within the same created kind—the elephant. The next step for these scientists was to place this DNA sequence in the “myoblast stem cells from a sheep.” These cells then began to replicate, and the resulting muscle meat was then made into a meatball. All in all, apparently the whole process was “ridiculously easy and fast,” completed in just a “couple of weeks.”

Now, here’s the surprising twist—the scientists are reportedly afraid to eat the meatball. Why? Well, one of the scientists says,

We haven’t seen this protein for thousands of years . . . So we have no idea how our immune system would react when we eat it. But if we did it again, we could certainly do it in a way that would make it more palatable to regulatory bodies.

Mammoths didn’t die out 10,000 years ago as most people believe.

Given the process by which this meatball was created, I’m not sure I’d want to eat it either! But think about this from a biblical worldview—mammoths didn’t die out 10,000 years ago as most people believe. The elephant kind went onto the ark with Noah and his family, survived the flood, and came off the ark into a new world. Now, like all the kinds God created, the elephant kind was created with a lot of genetic diversity, so after the flood, that kind adapted to a changing world, resulting in different species within a kind, including mammoths and African and Asian elephants (among other species within that kind). Sometime after the flood, likely toward the end of the ice age, mammoths went extinct, perhaps due to climate changes (caused by the flood and subsequent ice age) and/or human hunting.

So, are mammoth steaks coming to a BBQ near you? Perhaps. But, if they do, you won’t be joining human ancestors from tens of thousands of years ago in grilling and eating them. Humans who may have feasted on mammoths lived just a few thousand years ago in the world after the flood, during the ice age.

You can learn more about life during the ice age—and what happened to the mammoths—in this book Frozen in Time.

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This item was discussed today on Answers News with cohosts Avery Foley, Jessica Jaworski, and Patricia Engler. Answers News is our weekly news program filmed live before a studio audience here at the Creation Museum and broadcast on my Facebook page and the Answers in Genesis Facebook page. We also covered the following topics:

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Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying,
Ken

This item was written with the assistance of AiG’s research team.