After being frozen for thousands of years in a Siberian riverbed, this pristine mammoth tusk is a financial boon to the hunter who found it.
Slava Dolbaev uses a spear to dig out a corkscrewed tusk from a coastal ice cliff. Prying loose a single tusk can take hours, even days.
Oddly, the skull is worthless, but it usually leads the hunters to the tusks. Amazing that such an artifact simply sits on the ground in Siberia. Imagine herds of these huge creatures slowly parading across the tundra.
The shaggy giants that roamed northern Siberia during the late Pleistocene epoch died off about 10,000 years ago, though isolated populations lingered on islands to the north and east, the last dying out some 3,700 years ago. The mammoths’ tusks, which could spiral to more than 13 feet, are reemerging from the permafrost.
Yet, if the ivory hunters are traveling to islands as far as 600 km above the Arctic Circle to find mammoth tusks, does that fact not suggest that the earth was significantly warmer when these enormous mammals were thriving in places which are now blizzard whipped ice boxes most of the year?
More excellent photos by Evgenia Arbugaeva here
It would make an interesting conversation piece on the wall of my man cave.
ReplyDeleteEven better if you dug it out of the frozen cliff yourself. Wanna get a tusk finding expedition together?
DeleteOn a more local level, a few years ago one of the local governmental agencies was digging a trench when out popped a tusk, although it wasn't the size of these. Also, up on the coast, there is said to be a rock outcropping that at about ten feet off the ground changes from rough to smooth. The scientist finally figured that it must have been a scratching post for mammoths back in the day when they lived in California as well. How globally widespread they were, yet still they disappeared. It is a mystery.
I don't know why they're gone -- but I'm always up for a tusk hunting expedition. We could look in the tundra with ground penetrating radar...
DeleteAh . . . I miss them.
ReplyDeleteIn most countries, you wouldn't be permitted to keep them. They would be claimed as some sort of community property, cultural treasure, and "belong in a museum so everyone can enjoy them".
ReplyDeleteOddly, in the former Soviet Union and Communist China, Capitalism rules. If you follow the link to the pictures above, the Chinese are carving those tusks into some truly epic pieces of art. That's the kind of thing that gives them value (as opposed to their skulls, which are considered basically worthless), and allows the local folk in Siberia to make a real living. Better to leave them frozen in the tundra, or tumbling down cold Siberian rivers, in furtherance of some socialist idea of community property? I think not.
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