Paper from the NATHIST annual meeting in Jakobstad 2005
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Different areas of the world has at different times had many ice-ages and we can say that an ice-age is the normal stage for the earth since an ice-age is allways longer then a warming up period. So, we are well living a short unnormal period now with a warm climate and soon the ice-age will be back! When we are talking about the ice-age we mainly think to the last one that we used to say that ended ten thousend years ago allthough what happened is more complicated. That ice-age was to its later part terribly cold and the warming up was very sudden and brutal. That brought with it that the animals could not follow in adaption and very many species of the megafauna went extinct. Man had no or very marginal influence in theese extinctions.

The greatest symbol of the ice-age megafauna is surely the mammoth. Elefants that were very well adapted to the cold and depending on the great grasslands that covered most of Europe and Asia at the time of the ice-age. When the climate warmed up, the dense forests invaded the grasslands and the mammoths migrated to the north where these grasslands and toundra still existed but there was also the polar night and the too long and cold winters. The calf-death rate grew and this brougt the species to extinction.

In Siberia there was the belief that these great elefants where living like moles underground and died when coming up in the sun! This since cadavers where found frozen in eroding river-bancs at summertime. The name mammoth is coming from the estonian name for mole: "Maamut". Some estonian travellers where probably joking around these great moles!

In early times, bones of mammoths where believed to be those of giants and skulls with their great nasal hole believed to be skulls of cyclops! It was not before Catharina the Great of Russia sent frozen mammoth parts to Paris that it was established that real elephants had been living in Siberia. This must been before the great deluge!

The first mammoth skeleton to be mounted was that of "Adams mammoth" found at the shores of Lena in the late seventeen hundred. It got the left tusk to the right side and the right to the left! Looking very funny and giving model for plenty of very rongly drawed and reconstructed mammoths. Adams mammoth was shown like this in the Zoological Museum of the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg until just after the second world war when the tusks where moved to their correct sides! A young male was found deep frozen in the permafrost and quite well preserved at the Beresovka river in Yakutia in 1900 and brought to St Petersburg in 1901, where it was mounted in taxidermy. The tusks had unfortunately been removed and where put back in a way to remember about an actual elephant. The trunk was missing, eaten by wolfs, so it was not reconstructed.

In later years there was found the tip of a trunk that gave the shape of that organ but it was not until the discovery of the deepfrozen calf "Dima" in 1979 before all the trunk was known.

Discoveries of deep frozen hair in blue clay, preserved from all influence of oxygen, in Alaska showed also that the mammoth had the same darkbrown colour as the actual muskox and was not reddish brown as believed before. This color was olnly caused by the destruction of the pigments with time. In plenty of books we can read about fat bosses on the shoulder and the head but the deepfrozen cadavers dit never have any bosses! What caused these silhuettes on the cave drawings done by the people that had seen these elephants live, was just the same mecanisme of standing hair like in the neck of the muskox for keeping the brain and the shoulders better warm! In 2003 there was found the frozen legs and the skull of a not very big mammoth in Yakutia. Most of the head had been eaten by wolfs or bears but one eye and one ear where well preserved. The most interesting was anyhow that this was the first skull dicovered that never had the tusks removed. All skulls found before had had the tusks fallen out cause of rottening or had the tusks been removed by "ivory hunters". The tusks of this mammoth where, quite stupidly looking, crossing each other! The mammoth should not have the tusks like an other elephant! Well, they lived on the grasslands and did not need their tusks for working with threes and branches. Just for sweeping away the snow for finding their food and to push the rival during the symbolic rut-fights! I was astonished, when examinating the skull in the freezing room of the Academy of Sciences in Yakutsk a year ago when my friend Petr Lazarev showed me it. The skull had not been scientificly published yeat, so for not to harm Petr, I just took some notes but no photos. The rumour about the tusks is anyhow come out as we can see on lots of mammothdrawings done since this discovery.

Now we really start to now how the giant of the Ice Age was looking and was living...

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June 2005