JEAN-FRANÇOIS LAGROT was a veterinarian before
becoming a photojournalist. He has worked as a
consultant on ivory trade for WWF/Traffic, and is a
member of the French Explorer’s Club. He has travelled
through 85 countries, mainly on a motorcycle.However, for Professor Hwang Woo-Suk, who has
been working on mammoth cloning for several years,
these discoveries are but another disappointment.
The professor heads up the SOAAM Biotech Research
Foundation in South Korea, and has been collaborating
with Russian scientists at the North Eastern Federal
University in Yakutsk, which is set to become home to
the World Centre for Mammoth Studies. The South
Korean specialist had joined the expedition with the
hope that he would find some soft tissue remains of
these giants. Active tissue cells with preserved DNA are
a key component for the mammoth cloning project’s
success, but he has had no luck yet.
By the late afternoon, the teams abandon their
missions and make their way into the icy waters to
collect their bounties of omul that have been caught
in the nets. These fatty whitefish are the only source of
vitamins and fresh protein that the team has consumed
during the last three weeks, and are something of a
delicacy on Bolshoy Lyakhovsky.
The expedition members have not answered all the
questions they arrived with. A violent storm kept them
from inspecting a site situated on the northern coast,
where some years ago, tusk hunters found a spear made
This skull is in the region
of 10,000 years old. It’s
one of the few mammoth
skulls discovered on the
Lyakhovsky Islands by
tusk huntersof woolly rhino horn; it is thought that this remarkable
weapon may have been carved by Palaeolithic hunters.
Another expedition may be on the cards in the next
decade, pending funding and logistics. Before then, a
nearby island will become home to a new military base,
which will house some 2,000 soldiers looking to control
the northeastern territories and their growing shipping
traffic in search of oil and natural gas.
Snow has begun falling, slowly covering the
tundra once more. This signals that it’s time to begin
preparations to make the trip back to the continent,
before ice grips the island’s waters and makes a return
journey impossible. But, the scientists and ivory
hunters will hold out for another week. At this crucial
time of the year, exhuming as much mammoth ivory
and artefacts as possible is the priority. agnature