Their mission is guided by a set of
questions: Why – and how – did
the mammoth disappear some
10,000 years ago?
left The strait between
Yakutia and Bolshoy
Lyakhovsky Island is
treacherous, and claimed
this coast guard’s shipbottom Semyon Grigoriev,
chief of the expedition and
director of the Mammoth
Museum in Yakutsk, makes
a call to an outpostSuddenly, Pavel jumps up abruptly, like a
tightly wound spring that has been released.
He proudly exhibits a cave lion’s molar – a remain
from the Pleistocene period – in very good condition.
The team is thrilled with the discovery.
Pavel is a member of a crew of 14 scientists on an
expedition sponsored by the Russian Geographical
Society, organised by the Mammoth Museum in
Yakutsk. The team aims to find evidence of the
presence of Palaeolithic hunters on this lost piece
of land amongst the remote Lyakhovsky Islands,
some 70 kilometres off the Siberian coast.Their mission is guided by a set of questions:
Why – and how – did the mammoth disappear
some 10,000 years ago? The collective of Russian,
Yakutian, Moldavian, Korean and Dutch scientists
hope to get decisive answers to these questions on
this expedition in far northern Russia.
This group of islands in the Russian Arctic are
named after Russian merchant and explorer Ivan
Lyakhov, who first explored the territory in the
1770s in search of mammoth ivory. Given harsh
meteorological conditions, the Lyakhovsky Islands
are rarely visited. Temperatures can plummet to below
–20°C. Crossing the strait on boats with small outboard
motors built during the Soviet era is risky: Strong
and sudden storms occur often in the narrow strait
between the continent and Bolshoy Lyakhovsky, the
southern island of the archipelago, and the largest of the
Lyakhovsky Islands. Despite these tough conditions,
the island attracts palaeontologists like bees to a hive.
But it’s not only scientists flocking to the islands:
The archipelago is also the hunting ground of ivory
traders looking for mammoth tusks, as the islands
are famous for their high density of mammoth ivory –
home to more woolly mammoth (Mammuthus
primigenius) remains than anywhere else on Earth, as
the remains are very well preserved in the permafrost.nature