Piercing picture

The question of whether humans hunted the woolly mammoth to extinction is still in contention. Now Russian paleontologists Alexander Pavlov and Eugeny Mashchenko have released some unique photographs (ABOVE AND HERE) which further fuel the fire. While excavating at the Lugovskoe "mammoth graveyard" in western Siberia in 2002, they uncovered the thoracic vertebra of a mammoth wounded by a human hunter some 13,470 years ago. The evidence is a cone-shaped hole 7-10 mm wide that pierced the bone to a depth of 23.5 mm. The hole was made by a spear or javelin that was thrown with great force and lodged fragments of quartzite flakes inside. At the time of the hunt, the area – first unearthed in the 1990s – was a swampy one where mammoths and other mammals came for the salt in the blue clay. From the remaining thousands of animal bones, it is clear that many of them got mired in the muck. Paleontologist Anton Rezvy of the Khanty-Mansiysk Museum of Nature and Man, where the bone is now housed, reasons, "Some scientists use our find to prove the theory that man was the main reason for the mammoth's extinction. But it is hard to make such an assumption is this particular case, because we have to take into consideration that the mammoth remains were found in a muddy area where many of them were getting stuck. So even if the humans were hunting them here, it was more killing animals that were already stuck in the mud and had no way to escape."

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Cold calves

Lyuba and Khroma (IMAGE ABOVE, MORE HERE) are newborn mammoths that lived 40,000 years ago and are now providing unprecedented details about the early development of prehistoric pachyderms. Lyuba, discovered by reindeer hunters in 2008, was only one month old when she died in northwest Siberia. Khroma was found in 2009, 3,000 miles away in northeast Siberia, and had died at the age of only two months. American paleontologist and lead author of the newly published study, Daniel Fisher of the University of Michigan, explains, "This is the first time anyone's been able to do a comparative study of the skeletal development of two baby mammoths of known age. This allowed us to document the changes that occur as the mammoth body develops. And since they are both essentially complete skeletons, they can be thought of as Rosetta Stones that will help us interpret all the isolated baby mammoth bones that show up at other localities."

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Mammoths not massacred!

Contrary to popular belief, Stone Age Siberians did not slaughter mammoths in great numbers. Researchers Pavel Nikolskiy and Vladimir Pitulko of the Russian Academy of Sciences have determined that their ancient hunting patterns were not responsible for the animals' extinction. When they did kill, the natives definitely exploited the mammoth's vulnerabilities. “Yana people definitely attacked from the mammoth’s blind spot,” says Nikolskiy. He and his colleague assessed 1,103 bones from at least 31 mammoths that had accumulated at Yana over 2,000 years and found that while Siberian people ate mammoth meat after hunts, food was not their primary goal. They needed the ivory of their curved tusks to make tools and hunting weapons. But unlike many of their North American and European counterparts, the Siberians only sought out the mammoths every few years.

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Siberian blood

The 50- or 60-year-old female may have been foraging 10,000 years ago when she got mired in a swamp on what are now the Novosibirsk Islands off the coast of Siberia. Unable to free herself, her body quickly froze in temperatures of 14°F (-10°C). Her skin had been cut or torn, and her blood had dripped into a natural ice capsule. Her upper torso and legs were gnawed by predators, but the rest of her body – especially the lower jaw and tongue tissue – was-well preserved in the permafrost. Her flesh remained frozen without defrosting a single time over the hundreds of centuries. But incredibly the blood (IMAGE ABOVE), was liquefied like that of a saint. "We were really surprised to find...blood and muscle tissue,' says Semyon Grigoriev of the North Eastern Federal University. Grigoriev plans to study the blood of the mummy, which appears to have natural anti-freeze properties. Meanwhile South Korean bioengineer Hwang Woo-suk will attempt to extract DNA and, for the first time, clone an ancient woolly mammoth.

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