The Bison’s Biological Archive

One Observation

A bison carries more of the prairie than we can see. Its genome holds a record of migration older than any human footprint on this continent. Its rumen holds a microbial community that converts grass into animal life. And wherever a herd moves, the prairie is rewritten. Dust wallows become spring pools, seeds ride north in winter wool, and once, near Saskatoon, a herd’s hooves and rolling bodies uncovered stone carvings their ancestors had walked past centuries before.

In the Field

A bison’s proportions seem to belong to another age, and in a sense they do. The head hangs low beneath a mantle of dark hair. Above the shoulders, elongated vertebral spines rise, bound by an elastic nuchal ligament and sheathed in muscle. The architecture of the hump lets a bison swing its massive head like a plow to sweep snow from buried forage. In winter, a dense woolly underfur grows in beneath the coarse guard hairs. When Canadian researchers put bison, yak, and cattle through a winter of controlled cold exposure in the 1970s, the cattle hit their thermal limits somewhere above minus fourteen degrees Celsius. The bison never hit theirs. Down past minus thirty, the coldest the experiment could reach, their insulation held roughly two and a half times that of a Hereford. Instead of burning more energy to stay warm, the bison turned their metabolism down, waiting winter out.

In the photograph by Buffalo Charlie, a herd is scattered across the pasture of my cousin Charlie, his wife, Pam, and their family, beneath an enormous prairie sky.

The photograph looks distinctly North American. The deeper history begins in Asia.

During the great glaciation known as Marine Isotope Stage 6, the oceans dropped far below the shallow sill of the Bering Strait, and Siberia and Alaska became one continuous land called Beringia. Across it, ancestral steppe bison walked out of Asia and into a continent already roamed by mammoths, horses, and ground sloths. In Fossil and genomic evidence constrains the timing of bison arrival in North America, Duane Froese, Beth Shapiro, and colleagues reconstructed that crossing with precision. In Canada’s Yukon, at a fossil-rich exposure on the Porcupine River called Ch’ijee’s Bluff, they recovered a single bison foot bone sandwiched between two natural timestamps: a volcanic ash layer below it and the buried forest bed of the last warm interglacial above it. That bracketing makes it roughly 130,000 years old. It’s the oldest well-constrained bison fossil in North America. From that bone, a steppe bison, Bison cf. priscus, they read a complete mitochondrial genome. They compared it with that of a roughly 120,000-year-old giant long-horned bison, Bison latifrons, from Snowmass, Colorado, along with dozens of other ancient bison genomes. Every North American lineage traced back to a common maternal ancestor within the window of that low-sea-level world, about 195,000 to 135,000 years ago.

What followed was one of the most consequential biological dispersals in the continent’s last million years. Bison spread from Alaska across North America, diversified into giants like latifrons, and became the chief competitor for grass in a community long dominated by mammoths and horses. Froese and colleagues rank their arrival alongside only one other dispersal of comparable consequence.

That other dispersal was us.

Humans and steppe bison shared the mammoth steppe of northern Asia for a very long time before any person reached the Americas; archaeological sites in northeastern Siberia more than 30,000 years old preserve the remains of bison among the mammoths, horses, and reindeer that northern hunters depended on. When people finally did journey to the Americas, they entered a continent where bison had already been resident for well over a hundred millennia. As the geneticist Eske Willerslev and archaeologist David Meltzer write in Peopling of the Americas as inferred from ancient genomics: “To date, there is no genomic evidence that any population from a region other than northeast Asia was an important source of America’s first peoples.” Two crossings of the same vanished bridge, separated by perhaps 150,000 years. The bison were not newcomers when the first people arrived. They were the old ones.

The genome complicates every story we tell. In 2004, Shapiro’s team read DNA from hundreds of ancient bison and found that the great Beringian population’s genetic diversity began collapsing around 37,000 years ago, with climate shifting and grasslands contracting, at least fifteen thousand years before there is evidence of substantial human populations in eastern Beringia. The archive records that bison were already in long decline before the two species’ American history together even began. On the northern plains, that history became a deep relationship between people and animals: for thousands of years, bison were food, shelter, tools, and ceremony for the Plains peoples. At Wanuskewin, on Opimihaw Creek just outside Saskatoon, barely a day’s walk from Hague, people have gathered to hunt bison for some 6,000 years.

Genes tell only part of the zoogeographic history. The rest is written in the land, and in us.

From The Naturalist’s Studio

As Canadians, we have inherited a responsibility for the bison.

Perhaps twenty to thirty million bison occupied North America at their height. By the 1880s, the hide trade, the railways, and government policy had annihilated them. Historians such as James Daschuk have documented how the collapse of the herds became an instrument of famine and dispossession against the Plains peoples. By the late nineteenth century, fewer than a thousand Plains bison remained anywhere. Wild bison vanished from Saskatchewan in those same years.

My grandfather, Edward Krahn, was born in 1935 in a Mennonite farming community of a few hundred people near Hague, Saskatchewan. He was born in a barn, in the Mennonite building tradition carried from Prussia through the colonies in present-day Ukraine, to the house-barn joined dwelling and stable end-to-end under one roof, connected by an interior passage, so that the barn was not an outbuilding but the far end of the house. The Krahn name appears in the Old Colony’s earliest censuses, in the first villages on the Dnieper. His family had crossed continents too.

The Saskatchewan of 1935 was a hard inheritance: Depression wheat prices, and a year when the rains finally came only for stem rust to take the crop. The prairie Edward was born into had lost its bison half a century before. But 1935 also sat inside the bison’s improbable second chapter. Canada had purchased one of the last private herds, descended from a handful of calves saved on the Montana plains, and between 1907 and 1912 shipped more than 700 animals north to its new parks. At Prince Albert National Park, some hundred and fifty kilometres from Hague, a display herd had been installed in the Buffalo Paddock in 1933, two years before his birth. A child born into a world with almost extinct bison could, by wagon and a family’s patience, go look at the future coming back.

Nearly a century later, a branch of my Mum’s family is raising bison. My cousin Charlie and his wife, Pam, are behind Buffalo Charlie, a Saskatchewan producer whose herd numbers about four hundred bison. Pam is a Registered Dietitian, and her mother, Barb Janzen, is their official cold-process soap maker.

Thankfully, there are hundreds of thousands of bison in North America now, and the great majority live in commercial herds. Plains bison remain assessed as Threatened in Canada, with only a few thousand truly wild ones. The genome still keeps the ledger. In Science this month, Beth Shapiro’s group, the same lineage of research that traced the Yukon metacarpal, read 160 bison genomes spanning 20,000 years. They found that the nineteenth-century collapse fragmented the species’ diversity rather than erasing it, and that about a third of modern bison carry a trace of cattle ancestry, usually under two percent of the genome, a scar from the desperate crossbreeding of the rescue era. The same tools that traced a foot bone across Beringia now guide which animals found new conservation herds. Reading the archive has become an act of stewardship. Raising four hundred bison on Saskatchewan grass as Buffalo Charlie does, in a province where less than a fifth of the native prairie survives, is part of how the archive stays alive.

For Regenerative Builders

At one end, biotechnology recovers DNA from a bison that died 130,000 years ago. At the other, people use chemistry and materials knowledge to transform what living bison provide. The two are the same impulse: reading a biological system closely enough to carry something forward.

Consider what happens inside the animal. A bison cannot digest cellulose. Its rumen microbes can. Fibre-degrading bacteria dismantle the crystalline architecture of grass, alongside anaerobic fungi whose hyphae physically pry plant tissue apart. The fermentation yields volatile fatty acids that supply about seventy percent of the animal’s energy. Sunlight becomes grass; microbes unlock the grass; the bison becomes muscle, fat, hide, and an insulating coat. It is the prairie’s original biomanufacturing engine.

Human knowledge extends the chain. One example among Buffalo Charlie’s products is Wild Rose, a cold-process soap made with bison tallow and foraged prairie blooms.

Its chemistry begins with fat that could otherwise go to waste. In saponification, the triglycerides of rendered tallow react with lye, yielding glycerol and the fatty-acid salts we call soap. Tallow’s long saturated chains, particularly palmitic and stearic acids, pack into a hard, long-lasting bar with a low, creamy lather. A measure of coconut oil joins the recipe, lending its bubbles to the bison.

The chemistry of the prairie is legible in the lather.

The herd offers a second material. As winter ends, bison shed their insulating down. It’s fibre of around 17 to 24 microns, in cashmere’s neighbourhood, hidden beneath coarse guard hairs. It is stubborn stuff: short-stapled, lanolin-free, prone to felting, needing careful sorting. Buffalo Charlie collects it and has worked with Custom Woolen Mills, a family-run mill near Carstairs, Alberta, where carding machinery dating to 1895, older than the rescue of the species, turns shed bison wool into something that can be spun and worn.

The animal engineers materials into the landscape.

A wallowing bison presses a depression three to five metres wide into the soil; rain collects, ephemeral pools form, and distinct plant and invertebrate communities colonize the disturbance. Seeds travel in the wool. The study Seed dispersal by Bison bison in a tallgrass prairie recovered nearly 2,800 seeds of at least 76 plant species from bison hair. At Wanuskewin, within months of the herd’s return in 2019 after a 150-year absence, the animals’ rolling and trampling exposed boulders carved with petroglyphs centuries old, the herd excavating the human archive, as if returning the favour.

The natural engineering of the land, with advances in human technology, is why I believe the Canadian Prairies could become one of the most productive regions anywhere for biological innovation. The foundation is already here: plants, animals, soils, microbial communities, and generations of practical knowledge, Indigenous and settler alike. Biotechnology adds new ways of reading and designing with these systems; biomanufacturing asks what else the prairie’s chemistry might make. The opportunity begins with seeing value in what is already present: a fat, a fibre, a flower, a microbe, a wallow.

Something Earned

The bison crossed a vanished bridge between continents, watched mammoths and wild horses disappear, met the human descendants of those who had once shared its ancestors’ northern world, and was nearly erased before being carried back from the edge. Our own archive extends beyond the genome, through the knowledge and ways of making that generations carry forward. The technologies are new, but the instinct to read the living world and build with what it provides is among the oldest we share.