Note: the term �mammoth� is herein used specifically in reference to the Woolly Mammoth, Mammuthus Primigenius, unless otherwise stated
The myth of the flash frozen mammoths is a curious one. It has been replicated in numerous popular books over the years, by authors keen to emphasise the mysterious and seemingly catastrophic events that surrounded the end of the last ice age. Stated almost universally in such books as �fact� it is little wonder that the myth has permeated into the public conscience as a genuine and, as yet, unexplained mystery.
The myth goes that, around 10,000 years ago, mammoths and other fauna that inhabited what are now arctic regions of Siberia and Alaska where overwhelmed by a sudden, catastrophic, cooling event and became extinct, almost overnight. Thousands of remains have been found of them, frozen so quickly that their flesh is still edible and the contents of their stomachs can be analysed � showing they were eating temperate, or even tropical, plants moments before death. Their presence, in regions in which such creatures could clearly not survive today � it is too cold and there is insufficient food � shows also that, prior to this event, the climate of Siberia must have been much different � warmer than today. Their death coincided with the end of the ice age, an event which geologists still struggle to explain, but which the authors of these books claim they may have the answer to�..
So was there a catastrophe? What is the truth behind the mystery? Or is it all myth? Let�s start by looking at the ice age itself, as described through the dedicated research of many thousands of geologists, climatologists, oceanographers and glaciologists, mostly over the past 50 years.
The Ice Age
Around 120,000 years ago the world was a slightly warmer place than it is today. Polar ice sheets were less extensive and sea levels were consequently higher. This was the Eemian Interglacial. Over the next 90,000 years an ice sheet slowly grew across North America, waxing and waning but with each advance slightly larger than the one before, each retreat slightly less. This had major ramifications for the climate across the Northern Hemisphere, and in response, ice sheets developed across Scandinavia as well as most mountainous regions � the Laurentian ice sheet increased the earth�s albedo and lower sea levels. Increased (the amount of sunlight the Earth reflects back into space) meant the Earth was cooler. Lower sea levels meant that the permanent Antarctic ice sheet was able to grow larger. Weather patterns around the world changed, as permanent regions of high pressure developed over the ice sheets. Globally it became drier (paradoxically ice sheets can grow even with reduced precipitation, so long as the rate of precipitation is greater than the speed at which the snow and ice melts or sublimes. However, in some places where precipitation rates became much lower than they are today, no ice sheet was able to develop, even though it was cold enough for one. Siberia � which even today sees its annual winter snowfall vanish completely in summer temperatures of 70�f � was one such place and became a cold, dry, desert known as steppe.) The exact reasons for the waxing and waning of the Laurentian ice sheet is not yet fully understood. Certainly the �Milankovitch Cycles� � millennial scale variations in the Earth�s orbit � played a role. Probably there were other, more complex, interactions involving the oceans currents, particularly within the North Atlantic, involved as well. The waning of the ice sheet coincided with periods � interstadials � lasting from hundreds to a few thousand years, which saw temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere often as warm as today, maybe in some places even warmer than today.
The finally advance of the Laurentian ice sheet � and consequently others around the world � occurred around 25,000 years ago. This is known as the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) and represented the greatest advance in ice sheets, lowest sea levels, and coolest temperatures of the last ice age. The LGM came to an end around 18,000 years ago. This time, unlike previous retreats of the Laurentian ice sheet, it disappeared completely. Again, the full reasons for this are not properly understood. Again it is likely to have been a complex interaction of Milankovitch Cycles and ocean currents.
One of the consequences of the melting ice sheets was the formation of huge glacial lakes, especially in North America. These were frequently dammed by slowly retreating glaciers and, periodically, the ice dams burst allowing a catastrophic release of waters across the landscape of North America. The best know, and largest, of these were the Missoula Floods which created the scablands of Eastern Washington, and Lake Agassiz, the sudden release of which precipitated the most dramatic climatic event of the last 20,000 years � the so-called �Younger Dryas� (YD). The YD (named after a arctic flower) was a cold/dry event which started very suddenly - maybe in the space of just a few decades - about 12,900 years ago and lasted some 1,300 years before ending with a similarly dramatic rise in temperature coupled with increases precipitation across the Northern Hemisphere, especially Eurasia. The date for the end of the YD � 9,600BC � may be familiar to the readers of books by the likes of Hancock and Collins�.. It is also regarded as the end of both the last ice age and of the Pleistocene Epoch. And the start of the modern, or Holocene, period.
This then is the �last ice age�. Not a period of continuous ice cover across the northern hemisphere, nor even of continuous cold, but one of great variation with periods of warm as well as great cold. It ended not in one sudden cataclysmic event, but its end did see numerous locally cataclysmic floods.
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Before we move on to the mammoths, lets just quickly look at a couple of related cases that demonstrates well how dangerous it is to believe per se what you read�.
A 90ft Fruit Tree in Siberia?
In Fingerprints of the Gods, Graham Hancock tells us that ��.the Arctic explorer Baron Eduard von Toll found the remains of �a sabertooth tiger, and a fruit tree that had been 90ft tall when it was standing. The tree was well preserved in the permafrost, with its roots and seeds. Green leaves and ripe fruit still clung to its branches�. His source for this is Charles Hapgood�s book Path of the Pole- which expounds the theory that the ice ages were actually the result of the Earth�s entire crust slipping over the mantle and moving the north pole to different regions. A theory which, incidently has no geophysical support and in fact completely fails to explain the climatic variations shown, from palaeoclimatic data, to have existed during the ice age.
The idea of a completely preserved 90ft fruit tree long intrigued me. Not so much because it was supposedly found in arctic Siberia, but because I�d never heard of any fruit tree that grew so tall!
On delving a little further � all the way back, in fact, to a translation of Tollmans's (not Toll) actual report - published in several French journals in 1885/6 1 � it soon transpires that we have been somewhat misled. What Tollman actually reported was:
And the layers from top to bottom as follows:
1. a peat covering composed of water mosses among other things.
2. a frozen, sandy clay layer with Alnus fruticosa, Salix sp., a scapula of Lepus sp. [i.e., a shoulder bone of a saber-toothed tiger]
3. similar layers with Pisidium sp. and Valvata sp. The reclining nature of this layer is covered here. In figure 1 these same layers 1 and 2 form the upper horizon, only the deposit of the sea basin with Pisidium and Alvata is missing there.
The surprising thing in this instance is the discovery of Alnus fruticosa which is so wonderfully preserved that the leaves hold fast on the twigs of the boughs -- indeed even whole clusters of blossom casings are preserved. The bark of the twigs and stems is fully intact, all the stems of the Alnus fruticosa along with the roots, in the length of 15-20 feet, jut out of the profile as can be seen in both figures of the table. With a magnifying glass, one can even recognize in figure 2 the blossom casings of the Alnus fructicosa. These findings provide evidence that a vegetation which today reaches its northern limit 4 degrees to the south on the mainland was predominant at that time on the Great Ljachow Island below 74 degrees and that these remnants could not have floated here from afar but grew here at this site. (p. 60 -- translation by Prof. Jerry Cox, Furman University, May 1994)
Alnus fruticosa is the latin name for the alder tree � it is not a plum, pear, apple or any other form of fruit tree. And, as Tollman reports, was actually just 15-20ft tall. Including roots. Whilst still beyond its present range, this is no great mystery given that, as already mentioned, during some interstadial periods of the last ice age the climate here was warmer than today...... The story of the 90ft fruit tree grew � via Creationist literature � out of a mistranslation of the latin term Alnus fruticosa and was compounded by the misunderstanding that the depth of the deposits in which it was found represented it�s actually growing height.
From which we conclude that when we read extraordinary facts, it�s best to check them back to the source before getting too excited�.
Alaskan Muck
Again, in Fingerprints of the Gods, Graham Hancock claims that: In a great swathe of death around the edge of the Arctic Circle the remains of uncountable large animals have been found���One authority has commented, �Hundreds of thousands of individuals must have been frozen immediately after death.� This �authority�, is none over than our old friend Charles Hapgood.
In Gateway to Atlantis, Andrew Collins reports Frank C Hibben, a professor of archaeology from the university of New Mexico, as estimating that 40 million animals perished in the American continent alone. Hibben is best known for his description of the �Alaskan Muck� which supposedly covers much of the state and is comprised of the jumbled remains of millions of animals all killed in a sudden catastrophe. Hibben, who�s book was published in 1946, has frequently been quoted by other authors too. Strangely though, no-one seems to question whether in the subsequent 60 years any further geological surveys have taken place. Nor, indeed, the fact that Hibben was an archaeologist with a somewhat flowery turn of phrase and � so it seems to me anyway � strongly religious overtones
So, what does a 21st century geologist have to say about the Alaskan Muck?
In a paper presented to the 3rd International Mammoth Conference in 2003, entitled Mammoths, Horses And Mucks � Oh My! : Paleoenvironments Of Last Chance Creek, Yukon Territory by Zazula etal we read that:
Placer mining in the Klondike goldfields of west-central Yukon Territory has yielded thousands of late Pleistocene faunal remains. Fossils are often recovered from the base of "muck" deposits, the unconsolidated, fine-grained, ice-rich silt found in valley bottom sites overlying gold bearing gravel. The Yukon "mucks" may be analogous to Siberian Yedoma silt dating to the Duvanny Yar interval.
Two discoveries at Last Chance Creek placer exposures are the focus of multi-proxy paleoecological investigation. In 1993, the mummified partial carcass of a small Pleistocene horse (Equus lambei) complete with stomach contents was recovered at the base of the "muck". An AMS radiocarbon age places the horse at 26,280 �210 yr BP (Beta-67407, Harington and Eggleston-Stott, 1996). In 2002, an exceptionally well-preserved, complete tusk of a mature woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) was recovered from gravel and peat near the base of the "muck". Sedge (Carex) seeds from the peat yielded an AMS radiocarbon age of 25,700 �400 yr BP (Zazula et al., 2003).
The Alaskan Muck is nothing more than alluvial deposits found in large river valleys. And the remains found there date in some cases to some 14ky before the end of the ice age. They are the accumulation of many thousands of years of local floods. Some, at the end of the ice age as the Cordillera Ice Sheet melted, may well have been spectacular and have swept many dozens or even hundreds of animals to their deaths. But there is no evidence whatsoever for a single, massive, catastrophe. Just misinterpretation and wishful thinking.
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Flash Frozen Mammoths?
The myth of flash frozen mammoths can be traced back at least as far as the pioneering zoologist Georges Cuvier who, in his 1829 work Revolutions and Catastrophes in the History of the Earth commented that: �this eternal frost did not previously exist in those parts in which the animals were frozen, for they could not have survived in such a temperature. The same instant that these creatures were bereft of life, the country which they inhabited became frozen�
On the 16th January1960, an American newspaper, the Saturday Evening Post, published an article by Ivan T Sanderson entitled Riddle of the Quick-frozen Giants in which he wrote: �The mammoths died suddenly, in intense cold, and in great numbers. Death came so quickly that the swallowed vegetation is yet undigested �.. Grasses, bluebells, buttercups, tender sedges and wild beans have been found, yet identifiable and undeteriorated, in their mouths and stomachs.�
If we add to this the assertion by Graham Hancock in Fingerprints of the Gods that it is �Harder to explain � the fact that human beings perished alongside them, as well as many other animals that in no sense can be described as cold-adapted� and Andrew Collins� scholarly conjecture in From the Ashes of Angels that that ��contrary to popular belief, woolly mammoths did not live in arctic conditions. They inhabited more temperate zones where grassland and wet boggy forests prevailed.�
Then we truly have a mystery on our hands.
Or do we?
The idea that mammoths have been found with undigested temperate (or, as some commentators have reported, tropical!) plants in their mouths and stomachs originates with one of the best known mammoth excavations, at Berezovka, carried out by E. W. Pfizenmayer in 1901. Studies by Professor B. A. Tikhomirov, Botanical Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, in St. Petersburg revealed, found that, amongst other plant remains, there were tiny traces of the common buttercup, Ranunculus acris, in the mammoth�s stomach. Ranunculus acris today grows in places like����.Svalbard, well within the arctic circle. The Berezoyka mammoth also seems to have given rise to the myth that mammoth flesh, when defrosted, was still edible. It was. But only to half starved huskies and wolves. Carbon dating shows it died around 39,000 years ago.
So how did the Mammoths die?
Details of exactly where these �remains of thousands of mammoths� are to be found also seem to be a bit sketchy. I have been unable to locate any authentic report of such finds � generally one author quotes another author who quotes another and so on � but the original sources, if they ever even existed, seem to have mysteriously vanished.
So perhaps we should look at what actually has been found?
Take Berelekh, for example:
The Berelekh burial ground, situated on the bank of the Berelekh polar river flowing into the lower reaches of the Indigirka River, is a unique burial place. About 10 thousand bones belonging to 160 mammoths were excavated by our expedition in 1970. The remains of the Shandrinsky mammoth with internal organs were excavated from the bank of the Shandrin River in 1971. Fragments of the carcass of a two month old mammoth found in autumn, 1990, on the right bank of the Indigirka River at the Mylahchyn site was another wonderful discovery. There is not time to describe all the finds of these ancient animals, so I will simply list some of them. In 1968 the almost intact carcass of the Selericansky horse without its head was found along the higher reaches of the Indigirka River. Its absolute age was 37 thousand years. In 1981 the carcass of a horse that had died 26 thousand years ago was discovered on the shore of Ducarskoe Lake. In 1994-1995 the skin of a ten year old mammoth and the skin and part of the back leg of another mammoth were discovered on Big Lyahovsky Island. In 1997 the forefoot of a mammoth with its thick hair cover and a piece of mammoth skin were found on the bank of the Maksunuokha River. In 2002 two mammoth legs were excavated there. 3
Unfortunately for the catastrophists, these remains were deposited over a period of at least 11ky and probably much longer.
At Sevsk an even more dramatic discovery has been made:-
Excavations at Sevsk, Bryansk Region, Russia, by the Paleontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1988�1991 recovered 3800 bones of woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius Blum.) representing a minimum of 33 individuals. The locality is one of the largest naturally occurring deposits of mammoth remains in Europe and is inferred to be a catastrophic death assemblage. The material includes five skeletons of juvenile mammoths, from 1 month to 6 or 7 years of age, as well as partial skeletons and isolated bones of adult individuals. A femur and humerus of an approximately 10�12-month-old fetus are also among the finds. Morphological features suggest that the Sevsk mammoths belonged to one family group; the age structure and sexual composition of the assemblage do not differ significantly from that of a family group of Modern African elephants. In contrast to other localities in Siberia and central Russia, relatively more (about 45% of individuals) prepubertal animals are preserved at Sevsk. Radiocarbon dates indicate that the mammoths died about 14,000 years ago. Data from diatoms, pollen and rodents, as well as archeological evidence, corroborate this age, and provide the basis for a paleoenvironmental reconstruction at the end of the Valdaian Glaciation in western Russia 4
So there is evidence of large deposits of mammoth remains, indicating a catastrophic death. Though 5 juveniles and a few adults is not quite the thousands we�re looking for��
Elsewhere in Siberia there is clear evidence for preservation of mammoth remains buried in aolian (wind blown) deposits � a far cry from the flood or flash freezing proposed by catastrophists:-
In July, 2002, a new locality for mammoth remains, Kochegur, was discovered 3.5 km northeast of the Shestakovo locality. Numerous bone and tooth fragments were preserved within the deposits of the upper part of the section on the right bank of the Kiya River, at a height of about 80 m above the water line. Preliminary excavations were carried out to establish the species composition, stratigraphic position and taphonomy of faunal remains over the area of ~ 6 m2. More than one hundred fragments of bones and teeth were detected belonging to at least three M. primigenius individuals aged fifteen to thirty years. Most of the fossil remains occurred at a depth of 0.55 to 1.3 m within the bottom of the gray-brown loess-like loam (up to 0.55 m thick). Within the bottom of the bed there was, along with fossil remains, a great quantity of gravel and pebbles (occasionally boulders up to 0.3 m in size), as well as much gruss and rock debris derived from underlying Cretaceous deposits. This coarse material establishes the eolian-talus genesis of the deposits 5
The cause of death of the famous �Baby Dima� mammoth is even clearer:-
The most famous find is the Kirgilyakh or baby Dima mammoth (62� 40' N, 147� 59' E), which also was exposed during mining operations along the Kirgilyakh Stream. Dima is a virtually complete specimen, and extensive anatomical and geomorphological analyses are reported in Shilo et al. (1983). The site consists of three colluvium-covered river terraces. Although Dima was discovered on the second terrace, fragments of fur remaining in the third terrace suggest this was the point of original deposition. Evidently, the body was encapsulated in ice and moved from the third to the lower second terrace through solufluction. The baby mammoth likely became mired in a pool and drowned, as evidenced by silts found in his lungs. 6
But perhaps the most telling excavation was carried out at Krasniy Yar, near Tomsk in Russia. Here we discover that:-
The Krasniy Yar locality is of alluvial origin. The accumulation of the remains was a result of frequent deaths during crossing of the ancient Ob river, or during drinking. Perishing during the passage across the river could be confirmed by the significant number of remains of young mammoths, wooly rhino, bison, and horse (Maschenko and Shpanskiy, 2002). Corpses of the animals and their fragments accumulated along a short interval of the river with a slow current (some bones are rolled or broken). Probably burial occurred relatively slowly, making the carcasses accessible for predators and rodents. Many bones preserve the traces of gnawing by large predators and middle-sized rodents (probably gophers). There are two ways for the predated remains to occur in the locality. The principal one is through accidental death during the spring high water of the river. As a result, the most numerous remains are those of gregarious ungulates, which perished most frequently at the site. 7
Flash frozen mammoths eh? Proof of a global flood? So where did the predators come from?
Put another way, there is simply no evidence that a large number of mammoths become flash frozen over a short period of time at the end of the last ice age. On the contrary, there is a wealth of evidence that they died in different places at different times, sometimes individually, sometimes in small groups, as a result of a variety of causes, including falling into peat bogs and being swept away whilst attempting to ford swollen rivers. Just exactly the same way large herbivores die in arctic, and other, regions today��
As to why the mammoths finally became extinct. Well, that too is no longer a mystery. We turn here to one of the world�s leading mammoth experts, Dick Mol. Speaking of the Tamiyr peninsular:
The vegetation during the Weichselian was dominated by taxa indicating dry, cold steppe conditions (mainly grasses and Artemisia). Tundra plants were of minor importance and mainly occurred at humid sites. During two less cold, more humid Middle Weichselian interstadials there was a temporary increase of Larch, Birch and Alder, but the pollen records during those phases still reflect a rather open landscape. After the transition from the Late Weichselian to the warmer and more humid Holocene a remarkable and dramatic change took place. The herbaceous steppe vegetation declined and shrub and tree Birches and Alder expanded, together with tundra species.
For understanding the high population density and final collapse of the Late Pleistocene megafauna of Taimyr, insight into the interaction between climate, vegetation and herbivores is essential (Guthrie 1990, 2001). The climate-induced transition from dry steppe to moist tundra at the start of the Holocene had strong effects on the life conditions of the large herbivores. Snow cover during winter was thin or even absent during the dry climate of the Late Weichselian, and thus food remained available for grazing animals. Thick snow cover was problematic for the herbivores after the transition to the Holocene. The change in humidity played another important role: the dryness of the Weichselian period had positive effects on the length of the growing season, while, after the transition to the Holocene, plant growth could only start during late spring, after the thick snow cover had melted. Intensive grazing during the Weichselian had strong effects on the vegetation, because of the accelerated nutrient cycling (recorded fungal spores point to high production of dung). In addition, grazing stimulates grass species (Poaceae) because they have their growing points just near their roots. Many tundra plants have their growing points at the end of their stems, for which reason those species are easily damaged by grazing. The moisture-demanding and less palatable tundra plants could expand only after the early Holocene decline of the herbivore population density. Wet conditions and low grazing pressure caused the development of thick (insulating) layers of plant remains on top of the soils, which hampered early and deep thawing of the soils and thus also resulted in nutrient-poor conditions. Climate change probably was not the only factor causing the crash of the megafaunal populations, but the effects of increased temperatures and precipitation - as is evident from the pollen records from Taimyr - will have been an important factor in the megafaunal collapse at the Pleistocene / Holocene boundary. The climate change at the start of the Holocene was a major factor in the observed vegetation change, but the climatic effect was amplified as a consequence of the reduced population density of large herbivores. 8
Mammoths were killed not by some sudden �Day After Tomorrow� style flash freezing. They weren�t killed by the cold at all. They died because the climate turned wetter and this in turn led to a change in vegetation which was no longer capable of supporting large numbers of herbivores. Human predation may also have had an additional impact. And they died not in a single moment, but slowly, gradually, over thousands of years.
There is no mammoth mystery. Only myth.
NOTES:-
(4) Memoires de L'Academie imperials des Sciences de St. Petersbouro, VII Serie, Tome XLII, No. 13., Wissenschaftliche Resultate der Von der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften sur Erforschung des Janalandes und der Neusibirischen Inseln in den Jahren 1885 und 1886 Ausgesandten expedition. ["Scientific Results of the Imperial Academy of Sciences of the Investigation of Janaland and the New Siberian Islands from the Expeditions Launched in 1885 and 1886" -- ed.] Abtheilung III: Die fossilen Eislager und ihre Beziehungen su den Mammuthleichen, by Baron Eduard v. Toll (St. Peterabourg: Commissionnaires de I'Academie Imperiale des sciences, 1895).
(2) Radiocarbon Dating Evidence for Mammoths on Wrangel Island, Arctic Ocean, until 2000 BC
S. L. Vartanyan etal - published in Radiocarbon Volume 37, Number 1, 1995, pp. 1-6. Copyright � 1995 by the Department of Geosciences, The University of Arizona
(3) Discoveries And Study Of Carcasses Of The Mammoth Fauna In Yakutia - Petr Lazarev � paper presented to the 3rd International Mammoth Conference (3rd IMC) May 2003
(4) The Sevsk woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) site in Russia: Taphonomic, biological and behavioral interpretations - Evgeny N. Maschenko, Svetlana S. Gablina, Alexey S. Tesakov and Alexandra N. Simakova � 3rd IMC
(5) Kochegur, A New Locality For Mammoth Remains In The Shestakovo Beast Solonetz District (Western Siberia) - Sergey V. Leshchinskiy and Elena M. Burkanova - 3rd IMC
(6) Preserved Wooly Mammoths (Mammuthus Primigenius) And Associated Palynological Spectra From Northeast Siberia - Anatoly V. Lozhkin1 And Patricia M. Anderson � 3rd IMC
(7) Quaternary mammal remains from the Krasniy Yar locality (Tomsk region, Russia) - A.V. Shpansky � 3rd IMC � Published in Quaternary International
Volumes 142-143 , January 2006, Pages 203-207
(8 ) Results of the Cerpolex/Mammuthus expeditions on the Taimyr Peninsula, Arctic Siberia, Russian Federation - Dick Mol etal - 3rd IMC � Published in Quaternary International
Volumes 142-143 , January 2006, Pages 186-202