"At the end of August 1939, the German archaeologist Otto Völzing discovered around 200 fragments of carved mammoth ivory at the back of a cave in southern Germany. With war just a week away, Völzing's find was hurriedly collected in a box, where it lay unnoticed in a museum archive for decades. It wasn't until the 1960s, when the shards were inventoried, that something astonishing emerged out of the heap of broken pieces."
"They formed an incomplete figurine, with a chimeric mix of features: the body of person, and the head and forearms of a cave lion. Subsequent excavations in the 1970s found further pieces of what has come to be called the Lion-Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel. Carved from a mammoth tusk around 40,000 years ago, it is one of the earliest examples of the human capacity to imagine forms that don't exist in nature."
"Living things in every part of the biosphere have been forced by climate change, pollution and the spread of non-native species to adapt their bodies and behaviours to a human planet. They may not have visibly merged forms like the Lion-Man, but they do bear the impression of another species: us. It wasn't our intention that humanity would become the planet's greatest evolutionary force;"
Around 1939, fragments of carved mammoth ivory were discovered and later reassembled into the Lion-Man, a 40,000-year-old chimeric figurine exemplifying early human imagination. Historically, cultures imagined hybrids such as Hesiod's chimera and Yeats's 'rough beast' to represent beings beyond nature. Today, organisms across the biosphere are being forced by climate change, pollution and invasive species to alter bodies and behaviours to survive on a human-altered planet. Many species can adapt, but for numerous animals, plants and insects the pace of change exceeds their capacity to respond. Humanity has become the planet's dominant evolutionary force, and CRISPR offers a means to intervene.
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