Technically a Mastodon but it’s a beautiful piece of art

I suppose I’m on a real mammoth kick lately, but I don’t think you can really blame me. There’s something to them: it may just be that my lizard brain is impressed by their large size. Or maybe it’s some sort of genetic memory, from a time when my ancestors stalked the Eurasian Steppe and knew that killing one of those things would mean good things for our kith and kin. Or maybe it’s something more poetic: just the idea of these creatures, these titans, who once numbered in their millions ruling the plains. No doubt extremely intelligent like elephants, and yet they were content to live a simple life. Regal titans. And yet, the only remnant of them today are their frozen, twisted corpses, poked at by passing Siberians.

You’ve no doubt heard of at least a few of the frozen mammoths, the ones found out in Siberia. Most of what you’ve seen has probably focused on the relative curiosity of this, and the quirky possibility that the DNA from them could be used to clone mammoths and revive the species. An interesting idea, no doubt, but not the focus of this blog post. Instead, I want to focus on the phenomenon of frozen mammoths in Siberia more generally.

The fact that there are so many frozen mammoths in Siberia is simply a bizarre idea in and of itself. And strangest of all, it’s not just a few of them: an estimated 43,000 frozen mammoths have come to light in Asia over the millenia, and it is thought that there might be as many as 150 million buried in the permafrost.

The earliest people who are recorded to have been aware of this phenomenon is, unsurprisingly, the native people of Siberia. Native Siberians, however, do not descend from the original hunter-gatherers who drove the mammoth extinct in Eurasia. They came to the land much later, and thus had no cultural tradition of what a mammoth was. For them, the creature was something that was already frozen, it had no “living” form. Among many native of Siberia, it was believed that the Mammoths were a form of gigantic, underground mole, one that died instantly upon contact with sunlight. They termed these “moles” mamontokovast.

They found the rotting carcasses useful to feed their dogs (or themselves in their times of desperation), but the greatest boon from the mammoth carcasses was their ivory, which could be traded to settled societies.

We can only assume that the Russians became aware of this strange going-on as they expanded their empire deep into Siberia. The Russians being taciturn Russians, however, they seemed to have kept this more or less to themselves. Word of the mamontokovast (and details of just what the heck the deal was with Siberia in general) would only reach the Western world when Swedish prisoners-of-war would be imprisoned in the taiga by the Tsar Peter the Great in the 18th century.

Upon their return, they came back with strange and exotic tales of those distant lands. Mostly it was geographic details and rather racist ethnographies of the locals, but there was something that stood out: their description of a strange creature that could be seen peeking out of the tundra…

TO BE CONTINUED