Abridged version

We present to our readers a chapter from a book that is over thirty years old. The author wrote it in the early 50s, when only a few people in the world were studying cryptozoology - scientists and simply enthusiastic people who were not afraid to challenge official science. Therefore, B. Euvelmans' book had the effect of a bomb exploding in the West. Still would! After all, the scientist and writer talked in it about things that simply did not fit into the mind about the “Bigfoot” and living dinosaurs of Africa, about the giant sloth of Patagonia and the nightmarish size of the anaconda... This is in our days, when dozens of books have been published about mythical and mysterious animals, reports about them no longer seem so amazing, and then, in the early 50s, the works of A. Sanderson and Willie Lay, Frank Line and B.F. Porshnev had not yet been written...

In a word, Euvelmans turned out to be the pioneer of the cryptozoological topic in world natural science. Since then, many interesting events have occurred in this area: several species of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, not to mention insects, have been found, or rather, rediscovered. Lost worlds of Venezuela discovered. But Bigfoot, giant reptiles of Africa, and sea serpents remain on the agenda. And a mammoth. It’s not evening yet, gentlemen, says B. Euvelmans. More precisely, the 20th century is not over yet!

N Some time ago, the Soviet information service broadcast sensational news to the whole world: live mammoths were seen in Siberia!

However, this information did not find a wide response in the press; apparently, the topic was considered somewhat outdated. Indeed, how many times have these mammoths appeared on the pages of the press!

But the attention of scientists was again focused on the Far North, where for more than half a century there have been eyewitnesses who claim to have seen a living mammoth...

What do the Eskimos say?

Science once came close to accepting the hypothesis of the actual existence of mammoths: in 1899, a San Francisco daily newspaper published an article in which it was said in all seriousness that the Eskimos of Alaska were too well aware of the famous hairy elephants as their appearance , and about morals. The traveler who sent the article was surprised to discover that the Eskimos had weapons made of walrus tusks, on which were carved images of a shaggy colossus with long curved tusks. Moreover, the drawing was made relatively recently!

The version that the image of the animal was passed down unchanged from generation to generation for 20 25 thousand years, that is, from the time when mammoths supposedly disappeared, seemed too implausible.

A scientific commission immediately went to the indicated place; it did not meet mammoths there, but confirmed the traveler’s report. The bone weapon was taken for examination, which determined that it was made recently. When researchers asked the Eskimos where furry elephants lived, they pointed towards the icy desert to the northwest.

Maybe they just wanted to show the place where their ancestors once hunted mammoths? If this is so, then mammoths should have disappeared quite recently. The radiocarbon dating method, which was used to study archaeological finds, made it possible to accurately establish that the Eskimos settled in the American Far North no more than a thousand years ago.

Or maybe legends about shaggy giants came to them from distant Siberia? In any case, the Eskimos report details about mammoths that science can only establish through comparative analysis.

They live underground!

In Scandinavia, we will encounter a slightly modified legend: the Laplanders living in the Far North firmly believe in the existence of hairy giants. But they live, according to these people, under the eternal snows of the Great North.

And throughout Siberia to the Bering Strait, there are beliefs about shaggy underground colossi.

Thus, among the Eskimos inhabiting the Asian shore of the strait, the mammoth is known under the name “Kilu Kruk”, that is, “a whale named Kilu”. According to legend, this whale had a quarrel with sea ​​monster Aglo was thrown onto land, but turned out to be too heavy and sank into the ground. Since then, he has settled under the permafrost, where he digs passages for himself with powerful tusks.

Among the Chukchi, who occupy the extreme northeastern part of Siberia, the mammoth personifies the bearer evil spirit. He lives underground, in narrow passages and corridors. When a person encounters tusks protruding from the ground, he must immediately dig them out. Then the sorcerer will lose his power. They say that one day several Chukchi saw two fangs peeking out of the ground. They acted according to the behests of their ancestors and dug up a whole mammoth along with the tusks. All winter their tribe ate mammoth meat.

The Yukaghirs, whose possessions stretch beyond the Arctic Circle from the Lena delta to the Kolyma, mention in their legends the mammoth under the name “Kholkhut”. Some local shamans believe that the spirit of a giant is the guardian of souls. So a shaman who has been possessed by the spirit of a mammoth is incomparably stronger than an ordinary shaman.

“Based on this information,” wrote Waldemar Yochelson at the beginning of the century, who brought the northern legends to us, “we can assume that mammoths once lived at the same time as people.”

According to Yochelson, who led Ryabushinsky’s expedition to Kamchatka, the Aleutian, Commander and Kuril Islands, the Yukaghirs did not record the disappearance of shaggy monsters in their legends. They simply believe that the enormous weight of the giants did not allow them to survive in the wetland. It is noteworthy that many scientists adhere to this point of view.

To the south, among the Yakuts and Ustyaks, as well as among the Koryaks who inhabit the shores of the Sea of ​​Okhotsk, you can hear legends about a certain giant rat called “Mamantu”, that is, “the one who lives-underground”. They say that she cannot stand daylight. As soon as she emerges from the ground, thunder roars and lightning flashes. These giant rats allegedly cause tremors and earthquakes.

The Kamchadals in Kamchatka have preserved only echoes of these legends. Here you can hear about a fairy-tale character named Tuyla, who rides a dog sled underground. When he returns to his place, his dog Kozey is shaking off the snow - that’s why there is increased seismicity in those areas!

In Mongolia, the ghost of a hairy elephant named Tai-Shu can still be found in local lore. The book Se-chu, or Four Volumes on the Moral Philosophy and Politics of China, mentions a shaggy monster with tiny eyes and a short tail, which digs passages in the snow with its fangs.

In the encyclopedic treatise “The World of Animals,” the authorship of which is attributed to Kuang Chi, the first emperor of the Manchu dynasty (1662 1723), one can also find an echo of Siberian legends: “In the north lives an underground rat “fenshu,” that is, “hiding mouse,” or “ yenshu," or "mother mouse." In the book "The Mirror of the Manchu Language" she is called the "rat of the ice." This is a huge elephant-like animal that lives only underground and dies as soon as it comes up and the sun’s rays touch it.”

To this information, the writer-emperor adds several prosaic details: “You come across “Fenshu” that weigh up to 10 thousand pounds. Their teeth look like elephant tusks: northern peoples use them to make dishes, combs, knife handles, etc. I saw these teeth and products made from them with my own eyes. Therefore, I believe the stories about fenshu found in our old books.”

“The Mirror of the Manchu Language” reports surprisingly accurate information about mammoths: “The rat of ice and glaciers lives deep in the north, under the eternal snows. Its meat can be eaten. Its fur is several feet long. It can be used to weave carpets that do not allow damp air to pass through.”

From the Northern Elephant to Baron Kagg's Supercow

But let’s return to Siberia, where local residents can not only talk about mammoths, but also, on occasion, show them their huge tusks, reaching five meters in length and weighing more than 200 kilograms.

The trade in mammoth tusks has long flourished in Siberia. At the beginning of this century, their export from the Yakutsk region alone reached an average of 152 pairs per year. Over the previous two centuries, only registered tusks from more than 25 thousand animals were exported from this area. And from all of Siberia, based on the amount of taxes indicated in the customs books, from 60 thousand mammoths. This does not include the leakage of valuable material at an earlier time.

Mention of mammoth bone is found in Chinese chronicles, even before our era. And in the 9th century, the Arabs, who were successful in various types of trade, began marketing it on a grand scale. They bought tusks from the Bulgars on the Volga and took them to Europe, where they sold them as ivory. Clever merchants passed them off as the horn of a mythical narwhal and literally sold them for their weight in gold.

The delight of buyers subsided only in 1611, when the English traveler J. Logan brought to London supposedly an elephant tusk, which he had acquired in Russia.

"In Russia? This is impossible!" - cried his compatriots. They were well aware that elephants are found only in Africa and India. Of course, their remains can be found in Europe, but these are nothing more than Hannibal’s elephants...

But J. Logan stood his ground. He claimed that he bought the tusk from a Samoyed near the mouth of the Pechora River, which flows into the Barents Sea.

At the end of the 17th century, Logan’s words were confirmed by the report of the Dutch diplomat Evert Ida, who was sent to China by Peter the Great. There, in 1692, he heard stories that in the north of Siberia, burials of bones and giant fangs of animals called mammoths were sometimes found. One Russian told him that he himself had found frozen parts of this animal in the Yenisei region.

But the unusual stories that the indigenous people told about these mole-like creatures did not inspire confidence in European naturalists. Eventually scientists decided that we're talking about about an unusual animal, distantly related to elephants, but possessing, like him, valuable tusks. That's how walruses came onto the scene. Without a doubt, the remains of these huge pinnipeds, reaching a length of 5 meters (tusks up to 60 centimeters!), were mistaken by travelers for the bones of elephants! True, a walrus's tusk is not as huge as a mammoth's tusk, but walruses can often be found along the northern shores.

The confusion was further aggravated by the fact that the Russian merchants who exported the tusks called them “Mammoth bone”, and not “fang” or “teeth”. They themselves were misled by the Yukaghirs, the main suppliers of this raw material, who called it “Kholkhutonmun”, that is, “horn” and even “log” of a mammoth. This does not mean that they did not imagine the structure of a mammoth: they called the tusks “horns growing from the mouth.” As for the “logs,” they apparently seemed to the northerners the most suitable object for comparison with thick curved tusks, which, in their opinion, had nothing in common with teeth.

However, this was not the most egregious case of error, as evidenced by the story described in Willie Ley’s scientific work “Dragons in Amber”:
“In 1772, the Swedish scientist and officer, Baron Kagg, colonel of the royal cavalry, being a prisoner of war, ended up in Siberia. His partner, also a prisoner, devoted all his free time to collecting information about the famous giant, owner of an expensive bone. One day he met a Russian who told him that he was familiar with this animal and agreed to draw it. The partner gave the drawing to Kagg so that he could send it to Sweden, where this masterpiece is still kept in the Lenkoping library. It’s hard to say whether the Russian who depicted a cow with claws and horns twisted in a corkscrew believed in the truth of his drawing, or whether he wanted to make fun of his former enemy...”

Willie Ley remarks ironically:
“Baron Kagg himself sincerely believed the drawing. The same cannot be said about scientists.”

Surprise appearance of hippopotamus and woolly rhinoceros

While European scientists were puzzling over the mystery, the only clue in which could be considered the tusk brought by J. Logan, the Russians were taking concrete steps. Deciding to unravel the mystery, Peter the Great sent a German naturalist, Dr. D. G. Messerschmidt, to Siberia, who enjoyed considerable trust and authority. He was instructed to continue exploring the vast expanses of Siberia and at the same time pay due attention to the search for the mysterious digging elephant.

During the trip, the researcher learned that not far from Indigirka they discovered the corpse of a mammoth exposed from under the ice. The scientist arrived at the scene when most of the carcass had already been taken away by wolves. Messerschmidt received only the skeleton of the monster, as well as a piece of skin covered with long hair, reminiscent of a goat.

Alas! Comparative anatomy was still too poorly developed in those early years. The venerable scientist concluded without hesitation that the remains belonged to “an animal mentioned in the Bible under the name “Behemoth.”

Fortunately, few people were impressed by this “discovery.”

In 1771, another discovery was made, which added a rhinoceros to the list of suspected animals. The famous German naturalist and naturalist Peter Simon Pallas, traveling through Siberia at the expense of Catherine the Great, discovered on one of the tributaries of the Lena an incomplete skeleton of an unknown animal, covered with the remains of the skin of an unknown animal. Thick, long dark brown hair covered the skin. As the scientist correctly established, the skeleton could not belong to the legendary mammoth, it belonged to a rhinoceros.

Researchers who did not believe in Siberian elephants had to admit the fact of the existence in the Far North of a woolly rhinoceros - two-horned, with nostrils separated by a septum. Now paleontological works began to appear in Europe, which mentioned that the ancestors of modern rhinoceroses once lived here.

Let us recall that in the Middle Ages, when scientists had to dig up fossilized dinosaur bones preserved in European clays or gravels, it was generally accepted that they belonged to giant people Titans and Atlanteans. “Dragon bones” are kept in churches to this day. Elephant tusks were mistaken for the horns of another fairy tale hero narwhal.

In 1799, John Friedrich Blumenbach of the University of Göttingen solemnly announced that there used to be elephants in Europe that were not like modern elephants. Those tusks were bizarrely curved. You recognized them, of course: the scientist meant our mammoths!

But the famous German zoologist, well aware of the coat of the extinct elephant, did not think of comparing it with the legendary mole-like giant, which the Siberians called a mammoth. He christened the animal, whose skeleton he had painstakingly assembled from bones found both in churches and quarries, Elephas primigenius. This name was not successful, since mammoths were too isolated a group of animals, very different from modern elephants.

Preserved mammoth

Around the same time that Blumenbach shocked the Western world with his discovery, one of his favorite specimens appeared in the flesh before the eyes of a humble Evenk mammoth ivory miner named Osip Chumakov. The animal was in an ice block not far from the Lena delta and probably looked quite ominous, since, having stumbled upon it, the Evenk began to run as fast as he could. For according to legend, the mammoth had an evil eye.

However, driven by curiosity, Osip came every spring to visit his animal. One day he saw a piece of tusk emerge from the ice. For a mammoth ivory miner, this was too much of a temptation. The poor fellow tried several times to dig out a valuable tusk from under the ice, but every time he was afraid that the monster would wake up in pain and burst out.

There have long been menacing rumors about frozen colossi. Even Yochelson caught their echoes. “Having reached the Sea of ​​Okhotsk in the area of ​​the Kolyma River,” he wrote, “I spent the night on the shore of Lake Kememnan (Mammoth Lake). When I asked where the name of the lake came from, I was told that one day a family of Evenk nomads stopped for the night on its shore. Waking up in the morning, they saw not far from the parking lot a pair of mammoth tusks sticking out of the snow. Seized with horror, they jumped on the sledge and rushed off, but at the next stop they all died, with the exception of one boy.”

Osip, who knew many impressive stories about the furry giants, was so worried that one fine day he fell ill and decided that his last hour had come.

Fortunately, a Russian merchant named Boltunov was in the village at that time, who, sensing a profitable deal, quickly brought the superstitious Evenk back to life. He painted a picture of a profitable enterprise before Osip’s eyes, promising him that if he took him to the frozen mammoth, he himself would take the trouble to hollow out the tusks from under the ice. In anticipation of profit, Osip quickly recovered. The two companions managed to safely free the animal's tusks. Having given the Evenk 50 rubles, Boltunov became the owner of the loot.

The Russian businessman not only took the tusks with him, but also made a drawing from life, which eventually came to Blumenbach.

Of course, the animal in the picture bore little resemblance to an elephant. Moreover, before Boltunov’s appearance, the carcass was attacked by hungry wolves, and under the pressure of the ice it was bizarrely deformed, the skin was torn, the tusks were turned to the sides. But Blumenbach easily recognized him as his Elephas primigenius. It was enough for him to look at one of the teeth of the animal, carefully sketched by the merchant. The German scientist immediately published the drawing with the comment:
"Elephas primigenius", called a mammoth in Rus', dug together with skin and wool in 1806 at the mouth of the Lena River near the Arctic Ocean. The drawing was made from life, the remains of the animal are depicted as they were found, that is, damaged and partially destroyed.”

Inspired by the news of an almost preserved mammoth, a Russian scientist, Professor Adams, got ready to hit the road. He wanted to see the remains with his own eyes and make the necessary observations. Unfortunately, the famous botanist was ahead of wolves, foxes and wolverines, as well as Yakuts, who fed their dogs fossil meat.

However, the skeleton itself was well preserved; it was missing only one leg. Three quarters of the animal's skin was preserved, covered with reddish and brown hair, which on the neck reached a length of 70 centimeters. The thickness of the skin in some places exceeded 2 centimeters. Ten people could hardly lift the find. Adams carefully packed all the parts of the priceless fossil and even sifted the soil scattered around it, collecting 17 kilograms of mammoth wool. With the greatest precautions, the relics were transported to St. Petersburg and sold to the Kunstkamera for 8 thousand rubles. These remains can still be seen in the city's Zoological Museum.

Portrait of a shaggy colossus

The discovery of the frozen mammoth led to a series of similar discoveries in various places in northern Siberia, between the Ob and the Bering Strait. Constant erosion erodes the clay-ice graves where these giants sleep.

In April 1901, the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences was notified by the governor of Yakutsk about a new find: a perfectly preserved mammoth was discovered frozen in the ice on the bank of the Berezovka, one of the tributaries of the Kolyma. The Tsar personally donated 16 thousand rubles to the academy, with which an expedition was immediately equipped under the leadership of the head of the zoological department, Dr. Otto Hertz. This time the famous butterfly hunter was on the hunt for bigger prey!

Wolves and other predators did not have time to get ahead of the researchers. The melted part of the corpse began to decompose, so the burial gave off a characteristic smell.

Among the expedition participants was the young German scientist E.V. Pfizenmayer. This thirty-two-year-old paleontologist had long dreamed of digging up a prehistoric monster from the depths of the earth, and fate gave him such an opportunity. It was not just a surviving fragment of skin and a pile of bones that had to be cleaned and processed: Pfitzenmaeyer had the good fortune to dissect the untouched flesh of a huge beast and thoroughly understand its anatomy. Subsequently, his work on the study of mammoths was recognized throughout the scientific world, and he was appointed director-curator of the Tiflis Museum, where he lived until 1917: then the scientist returned to his homeland in Württenberg.

A specimen found on the Berezovka River served as the basis for determining the scientific name of Siberian mammoths. It was named Elephas berezkius.

The entire body of the mammoth removed from the permafrost was covered with reddish-yellow fur. In some places it was black and reached from 30 to 70 centimeters in length. Probably, before its color was black and reddish, but over time it changed.

The animal's tail was short. A curious detail: at the base it had a special fold of skin to protect the anus from the cold.

It also saved a subcutaneous layer of fat up to 9 centimeters thick from frost. In addition, the animal carried two fatty growths on its head and nape: they served it, like camels, as a source of food in times of famine.

The researchers were struck by how much the mammoth's appearance resembled that of an Asian elephant. Especially with his hunchback, small ears and concave forehead.

Blood samples were taken from the animal's subcutaneous vessels and carefully examined. The results of the analysis irrefutably proved that mammoths are related to Indian elephants.

Since we're talking about elephants, let's try to find out the true height of mammoths. Looking at illustrations for textbooks and other books, you might think that mammoths reached 6 meters in height. But the Siberian mammoth never exceeded a height of 3 meters at the withers; it was even lower than modern Indian elephants (remember, African elephants reach a height at the withers of 3 meters 70 centimeters). But if you consider that the body of mammoths was covered with long hair, and by winter impressive growths grew on the head and scruff of the neck, then you can imagine what mountains of wool and meat they looked like!

Now we even know what the giants ate. Pfizenmayer dissected the contents of the monster's stomach - 12 kilograms of chewed food that had not had time to digest. Botanists were able to determine the animal's usual diet: it consisted of larch, pine and spruce needles, seasoned with sage and wild thyme, as well as pine cones, moss, alpine poppy and buttercups. Further analysis established that the food of Siberian elephants also included dwarf willow and birch, alder, poplar, and various types of reed and cereal vegetation.

In a word, in their stomachs one could find everything edible that grew in those days in the tundra and forest-tundra.

When did mammoths disappear? And why?

It would seem that well-preserved finds obviously prove the existence of mammoths at the present time, as the peoples now living in the far North believe. But science categorically refutes this hypothesis. Cuvier, who contributed to the unprecedented rise of paleontology, convinced European scientists of the 19th century that mammoths, the remains of which are found everywhere from North America up to Siberia inclusive, are an extinct group. The evolutionary doctrine of the development of the animal world excluded the possibility of preserving an animal whose entire genus had become extinct a long time ago. Thus, the bodies of mammoths, even if their meat was still suitable for food, must have been frozen for 10 to 100 thousand years!

In 1864, Edouard Lartette, who can rightfully be considered the founder of human paleontology, dug up an ivory blade in the La Madeleine area, on which was clearly engraved a drawing of a mammoth.

This magnificent specimen ancient art accepted at the Academy of Sciences as a fake. The drawing clearly shows a supraoccipital fat hump, which those who allegedly faked it could not have known about. The trouble was that at that time scientists did not know about the existence of the hump. It became known about it, as we have already said, several decades later.

From now on two facts were established. Firstly, furred elephants once occupied vast territories in Europe, Asia and North America. Secondly, they were contemporaries of man. This was confirmed by drawings discovered in France in the Dordogne caves, where so carefully painted images of mammoths appeared before the eyes of researchers that there was no doubt: they were made from life. But if mammoths disappeared from Europe, and humans remained, then the universality of Cuvier’s law is called into question, according to which a complete change species composition fauna occurs as a result of major natural disasters.

If some great flood or earthquake did not cause the disappearance of shaggy elephants, then what caused their death?

Science has established that mammoths appeared in the Far North later than in Central and Western Europe. This is quite understandable based on climatic conditions, which are known to have undergone significant changes.

Siberian tigers have longer fur than Bengal tigers, and Alaskan grizzlies have warmer coats than their Malaysian counterparts. Long hair is, of course, one of the main adaptations for living in cold conditions. In the same way, it is no coincidence that the hairiness of mammoths contrasts with the almost naked skin of African and Indian elephants.

If mammoths once lived in vast areas of North America and Europe, this is because in those days the temperature there was lower than today. Modern research showed that the glaciers that today cover the mountains of Scandinavia at that time extended throughout northern Europe. It was they who turned the once flourishing region, filled with animals that now live in the tropics, into the Siberian tundra.

The remains of mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses with septate nostrils found in Europe correspond to the last glaciation period, which ended, according to scientists, about 12 thousand years ago.

It is logical to assume that mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses followed the retreating glacier north, which kept them much-needed cool.

But if cold-loving animals left their former pastures, which little by little began to be covered with dense forests, this does not mean that inevitable death awaited them in the vastness of Siberia. After all, their favorite climate reigns there to this day!

What killed the giants?

Scientists puzzled over what caused the death of a huge population of animals that were not only well adapted to the cold, but also preferred it to a warm climate. Perhaps they were carried out to sea by a violent flood caused by melting glaciers? But he could not destroy all the animals on several continents at once.

In search of an answer to this question, the French zoologist Neuville questioned the frost resistance of mammoths. Were they really as well protected from the cold as it seems when looking at their thick coat? Was the cold the reason for their death? They must have suffered an incredible cold spell if their frozen bodies could survive to this day!

In their stomachs we can find particles of plants that would not be able to develop in too harsh a climate. Maybe we don't know about a sudden wave of cold air that killed the main vegetation, leaving large animals without food?

No, Neville answers. This could not happen over such an extended space. In addition, the stomachs of found mammoths are usually full of food, and the layer subcutaneous fat thick enough to indicate the onset of a hungry period.

It seems that the disappearance of the giants was not caused by external factors. Neville began to carefully study the skin of mammoths and compare it with the skin of modern elephants. He concluded that they were identical. In particular, neither one nor the other has sweat and sebaceous glands (Now these data are questioned. Ed.). But in the absence of fat treatment, the thick wool of a mammoth ceases to be a warm fur coat. Rain and snow can easily penetrate through it, turning it into an ice crust.

Neuville also noticed that the famous tusks are almost circular in shape, which makes them useless as weapons; on the contrary, they only burden the animal.

In addition, the giants’ legs were “shod” with powerful horny growths, which, according to the scientist, made the movements of the mammoths clumsy and slow.

In short, the disappearance of mammoths was the result of gradual but steady degeneration. They turned out to be unadapted to severe frosts and had other deficiencies in their body structure. This was the opinion of the famous zoologist.

To me, perhaps, none of Neville’s arguments seems convincing.

On the one hand, the permeability of a fur coat would have to be more than compensated by a powerful fat layer, which, as is known, is an excellent protection from the cold. In addition, the presence, as we have already noted, of a special fold of skin at the base of the tail indicates quite advanced mechanisms of protection against icy air. Finally, one can ask the question: did not, on the contrary, the horny growths help our heavyweights to step on sticky soil and deep snow?

However, the objection may be quite simple: if mammoths were so oppressed by the cold, why did they not remain in Europe after the retreat of the glaciers? It didn’t take much for them to flee from warming to freeze to death in Siberia!

The argument that mammoth weapons have turned into useless cargo is completely refutable: for example, it is known that elephants, defending themselves with their tusks, try not to pierce, but to knock down the enemy. And for this, rounded tusks are quite suitable.

Have they really disappeared?

The most popular hypothesis these days claims that the mammoths died as a result of a catastrophe. Was it an accident that killed the Berezovka mammoth? The examination revealed a fracture of one of the legs and pelvis. Apparently the woolly elephant took a wrong step and fell off a cliff covered in dust from the recent snowfall. Floundering in a landslide, he caused a new avalanche of snow, which buried him forever.

Could such accidents have become widespread under certain conditions? For example, when the glacier retreated, many gullies appeared, hidden and obvious, lying in wait for the giants.

But can an event as rare for an animal as a fall from a cliff be seriously considered the cause of the extinction of an entire species? On the contrary, animals instinctively try to avoid suspicious places. It is unlikely that mammoths, going to new territories in order to survive, would blindly rush from the slopes.

Elk, reindeer, wolverine, arctic fox and lemming lived side by side with mammoths during the Ice Age, and with them the musk ox and Przewalski's horse. All of them found refuge in Siberia and Alaska. Why were mammoths an exception?

Most scientists agree that they could have survived until very recently. So what is next? Why couldn’t a small part of them survive somewhere in the lands of the Yakuts and Yukaghirs?

In science, much often depends on how the question to which we are looking for an answer is posed. So far we have tried to answer the question: do mammoths live in the tundra today, and if not, why did they become extinct? But why in the tundra? Just because their remains are found only among the swampy plains? However, this does not prove that mammoths did not live in other places. After all, if the remains of monkeys and lions are found in Europe, this does not mean that these animals did not live anywhere else.

It is likely that the taiga used to extend much further north than it does today, precisely where mammoth remains are found most often.

However, the fact that the mammoth is primarily a taiga animal and not a tundra animal confirms the contents of their stomachs. In the tundra the main vegetation is moss. But the diet of giants, as we found out, was much more varied. We also found out that their skin was devoid of sebaceous glands, but at the same time was equipped with a fatty layer. That is, the animal was poorly protected from rain and snow, but tolerated the cold well. It turns out that it is a forest landscape, where the dense crowns coniferous species well protected from rain and snow, it was preferable for mammoths.

The monster was seen alive

In this huge forest, consisting of birch and conifers, crossed by numerous rivers, mammoths would find themselves ideal conditions for life. Why did they need to leave these nourishing and safe places to reign among the icy desert?

If my assumption is correct, is it possible to admit that shaggy giants still roam the taiga expanses? Of course you can! Taiga is the longest forest in the world. Most of it is completely unexplored. Mammoths can wander through it without hope of ever meeting a person.

But the local tribes probably managed to see mammoths from time to time. If readers are distrustful of the evidence of these peoples cut off from civilization, then for them we have reserved the story of two Russian hunters who in 1920 encountered the traces of a huge beast at the edge of the forest. This happened between the Chistaya and Taz rivers (the area between the Ob and Yenisei). The oval-shaped tracks were from 60 to 70 centimeters in length and about 50 in width. The animal placed its front legs four meters from its hind legs. Heaps of dung that appeared from time to time testified to the powerful size of the beast.

The excited hunters followed these tracks. In the forest they noticed branches broken off at a height of three meters. After several days of chasing, they finally met two monsters, which they observed from a distance of about 300 meters. The animals were brown in color and had long hair; moved slowly. The hunters made out curved tusks.

This evidence is supported by the fact that the events took place where it was “not customary” to meet a mammoth. Deceivers usually choose the most reliable details for their tales. The traditional image of a mammoth is confined to the snowy desert or tundra; this is how it is depicted in all scientific works and textbooks. Although, in my opinion, this is the most unnatural habitat for furry colossi.

Maybe in winter, when there was nothing to eat in the taiga, mammoths went out into the tundra in search of moss? It was there that they fell into treacherous traps, like frozen swamps.

I hope that Russian experts studying mammoths will eventually come to the same conclusions as I did. Interest in these animals does not wane; expedition after expedition follows the discovery sites. Some of them are heading not to the shores of the Arctic Ocean, but to the Ob and its tributaries.

In conclusion, let us remember that the famous conqueror of Siberia Ermak Timofeevich mentioned meeting a “hairy elephant” among the Ural Mountains. Local residents, according to the Cossack, considered this “mountain of meat” a symbol of the wealth of their country...

Bernard Euvelmans | Translated from French by Pavel Trannois

When did mammoths go extinct? If they are extinct.

V.Lukyanov

Sparing lines from the reference book: “...A now extinct mammal of the elephant family that lived in the second half of the Pleistocene in Eurasia and North America. They reached a height of 5.5 meters and a body weight of 10-12 tons. The reasons for the extinction are not fully known, although it is believed that they died as a result of climate change and the incessant hunting of them by human tribes. Mammoths disappeared from the face of the Earth about one and a half ten thousand years ago..."

For our ancestors, they were as commonplace as dogs, cats, horses and cows in our time... Can you imagine the world of the next century without dogs and cats?! Likewise, our century would have seemed more than strange to our distant ancestors if they had been told that we do not have mammoths.

Mammoth lived

The scientific world unanimously classifies the mammoth as a long-extinct animal. None of the biologists have yet brought back the skin of a “freshly killed” mammoth from northern expeditions, therefore, it does not exist. The only question for scientists is: as a result of what cataclysms mammoths became extinct. There are two main versions: mammoths were either eaten by people, or they were killed by the climate (cold). To be honest, if I weren't an animal rights activist, I would have liked the first version better.

At the beginning of the last century, the most popular hypothesis was about the amazing dexterity of primitive hunters who specialized exclusively in eating mammoths. There is no doubt that people ate mammoths; this can be evidenced by the sites of primitive man with the remains of mammoth bones. It is even possible that, by hunting large animals, man learned the collective organization of labor and acquired speech, so we owe to mammoths not only that we ate them, but also to everything human that is in us.

A fresco in the Moscow Historical Museum depicts the ease with which people kill mammoths with large stones. The victory of our mind over the primitive mountain of muscles pleases our pride.

But it’s hard to believe in the effectiveness and success of such a hunt; it’s enough to remember that both Indian and African elephants quite recently absolutely calmly dealt with much better armed people and kept them at a respectful distance from themselves. Asian hunters generally considered it unprofitable to eat an elephant - there is a lot of hassle, but little benefit, it is much more profitable to take a young and stupid elephant by cunning, train it and use it for hard work as a pet and a powerful mechanism that does not require spare parts.

If ancient people had been able to catch live mammoths, they would have tamed them and used them for farming, because it is stupid to simply eat what modern Asian elephant drivers consider the greatest wealth (“the goose that lays the golden eggs”). Why hunt powerful thugs if there was an abundance of various game around?

Mammoth meat also fell on dinner table- ancient people did not disdain rotten meat and carrion, especially since they also came across fresh bodies of those who died from the cold and accidents. Yes, even without eating mammoths, ancient man I would hardly have passed by the free mammoth bone, which is so convenient to use on the farm (besides relatively light tusks and heavy stones, there were no other durable building materials at that time).

So, to the joy of the “greens,” most likely mammoths did not become extinct because of people. Then – the climate?

At the end of the 20th century, the most popular version was about a sharp climate change in Siberia and Canada, as a result of which large northern herbivorous mammals (mammoth, woolly rhinoceros) were deprived of their usual food and quickly died out. However, for some reason, these changes did not affect their contemporary - the musk ox (musk ox), which not only survived, but to this day does not stop reproducing, despite any climatic disasters.

Such considerations make cryptozoologists doubt the complete extinction of mammoths.

Is the mammoth alive?

Foreigners who visited Muscovy wrote about the existence of mammoths. Geographer Qian in his notes in 188-155 BC. wrote: “...of the animals there are... huge wild boars, northern elephants with bristles and a kind of northern rhinoceroses.”

In the 16th century, the ambassador of the Austrian Emperor Sigismund Herberstein wrote in his “Notes on Muscovy”: “In Siberia... there is a great variety of birds and various animals, such as, for example, sables, martens, beavers, stoats, squirrels... In addition, weight. In the same way, polar bears, wolves, hares”... The weight, or the whole thing, of this animal, according to the description, resembles the same mammoth. Already at the beginning of the 20th century, the Kalym Khanty strange beast The mammoth pike, called “all”, was covered with thick long hair and had large horns. Sometimes “everyone” started such a fuss that the ice on the lakes broke with a terrible roar...

Ermak's warriors, who conquered Siberia, also met huge hairy elephants in the forests.

Both the Ob Ugrians and the Siberian Tatars described the hairy elephant in detail: “The mammoth, by its nature, is a meek and peace-loving animal, and affectionate towards people; when meeting a person, the mammoth does not attack him.”

The notes of cryptozoologist M. Bykova also contain information about modern encounters with mammoths. On one of the rivers of Western Siberia, several boats with local residents slowly floated along the river. Suddenly, a huge body, three meters high, covered with long hair, rose from the water. Raising first one leg and then the other, it began to beat them on the water. Then it swayed on the waves and dived into the water...

Pilots flying over the taiga in the 40s of the last century talked about huge shaggy animals seen from above...

Of course, it would be difficult for a mammoth to survive in the harsh Siberian winters. In the 1990s, a version first appeared in the Russian press that mammoths, to protect themselves from the cold, could well have switched... to a semi-aquatic lifestyle! With this lifestyle, large animals are able to withstand even 60-70 degree frost - if, like walruses, they hide in water that has a temperature not lower than zero. Moreover, the larger the animal, the more comfortable it will feel in the water. What could be bigger on earth than a mammoth? The only question is how comfortable will a mammoth feel in the water?

Better than we can think of! The mammoth swims well; its closest relatives, elephants, as it turned out relatively recently, are excellent swimmers, sometimes swimming tens of kilometers into the sea. And distant relatives of mammoths - the famous sea sirens - retained characteristics common to elephants: pectoral mammary glands, change of molars throughout life and tusk-like incisors.

And elephants have also retained some of the properties of marine animals; they have the ability to produce and hear infrasounds below the sensitivity threshold of the human ear (only marine animals, such as whales, have such abilities). Moreover, Australian zoologist Anne Gate, who studied elephant embryos at the University of Melbourne, came to the conclusion that trunks appeared much earlier than is commonly believed. E. Gate is convinced that elephants were once amphibians...

All this is so convincing that it’s surprising - why don’t we still see mammoths frolicking in the water in the Moscow River? Perhaps, if by mistake the mammoths degenerated, then it is worth reviving their tribe again? Now we won’t let them go to waste.

The mammoth will live!?

Russia is the birthplace of elephants, I say this completely without irony. If anyone doubts that the first (still hairy) elephants were once found on the territory of what is now Siberia, then perhaps in time they will no longer have anything to cover them with. If huge hairy elephants are to be reborn anywhere, it will be in Russian Siberia.

The idea of ​​artificially breeding mammoths, of course, first appeared as a fantastic story on the pages of the popular magazine “Technology for Youth.” But, as you know, a particularly lazy reader does not bother to read the postscript itself stating that this is fantasy, and takes everything he reads as a guide to action.

At the end of the 90s of the last century, after the first successful cloning experiments, reports appeared about a project to create hypothetical breeding animals that were planned to be created artificially using genetic engineering and other achievements modern sciences. 1996, summer - a scientific expedition to Siberia was formed in Japan with the goal of finding the body of a male mammoth in a layer of permafrost in Russia at the “mammoth cemetery” in the permafrost layer, then isolating mammoth sperm with an undestroyed DNA molecule, and fertilizing the elephant with the resulting material.

It was assumed that the emerging baby would be 2/3 a typical mammoth and only a third an elephant. Maybe then it will be possible to create a whole colony of new (old) animals, almost entirely similar to those that became extinct in Siberia just a few thousand years ago. So, task number one is to find a fresh mammoth carcass.

For the first time the remains of a mammoth were found in permafrost Siberia in 1798. Since that time, several hundred such finds have been made. In the north (in Yakutia, Kolyma, Chukotka, Alaska) bones, tusks and even almost whole carcasses, sometimes untouched by rot, are often found. Most often, such finds occur during gold mining operations, when large layers of earth and peat are removed with excavators.

Mammoth corpses have also been found relatively well preserved in permafrost. Until now, northern elephants have been extracted from the soil using the same primitive method. They were washed out of the frozen ground with hot water. Because of this, it was not possible to preserve all the hair, skin, and internal organs in their original form.

Mammoth cemeteries or mammoth nurseries?

In the 1996 season, the Russian-Japanese expedition failed to find a suitable candidate for the “father” of the future mammoth elephant... Members of our “Cosmopoisk” also spent more than a year searching for a suitable mammoth carcass. The hope of finding a specimen of the required freshness was fueled by the relatively recent history of a decently preserved specimen of “Dima’s baby mammoth,” discovered by an excavator operator while clearing a gold-bearing layer near Susuman in the Magadan region.

Later, the cosmopoiskovsky workers were in these parts, questioning the gold miners about the same “Dima No. 2”... Soon the discovery of the seemingly necessary sample was secretly told at one of the mines, but... the geneticists were not satisfied this time either.

1997, July 29 - a group of specialists from the Department of Biological Resources of the Ministry of Nature Protection of Yakutia and the local mammoth museum flew to the Ustya-Yanovsky district, where hunters found the remains of a mammoth on the banks of the Maksu-Nuoka River.

The huge hairy elephant lost its tusks and part of its head, but its carcass rested in the icy shackles of permafrost. The last circumstance is very important, because Japanese scientists need the most intact torso with genitals... And again, scientists rejected the found fossil.

In the late 90s of the 20th century, an international research expedition was the first in the world to extract a mammoth completely intact. The first to discover the carcass of a fossil mastodon was a Russian expedition member named Zharkov. This surname was assigned to the mammoth. The extraction technology was quite complex and labor-intensive. During excavations, a whole team of workers created a stable microclimate there; the temperature was no higher or lower than minus 15 degrees.

Zharkov (mammoth) himself weighed 4 tons, but together with the parallelepiped of ice and soil in which it was embedded and with which it was removed, as much as 23 tons. All this was tied to a Mi-26 helicopter, which pulled the mammoth out of the permafrost... The first sample of the mammoth's DNA was sent for research.

In 1999-2000, attempts to search for mammoth carcasses continued. Once we received a message about the discovery of a “very fresh” carcass too late. While we phoned the Japanese, while we found money for the trip, while we agreed with the military about help with transportation by air, like fresh mammoth meat... we ate it! We were ahead of us by businessmen who made good money by satisfying the lust of gourmets by flying French tourists and a professional chef directly to Siberia...

So the Kosmopoisk Association still appeals to all hunters and artel workers not only with the old request “If you see it, let us know!”, but also with the new one - “Don’t eat!”...

Whether search engines will be able to find and scientists will be able to isolate mammoth sperm and thereby begin an experiment - only time will tell. And if the hopes of Russian, Yakut, and Japanese researchers come true, humanity may soon witness a sensational result of the experiment.

Siberian roots Nesen?

There is another argument in favor of the existence of mammoths in the North. In descriptions of eyewitnesses of the appearance of monsters like Nesen on the surface of lakes, the following details often appear: a long flexible neck, and behind it a body (back?) rising above the water. Supporters of the aquatic existence of mammoths claim that in reality this is a high-raised trunk and head of a mammoth! Beautiful version! Or, as skeptics would say, an amazing legend...

In fact, it is much easier to assume that it is not plesiosaurs and other reptiles lurking in the water Cretaceous period, who lived 60-75 million years ago, and mammoths, who lived “only” tens of thousands of years, and maybe just a few centuries ago. It has already been written above whether mammoths are able to survive in cold climates in cold water. Of course they can!

And if the heads of plesiosaurs appeared only in Siberian reservoirs (but no, they are also seen in relatively warm climates in England, Ireland, America and even Africa), then I would be the first to support the version of waterfowl mammoths mistaken for lizards. But why would a mammoth, assuming that it survived in Africa, hide under water there too?! And if mammoths come ashore at least occasionally, then why are they not seen in densely populated Scotland and Ireland? Or – in Siberia there are mammoths, but in Africa there are no mammoths?

True, there is one more “but” in defense of the relationship between Nesen and the prehistoric elephant. The elusive mammoths and the elusive water monsters have one more common property that makes them related. Both of them have all the signs of ghostly chronomirages.

Mammoth chronomirages?

So, many stories that only 100-200-300 years ago mammoths were seen in the lost corners of the taiga have not yet been confirmed in practice. It is clear that there are no traces of mammoths on earth, but to this day it is still unclear whether the mammoth has died out, basking in the rays of posthumous glory, or whether it is bathing in the icy Siberian water, remaining unknown. What if... neither one nor the other?

How everything is simplified if we assume that mammoths really went extinct, but only occasionally - when the necessary physical conditions and emotional condition observers - appear to us in all their glory. How real are they at such moments? No more real than the warriors of the Napoleonic wars, or plesiosaurs, or starship pilots of the 25th century - all of them already or do not yet exist. Or they exist, but not in our space-time reality, being displayed in us in approximately the same way as a television image becomes reality for a room with a TV in it.

From the point of view of a savage who saw television for the first time, a mammoth on a color screen is very real, but very soon the wild man will be convinced that hunting for a moving image of game will be a complete fiasco. Are we new savages in front of a huge natural “TV” showing us images of long-defunct monsters?

V. Chernobrov

Mammoths are one of the most noticeable animals. These huge mammals roamed the Earth for millions of years before fading into oblivion several thousand years ago.

However, today scientists believe we have the necessary tools to bring them back from the dead. Nearly perfectly preserved specimens found in the icy tundra of Siberia have revealed many secrets. The genetic code of mammoths has been deciphered. The mammoth embryo can be carried by a surrogate mother, an Asian elephant, or this can be done using an artificial uterus.

Now that mammoths may be returning to existence, it will be useful for you to learn about these prehistoric animals. Here are 10 facts you might not know.

10. Mammoth remains allowed for an important scientific breakthrough

The first mammoth remains were unearthed in 1728, more than a hundred years before the discovery of dinosaurs. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution did not yet exist, and people's understanding of the structure of the world was mainly based on religious texts. The prevailing belief was that all known animals originally existed in their present form from the time of Eden. God could not make a mistake, so it seemed implausible that he would allow one of his creations to disappear from the face of the Earth.

Mammoth remains, which began to be discovered more and more often, challenged this belief.
Some scientists have suggested that the giant bones must belong to African elephants. The remains, which were discovered in Italy, were believed to be those of one of the war elephants carried by Hannibal Barca across the Alps during the war with Rome. It was much more difficult to explain how African elephants could roam northern Europe and Siberia, where many bones were discovered.

This question was eventually answered by a French scientist named Georges Cuvier. In 1796, he published a paper in which he showed that the teeth and bones of mammoths were different from those of living elephants. By 1812, Cuvier had identified 49 different species of extinct animals. However, it was the giant mammoths that captured the public's imagination and helped prove that extinction is a scientific fact.

9. Primitive people killed mammoths

Mammoths have become one of the success stories of evolution. Their remains have been found on every continent except South America and Australia. They roamed the Earth for six million years before suffering the same fate as 99.9 percent of all species that ever existed and went extinct.

Scientific analysis has shown that the mammoth population began to decline sharply around 12,000 years ago. This is due to the end of the last one Ice Age, which supports the idea that climate change led to the extinction of mammoths. When environment became warm, they simply could not adapt to the changes.

One of the problems with this theory is that mammoths experienced several warm periods. This means they could possibly survive warming again. The difference between these periods was that they began to be hunted by people seeking to obtain meat and ivory.

A study conducted by the University of Exeter in England found a strong connection between the extinction of large animals such as mammoths and known patterns of human migration. This suggests that humans, rather than climate, may well have been the deciding factor in the demise of mammoths.

8. The Last Woolly Mammoths Didn't Look Like You Think

Located in the Arctic Ocean about 100 miles north of Siberia and covered in ice for much of the year, rugged Wrangel Island is home to polar bears, walruses and arctic foxes. It was also home to the last woolly mammoths.

Mammoths were thought to have gone extinct about 10,000 years ago. We now know that a small, isolated population of animals survived on Wrangel Island and were born here for hundreds of generations. Back in 2000 BC. BC, at a time when people were already advanced enough to build giant and stone palaces, the last of the mammoths still walked the Earth.

By comparing the gene sequence of a mammoth that lived 45,000 years ago and a more modern mammoth from Wrangel Island, scientists found that the latter was not very healthy.

Thousands of years of interbreeding have led to the development of many problems in animals. The most notable of these was a defect that caused their fur to become a translucent white color and lose its insulating properties. The last of the mammoths looked completely different than we imagined.

7. St. Paul's Island Mammoths Died Horribly

Woolly mammoths on Wrangel Island were not the only ones of their kind to temporarily escape extinction of their species. Another lone group of several hundred animals survived, cut off from the mainland on St. Paul Island off the coast of Alaska.

No human set foot on St. Paul's Island until 1787, so these woolly mammoths were safe from hunters. However, although their isolation extended their existence for thousands of years, it ultimately led to their extinction.

When the lakes from which the mammoths drank fresh water began to dry up, there was nothing to drink and nowhere to go. It is likely that the unfortunate animals began to slowly die.

By analyzing lake sediments for mammoth DNA, scientists were able to determine the date of this disaster with amazing accuracy. The mammoths of St. Paul Island were lost forever to our world about 5,650 years ago, within a margin of just a hundred years.

6. Some mammoths weren't mammoths at all

The name mammoth has become synonymous with enormous size. However, there were several species of mammoths that did not fit this stereotype at all. Most mammoth species were slightly larger than African elephant, and some of them were significantly smaller. The smallest of them once lived on greek island Crete, and the adult was no larger than a baby elephant, reaching a height of only 1 m. Even a person of average height would be taller than these tiny mammoths.

The extinct mammoths of Crete represent the most famous example Foster’s rule, also called the “island effect.” It is that when large mammals Find themselves isolated on a small island, they adapt to the limitations in habitat and food, evolving and becoming smaller in size. Interestingly, in smaller mammals, such as rabbits, the opposite is true. They tend to adapt to island life, evolving to be larger than their mainland relatives.

5. Woolly mammoth tusks look like tree trunks

Woolly mammoths are perhaps the most distinctive and iconic of all mammoths. The height to the shoulders was more than three meters, they weighed 6 tons, and their entire body was covered with thick brown fur.

The tusks, which they used to search for food in the snow, could grow up to three meters in length and weigh 91 kilograms. By comparison, the tusk of the average male African elephant is “only” two meters long.

Woolly mammoth tusks are notable for more than just their size. They continued to grow throughout the animal's life. As they grew, they formed daily growth rings. Just as one can determine the age of a tree by counting the rings on its trunk, scientists can cut open the tusks of a woolly mammoth and count the rings to determine exactly how old the animal was when it died. Since females' tusks grew more slowly during pregnancy, this way one can even determine how many times a given female gave birth.

4. The Great American Unknown

At the end of the 18th century, a Frenchman named Georges de Buffon was one of the most famous and influential scientists in the world. He never set foot on American soil, but that did not stop him from publishing his theory of the degeneration of American species.

Buffon insisted that American soil was less fertile, its people shorter, and its animals smaller, weaker, and less imposing than those of the Old World.

The Americans were outraged. And Thomas Jefferson is the third President of the United States, so much so that he shot a huge bull moose and sent it to Europe, and its half-decomposed carcass was delivered to Buffon's doorstep.

Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, naturalists pieced together bones giant creature, then called the Great American Unknown, but now known as Mastodon.

The recreated image of the beast was not ideal. For some time he was assigned claws that actually belonged to a giant sloth found nearby. A curious misconception that the beast would have been an agile predator led to its tusks being attached in reverse. The theory was that the beast used them to pin its prey to the ground.

Despite these errors, the completed mastodon reconstruction was impressive. Thomas Jefferson was fascinated by the animal and even financed an expedition that he hoped would discover living specimens in remote regions of America. As he kindly pointed out to Buffon, the giant bones of the Great American Unknown satirize the idea that American animals were small, weak and flawed.

3. Mammoth hunting is becoming big business

As the effects of climate change are felt far and wide and Arctic permafrost begins to thaw, huge numbers of woolly mammoths are emerging from their icy tombs after thousands of years.

The abundance of new specimens to study means that scientists now know more about mammoths than almost any other extinct animal, but these specimens have also given rise to a new species of mammoth hunter.

It is believed that up to 10 million mammoth carcasses may be found in the Arctic. Considering that just one large tusk costs about $35,000, that's a lot of money.

Many mammoth hunters work illegally, without permission. However, the trade in mammoth tusks is not covered by the 1989 ban on ivory trade, so they can officially be sold on the open market.

Some of the more optimistic conservationists have suggested that the availability of mammoth elephants could lead to a reduction in elephant poaching. So far this has not happened, and the trade in mammoth ivory is often used as a cover for illegal ivory trafficking.

2. Mammoths can withstand climate change

Thawing permafrost not only helps locate mammoths, it also releases huge amounts of carbon from the ground into the atmosphere. This is potentially very bad. As carbon is released, the rate of permafrost melt will increase, which in turn will release even more carbon.

This feedback loop poses a potential threat to the future of humanity. One of the more bizarre suggestions is that reintroducing woolly mammoths to Siberia would help mitigate the damage and help combat climate change.

The blanket of snow that covers Siberia for most of the year is actually a heat trap. When mammoths trample snow in search of food, they will presumably cause the permafrost to be exposed to colder air and melt more slowly.

For this plan to work, hundreds, maybe even thousands of mammoths are needed. This is the main stumbling block because we currently don't have them. However, a team of Harvard University scientists led by George Church believes they are on the verge of a woolly mammoth revival.

1. Rise of the mamophant

Even if Dr. George Church and his team succeed, the animals they create will not, strictly speaking, be pure mammoths. More precisely, they could be described as a hybrid of a mammoth and an elephant - a mamophant.

The woolly mammoth's closest relative is the Asian elephant, not the African elephant. Their branches diverged from the common family tree as much as 6 million years ago, but it was recently discovered that their genomes are much more similar than expected. At the genetic level, the Asian elephant is 99.6% identical to the woolly mammoth. This makes them much more similar than humans and chimpanzees, which are thought to share 96% of their DNA.

This similarity allowed Church's team to use the Asian elephant as a genetic template. Complex software DNA editing allows scientists to copy and paste mammoth DNA. If Church is right, he could create an animal that is almost identical to the woolly mammoth, both in appearance and genetics, and has everything it needs to survive the harsh Siberian winters.

Church says his project could help combat climate change, learn more about genetic diseases and conserve the endangered Asian elephant, albeit in an unfamiliar genetically altered state. However, this did not help to allay concerns expressed by many about the ethics of the project.

(Osborn, 1928)

†Mammuthus sungari (Zhou, M.Z, 1959)

† Mammuthus trogontherii(Polig, 1885) - Steppe mammoth

Taxonomy on Wikispecies

Images on Wikimedia Commons

NCBI EOL

Encyclopedic YouTube

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✪ HISTORIANS LIE TO US AGAIN. 100% Evidence that mammoths lived in the 19th CENTURY. ARE ALL MAMOTHS EXTINCTION?

✪ Alexey Tikhonov: “Mysteries of the mammoth” (SPB)

✪ DID Dinosaurs and Mammoths ALWAYS LIVE IN THE 20TH CENTURY? Why is this hidden?

✪ Mammoths (narrated by paleontologist Yaroslav Popov)

✪ Live mammoth in Siberia. Yakutsk (1943)

Subtitles

from encyclopedias we can learn that mammoths are an extinct genus of mammals from the elephant family; they were twice as heavy as the largest modern African elephants; in the same encyclopedias we learn that mammoths became extinct during the last ice age about 10 thousand years ago, but let’s try to look at this issue from a seditious point of view view in Turgenev's story the polecat and the Kalinich from the series of notes from the hunter there is an interesting phrase the polecat raised his leg and showed his boot, probably made from mammoth skin, in order to write this phrase Turgenev had to know several things quite strange for the mid-19th century in our today's understanding he should have known that there was such a beast at the moment and know what kind of skin he had, he should have known about the availability of this leather, because judging by the text, the fact that a simple man wears boots made of mammoth skin for Turgenev was not something out of the ordinary, it should be recalled that Turgenev wrote his notes almost as if they were documentaries without fiction, so in the note he simply conveyed his impressions of the meeting with interesting people and it happened in the Oryol province of the autumn region in Yakutia where mammoths are found and the cemetery there is an opinion that Turgenev expressed himself allegorically, we mean the thickness and quality of the boot, but why then weren’t elephant skins well known in the 19th century, but according to the official version there was awareness about mammoths insignificant until the beginning of the twentieth century, the only mammoth skeleton that could be seen was in the zoological museum, but it could hardly give an answer to the question of what the mother’s skin looks like, so the phrase dropped that I will not at least puzzle you, however, the harness was kept in the Tobolsk Museum of Local Lore In the 19th century, made specifically from mammoth skin, a mention of mammoths is also present in another famous writer of the 19th century, Jack London, his story, a fragment of a critical era, tells of a meeting of a hunter in Alaska with an unprecedented beast, which, according to the description, is like two peas in a pod, but not only writers remember mammoths in their works; there is a sufficient amount of historical evidence of people meeting these animals greatest number mentions of such cases were collected by Anatoly Kartashov, here is evidence from the sixteenth century, the ambassador of the Austrian Emperor Croatian Sigismund Herberstein, who visited Muscovy in the mid-16th century in 1549, wrote in his notes about Muscovy in Siberia there are a great variety of birds and various animals, such as sable and martens, beavers, ermines, squirrels and in the ocean live on I am a walrus, in addition, the weight is exactly the same as polar bears, wolves, hares, please note that in the same row as very real beavers, squirrels and a walrus there is a certain, if not fabulous, then certainly mysterious and unknown weight, however, this forest might not be known only to Europeans but to locals inhabitants of this possibly rare endangered species did not represent anything mysterious not only in the sixteenth century, but Idris more than a century later in 1911 you wrote an essay in the silence of the towns the trip stood up and the narrow edge there are such lines to the tired Khanty pike the mammoth is called this whole monster was covered with a thick long wool and had large horns, sometimes all over then or between each other I’ll take such that the ice on the lakes broke with a terrible coffin and it turns out that in the sixteenth century almost everyone knew about mammoths, including the Austrian ambassador, another legend is known that in 1581 the warriors of the famous conqueror Siberia Ermak saw huge hairy elephants in the dense taiga let's move on to the 19th century, the New York Herald newspaper wrote that US President Jefferson, who held the highest office from 1801 to 1809, became interested in the sled's messages about mammoths, sent helmets with the nose of an envoy who, when he returned, claimed with everything fantastic things according to the Eskimos of mammoths You can still find living mammoths in remote areas in the northeast of the peninsula; the envoy with my eyes really didn’t see them, but a special Eskimo weapon will come to hunt them, and this is not the only one known history the case of Eskimo weapons for hunting mammoths there are lines in an article published in San Francisco in 1899, some travelers along the fishing line wonder why the Eskimos would make and store weapons for hunting animals that became extinct at least 10 thousand years ago, here is another evidence of the end of the nineteenth century in the max store magazine for 1899 in a story called the murder of mothers, it is stated that the last mammoth was killed in the Yukon in the summer of 1891, of course now it is difficult to say what is true in this story and what is literary fiction, however at that time the story was considered to be already known to us towns writes in his essay a trip to the Solunsky region in 1911, according to the Ostyaks in Kent us of scam the sacred forest, as in other times, mammoths live near the river and in the river itself, often in winter you can see wide cracks on the ice of the river and sometimes you can see that the ice is split and crushed into many small pieces, we eat all these are visible signs and results of the mammoth’s activity, the animal’s horns and back breaking apart and breaking the ice. Recently, about fifteen to twenty years ago, there was such a case on the lake of a mammoth barrel. In its own way, the animal is meek and peaceful and towards people affectionately, when meeting a person, maman not only does not attack him, but does not even caress him in Siberia, you often have to listen to the stories of local peasants and come across the opinion that mammoths still exist, but it’s just very difficult to see them; mammoths now remain a little like them and most large animals are now becoming rare, we will trace the chronicle of contacts between humans and mammoths in the 20th century, Albert Moskvin from Krasnodar, who lived for a long time in the Mari SSR, talked with people who themselves saw woolly elephants, here is a quote from a letter from to the Mari name of the mammoth, according to eyewitnesses, the Mari used to be seen more often what do the Mari now call a herd of 45 heads this phenomenon about before sound wedding of mammoths the Mari told him in detail about the way of life of mammoths about their appearance about relationships with human cubs and even about the funeral of a dead animal, according to them, kind and affectionate abd offended by people at night turned out the corners of the barns but did not break the fences, while making a dull trumpet sound, according to the stories of local residents, even before the revolution, mammoths forced residents of the lower villages to move to a new place shop and and and for whom what were they in the area that is now called Medvedev’s stories contain many interesting and surprising details, however it develops a strong belief that there is no fantasy in them, according to this evidence, mammoths were seen and known well a hundred years ago, and this was in the Volga region of the European part of Russia, but evidence from Siberia in 1920, hunters observed two individuals of mammoths in the interfluve of the Ob and Yenisei in the thirties there are references the life of mammoths in the area of ​​Lake Syrkovaya on the territory of the present Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Region there are also later descriptions; for example, in 1954, a huntsman observed a mammoth in one of the reservoirs; similar encounters between residents of remote corners of our country with huge furry animals were described in the sixties and in the seventies and eighties years of the 20th century, for example, in 1978, in the area of ​​the Indigirka River, a group of prospectors in the morning discovered about 10 mammoths swimming in the river, this story could be classified as a tale of invention, only this time the marvelous animals were observed for half an hour by not a single frightened person and a whole group of adult men, it is clear that many of you will accept these stories, guided by the principle that until I see it, I don’t believe it. Meanwhile, there are two videos on the Internet that show a living mother of mammoths, rightfully called fossils in our time, and in fact I dig in order to extract tusks for business Why do mammoths and tusks drip from cliffs on the banks of rivers and so en masse that a bill has been introduced into the State Duma equating mammoths with minerals and also introducing a tax on their extraction? Science tells us that the distribution area of ​​mammoths was huge, but for some reason they are only digging them en masse in the north we have a question about what led to the formation of these mammoth cemeteries, we can build the following logical chain of mammoths there were a lot of times there were a lot of them they had to have a good food supply, for example, the daily ration of an elephant living in the Moscow Zoo is about 250 kilograms of food, which includes hay grass bread vegetables and other products even if the mammoths ate a little less with such appetites they still could not for a long time wandering on glaciers as is traditionally depicted in all kinds of reconstructions, in turn, a good food supply suggests a slightly different, warmer glue in those places, a different climate in the Arctic Circle could only be if it was so in time not the Arctic mammoth tusks and the mammoths themselves are found underground it means some event happened on the roof and their servants group if the mammoths didn’t bury themselves in the ground then this new club could only have been brought by water that first gushed in and then went away a layer of sediment quite thick, meters and tens of meters means the amount of water that deposited such a layer must have been very large; mammoth carcasses are found well preserved; if their meat can be eaten, it means that the event that killed them did not happen tens of thousands of years ago, but relatively recently, and immediately after the burial of the corpses on young soil, they quickly froze, here are a few examples when paleontologists came to the river bank then were surprised at the preservation of the mammoth in permafrost, it spent almost 30 thousand years but the skin, muscles, some internal organs and most importantly the brain were preserved in Siberia in permafrost areas, Russian scientists discovered a mammoth carcass with well-preserved liquid blood and muscle tissue, members of the expedition of the Yakut North-Eastern Federal University and Russian Geographical Society or their research on Malo Lyakhovsky Island, the result was a unique find, they discovered the carcass of a female, the lower part of which was frozen into ice and was well preserved, but the most amazing liquid blood that flowed from the mammoth’s abdominal cavity even at an air temperature of minus 10 degrees Celsius is quite fresh in appearance to everyone red and again your light smells in some parts and I will say that you all will still add to this logical chain the research of Alexey Artemyev and Alexey Kungurov, who drew attention to the average age of the forests of Siberia about 300 years, of course there is a village older, but the dating of the supposed cataclysm, given these data, is still the same fluctuate on a scale of centuries, they span millennia; taking this into account, it becomes clear that there is massive evidence of living or recently living mammoths, which represent the remnants of a huge population; after all, over the last 200 years alone, more than a million pairs of mammoth tusks were exported from Russia, which means millions of mammoths populated the ecological niche in the territory Eurasia, at the same time, it is precisely the recent dates of the cataclysm that are the most painful and unacceptable for official science, because the very formulation of this problem gives rise to a huge number of new questions that someone really wants to answer

Phenotype

Extinction

Most mammoths went extinct about 10 thousand years ago during the last Vistula Ice Age in the Younger Dryas, simultaneously with the extinction of 34 genera of large animals (the Great Holocene Extinction). On this moment There are two main hypotheses for the extinction of mammoths: according to the first, Upper Paleolithic hunters played a significant, or even decisive role in this, and the other, which explains the extinction to a greater extent natural causes(the era of extreme flooding, which began 16 thousand years ago, rapid climate change about 10-12 thousand years ago, the disappearance of the food supply for mammoths). There are also more exotic assumptions, for example, due to the fall of a comet in North America or large-scale epidemics, but the latter remain marginal hypotheses that most experts do not support.

The first hypothesis was put forward in the 19th century by Alfred Wallace, when sites of ancient people with large accumulations of mammoth bones were discovered. This version quickly gained popularity. It is believed that Homo sapiens settled in northern Eurasia about 32,000 years ago, entered North America 15,000 years ago and probably quickly began actively hunting megafauna. But in favorable conditions in the vast tundra-steppes, their population was stable. Later, a warming occurred, during which the range of mammoths significantly decreased, as had happened before, but active hunting led to the almost complete extermination of the species. Scientists led by David Noguez-Bravo from National Museum natural sciences in Madrid, in support of these views, the results of large-scale modeling are cited.

Proponents of the second point of view believe that human influence is greatly overestimated. In particular, they point to a period of ten thousand years, during which the mammoth population grew 5-10 times, that the process of extinction of the species began even before the appearance of people in the corresponding territories, and that along with mammoths many other species of animals became extinct, including small ones, which were “neither enemies for the Cro-Magnons nor prey to be destroyed,” and that there is insufficient direct evidence of active hunting of mammoths by people - only 6 “places of slaughter and cutting of proboscideans” are known in Eurasia, and 12 in North America. Therefore, in this hypothesis, anthropogenic intervention is assigned a secondary role, and natural changes are considered the primary factors: changes in climate and food supply for animals and pasture area. The connection between extinction and climate change in the Upper Drias has been noticed for a long time. But for a long time there was no convincing justification for the fatalism of this particular cooling, since this species has experienced many warming and cooling events. Researcher Vance Haynes from the University of Arizona again raised this question in 2008, and using data from several excavations, found that the onset of cooling and the extinction of megafauna coincided with an accuracy of up to 50 years. He also drew attention to the fact that the Upper Dryas sediments are dark in color due to their enrichment in organic particles, the composition of which indicates a much more humid atmosphere at that time, compared to what was previously.

The same question was raised in a publication in the journal Nature Communications in June 2012, where the results were published basic research an international group of scientists led by Glen MacDonald from the University of California. They tracked changes in the habitat of woolly mammoths and their impact on the population of the species in Beringia over the past 50 thousand years. The study used a significant amount of data on all radiocarbon dating of animal remains, human migration in the Arctic, climate and fauna changes. The main conclusion of scientists: over the past 30 thousand years, mammoth populations have experienced fluctuations in numbers associated with climatic cycles - a relatively warm period about 40-25 thousand years ago (relatively high numbers) and a cooling period about 25-12 thousand years ago (this is the so-called “ The last glaciation" - then most mammoths migrated from the north of Siberia to more southern regions). The migration was caused by a relatively sharp change in tundra fauna from tundra steppes (mammoth prairies) to tundra swamps at the beginning of the Allerød warming, but subsequently the steppes located to the south were replaced by coniferous forests. The role of people in their extinction was assessed as insignificant, and the extreme rarity of direct evidence of human hunting of mammoths was also noted. Two years earlier, Brian Huntley's research team published the results of their modeling of the climates of Europe, Asia and North America, which identified the main reasons for the predominance of herbaceous vegetation over large areas over time: low temperatures, dryness and low CO 2 content; and also revealed the direct influence of subsequent climate warming, increased humidity and CO 2 content in the atmosphere on the replacement of herbaceous communities by forests, which sharply reduced the area of ​​pastures.

In North America, the people known as the Clovis culture disappeared at the same time as the megafauna, so it is unlikely that they could have been involved in their extermination. Recently, the cosmic hypothesis of the extinction of megafauna in North America has gained more weight. This is due to the discovery of a thin layer of wood ash (supposedly evidence of large-scale fires), numerous finds of nanodiamonds, impact spherules and other characteristic particles throughout the continent, and finds of mammoth bones with holes from meteorite particles. The culprit is considered to be a comet, which had probably already broken up into a trail of debris by the time of the collision. In January 2012, a paper was published in PNAS about the results of a large scientific team's work on Mexico's Lake Cuitzeo. This publication marked the transition of this hypothesis from the category of marginal to the main hypotheses explaining the Younger Dryas crisis - climate cooling for a millennium, oppression and destruction of established ecosystems, extinction of glacial megafauna.

Asia's largest local concentration of remains Mammuthus primigenius is a burial in the Volchya Griva area in the Novosibirsk region. Some of the bones bear traces of human processing, but the role of the Paleolithic population in the accumulation of the bone-bearing horizon of the Volch'ya Griva was insignificant - mass death mammoths on the territory of the Barabinsky refugium was caused by mineral starvation. 42% of samples of woolly mammoths discovered in the ancient oxbow lake of the Boryolekh River show signs of osteodystrophy - a disease of the skeletal system caused by metabolic disorders due to a lack or excess of vital macro- and microelements (mineral starvation).

Skeleton

In terms of its skeletal structure, the mammoth bears a significant resemblance to the living Indian elephant, which it was somewhat larger in size, reaching 5.5 m in length and 3.1 m in height. Huge mammoth tusks, up to 4 m in length, weighing up to 100 kg, were located in the upper jaw, protruded forward, curved towards the top and converged towards the middle.

The molars, of which mammoths had one in each half of the jaw, are somewhat wider than those of an elephant, and are distinguished by a greater number and hardness of lamellar enamel boxes filled with dental substance. As they wore out, the mammoth's teeth, like those of modern elephants, were replaced with new ones; such a change could take place up to 6 times during its life.

History of the study

Bones and especially molar teeth of mammoths were found very often in the deposits of the Ice Age of Europe and Siberia and were known for a long time and, due to their enormous size, with general medieval ignorance and superstition, were attributed to extinct giants. In Valencia, a mammoth molar was revered as part of the relics of St. Christopher, and back in 1789 the canons of St. Vincent carried the femur of a mammoth in his processions, passing it off as the remnant of the hand of the named saint. It was possible to get acquainted with the anatomy of the mammoth in more detail after the Tungus discovered in 1799 in the permafrost soil of Siberia, near the mouth of the Lena River, a whole mammoth corpse, washed by spring waters and perfectly preserved - with meat, skin and wool. 7 years later, in 1806, Adams, sent by the Academy of Sciences, managed to collect an almost complete skeleton of the animal, with some surviving ligaments, part of the skin, some entrails, eyes and up to 30 pounds of hair; everything else was destroyed by wolves, bears and dogs. In Siberia, mammoth tusks, washed away by spring waters and collected by the natives, were the subject of significant trade trade, replacing ivory in turning products.

Mammoth genome

Genetic groups

Legends of the peoples of Northern Europe, Siberia and North America

In 1899, a traveler wrote an article for a San Francisco daily newspaper about the Alaskan Eskimos who described a shaggy elephant by carving its image on a walrus ivory weapon. A group of researchers who went to the site did not find mammoths, but confirmed the traveler’s story, and also carried out an examination of weapons and asked where the Eskimos saw shaggy elephants; they pointed to the icy desert to the northwest.

Mammoth bone

Exhibits in museums

A unique stuffed adult woolly mammoth (the so-called “Berezovsky mammoth”) can be seen in

Mammoth skeletons can be seen:

Monuments

Mammoths in heraldry

The image of a mammoth can be seen on the coats of arms of some cities.

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  Mammoths in toponomics

  In the Taimyr Dolgano-Nenets district of the Krasnoyarsk Territory, in the Lower Taimyr basin there are such objects as the Mammoth River (named after the discovery of the skeleton of the Taimyr mammoth on it in 1948), Left Mammoth and Mammoth Lake. In the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, on Wrangel Island, there are the Mammoth Mountains and the Mammoth River. A peninsula in the northeast of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, where the remains of the animal were found, is named after the mammoth.

  see also

  Notes

  1. BBC Ukrainian - Russian News Scientists Russia and Korea want to clone mammoths
  2. RUSSIAN SCIENTISTS TOLD HOW THE TRUNK HELPED MAMOTHS SURVIVE
  3. In Taimyr they found a unique mammoth Zhenya - with meat, wool and a hump
  4. Chubur A. A. Man and mammoth in the Paleolithic of the Pedesenia. Continuing the discussion // Desninskie antiquities (issue VII) Materials of the interstate scientific conference “History and Archeology of Podesenya”, dedicated to the memory of the Bryansk archaeologist and local historian, Honored Worker of Culture of the RSFSR Fyodor Mikhailovich Zavernyaev (11.28.1919 - 18.VI.1994). Bryansk, 2012
  5. Doctor of Geographical Sciences Yaroslav Kuzmin on the causes of the extinction of mammoths
  6. New data from genetics and archeology shed light on the history of the settlement of America Elementy.ru
  7. Marc A. Carrasco, Anthony D. Barnosky, Russell W. Graham. Quantifying the Extent of North American Mammal Extinction Relative to the Pre-Anthropogenic Baseline plosone.org December 16, 2009
  8. People have completed nature’s work of exterminating mammoths