Elephants in Siberia

1. From “Smithsonian Exploration in Alaska in 1904”

(publication 1584, pages 84-91 — emphasis is mine WLC)

It is stated by Pallas in the 17th volume of the New Commentaries of the Academy of Petersburg, 1772, that throughout the whole of northern Asia, from the Don to the extreme point nearest America, there is scarce any great river in whose banks they do not find the bones of elephants and other large animals which cannot now endure the climate of this district, and that all the fossil ivory which is collected for sale throughout Siberia is extracted from the lofty, precipitous, and sandy banks of the rivers of that country; that in every climate and latitude, from the zone of the mountains in central Asia to the frozen coasts of the Arctic Ocean, all Siberia abounds in these bones, but that the best fossil ivory is found in the frozen lands adjacent to the Arctic Circle; that the bones of large and small animals lie in some places piled together in great heaps, but, in general, they are scattered separately, as if they had been agitated by waters, and buried in mud and gravel.

The term mammoth has been applied indiscriminately to all the largest species of fossil animals, and is a word of Tartar origin, meaning simply ‘animal of the earth.’ It is now appropriated exclusively to the fossil elephant, of which one species only has been yet established, differing materially from the two existing species, which are limited, one to Asia, the other to Africa.

Of all the fossil animals that have been ever discovered, the most remarkable is the entire carcass of a mammoth, with its flesh, skin, and hair still fresh and well preserved, which in the year 1803 fell from the frozen cliff of a peninsula in Siberia, near the mouth of the Lena.  Nearly five years elapsed between the period when this carcass was first observed by a Tungusian in the thawing cliff, in 1799, and the moment when it became entirely disengaged, and fell down upon the strand, between the shore and the base of the cliff.  Here it lay two more years, till great part of the flesh was devoured by wolves and bears; the skeleton was then collected by Mr. Adams and sent to Petersburg.  Many of the ligaments were perfect, and also the head, with its integuments, weighing four hundred and fourteen pounds without the tusks, whose weight together was three hundred and sixty pounds.  Great part of the skin of the body was preserved, and was covered with reddish wool and black hairs; about thirty-six pounds of hair were collected from the sand, into which it had been trampled by the bears.

The following description, by Mr. Adams, of the place in which this mammoth was found will form an interesting subject of comparison with Captain Beechey’s account of the cliff in Eschscholtz Bay: ‘The place where I found the mammoth is about sixty paces distant from the shore, and nearly a hundred paces from the escarpment of the ice from which it had fallen.  This escarpment occupies exactly the middle between the two points of the peninsula, and is two miles long; and in the place where the mammoth was found, this rock has a perpendicular elevation of thirty or forty toises (from 180 to 240 feet).  Its substance is clear pure ice; it inclines towards the sea; its top is covered with a layer of moss and friable earth fourteen inches in thickness.  During the heat of the month of July a part of this crust is melted, but the rest remains frozen.  Curiosity induced me to ascend two other hills at some distance from the sea; they were of the same substance, and less covered with moss.  In various places were seen enormous pieces of wood of all the kinds produced in Siberia; and also mammoths’ horns in great numbers, appeared between the hollows of the rocks; they all were of astonishing freshness.  The escarpment of ice was from thirty-five to forty toises high; and according to the report of the Tungusians, the animal was, when they first saw it, seven toises below the surface of the ice.***’

I have to observe in this passage, that it contains no decisive evidence to show that the ice seen by Mr. Adams on the front of the cliff from which the elephant had fallen was anything more than a superficial facing, similar to that found by Captain Beechey on parts of the front of the earthy cliff in Eschscholtz Bay; the same cliff which, a few years before, when visited by Kotzebue, seems to have been so completely incased with a false fronting of ice as to induce him to consider the entire hill to be a solid iceberg.  One thing, however, is certain as to this mammoth, viz., that whether it was imbedded in a matrix of pure ice or of frozen earth, it must have been rapidly and totally enveloped in that matrix before its flesh had undergone decay, and that whatever may have been the climate of the coast of Siberia in antecedent periods, not only was it intensely cold within a few days after the mammoth perished, but it has also continued cold from that time to the present hour.

Remains of the rhinoceros also appear to be nearly co-extensive with those of the elephant in these northern regions.  Pallas mentions the head of a rhinoceros which was found near Lake Baikal, near Tshikoi and four heads and five horns of this animal from various parts of Siberia on the Irtis, the Alei, the Obi, and the Lena.  These horns in the frozen districts are so well preserved that splices of them are used by the natives to strengthen their bows.

Pallas conceived that these remains are not derived from animals that ever inhabited Siberia, but from carcases drifted northward from the southern regions by some violent aqueous catastrophe, and that there is proof both of the violence and suddenness of this catastrophe in the phenomenon of an entire rhinoceros found with its skin, tendons, ligaments, and flesh preserved in the frozen soil of the coldest part of eastern Siberia.  On the arrival of Pallas in Ircutia in March 1772, the head of this animal was laid before him, together with two of its feet, having their skin and flesh hardened like a mummy; it had been found in December 1771, in the sand banks of the Wiluji, which runs in about 64 degrees of north latitude into the Lena; the head and two feet only were taken care of, the rest of the carcass, though much decayed, was still enclosed in its skin, and was left to perish; the bones were yellow, the foot had on its skin many hairs and roots of hairs.  On various parts of the skin were stiff hairs from one to three inches long.

If we compare these phenomena of the arctic regions with those of other countries, and especially with England, we shall find it by no means peculiar to the northern extremities of the world to afford extensive deposits of diluvial mud and gravel, containing the remains of extinct species of the elephant and rhinoceros, together with those of horses, oxen, deer, and other land quadrupeds.  A large portion of the east coast of England, particularly of Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Yorkshire, and Northumberland, is composed of similar deposits of argillaceous diluvium, loaded in many places with bones of the same species of quadrupeds; these deposits occur not only on the low grounds and lands of moderate elevation, but also on the summits of the highest hills, e.g., on the chalky cliff of Flamborough Head, four hundred and thirty feet above the sea.  In the central parts of England, near Rugby, we have similar deposits, containing bones, tusks, and teeth of the same species of animals.  In Scotland we have the same  argillaceous diluvium on the east coast, near Peterhead, and near the western coast, at Kilmours, in Ayrshire, where it contains tusks of elephants and bones.

The analogies which these deposits offer to those in the arctic regions are striking.  In both cases the bones are of the same species of animal.  In both cases they are imbedded in superficial deposits of mud and gravel of enormous extent and thickness.  In both cases the deposits derive no accession from existing causes, and are suffering only continual loss and destruction by the action of the atmosphere, of rivers, and of the sea.  Their chief peculiarity in the polar regions seems to consist in the congealation to which the diluvium itself as well as the remains included in it are subject, from the influence of the present polar climate.  Examples might be quoted to show the occurrence of similar remains in diluvial deposits all over Europe and largely in America.  Having then such extensive accumulations of the bones of animals, and the detritus of rocks, all apparently resulting from the simultaneous action of water, but which the operation of existing seas and rivers in the districts occupied by this detritus can never have produced, and are only tending to destroy, we may surely be justified in referring them all to some adequate and common cause, such as the catastrophe of a violent and general inundation alone seems competent to have afforded.

The facts we have been considering are obviously much connected with the still unsettled question respecting the former climate and temperature of that part of the earth in which they occur.  Too much stress has, I think, been laid on the circumstances of the mammoth in Siberia being covered with hair.  We have living examples of animals in warm latitudes which are not less abundantly covered with hair and wool in proportion to their size than the elephant at the mouth of the Lena.  Such is the hyaena villosa lately noticed at the cape by Dr. Smith, and described as having the hair on the neck and body very long and shaggy, measuring in many places, but particularly about the sides and back, at least six inches; again, the thick shaggy covering on the anterior part on the body of the male lion, and the hairy coat of the camel (both of them inhabitants of the warmest climates), present analogies which show that no conclusive argument in proof that the Siberian elephant was the inhabitant of a cold climate can be drawn from the fact of the skin of the frozen carcass at the mouth of the Lena having been covered with coarse hair and wool; but even if it were proved that the climate of the arctic regions was the same both before and after the extirpation of these animals, still must we refer to some great catastrophe to account for the fact of their universal extirpation, and from those who deny the occurrence of such catastrophe, it may fairly be demanded why these extinct animals have not continued to live on to the present hour.  It is vain to contend that they have been subdued and extirpated by man, since whatever may be conceded as possible with respect to Europe, it is in the highest degree improbable that he could have exercised such influence over the vast wilderness of northern Asia, and almost impossible that he could have done so in the boundless forests of North America.  The analogy of the non-extirpation of the elephant and the rhinoceros on the continent and islands of India, where man has long been at least as far advanced in civilization, and much more populous than he can ever have been in the frozen wilds of Siberia, shows that he does not extirpate the living species of these genera in places where they are his fellow-tenants of the present surface of the earth.  The same non-extirpation of the elephant and rhinoceros occurs also in the less civilized regions of Africa; still further, it may be contended, that if man had invaded the territories of the mammoth and its associates until he became the instrument of their extirpation, we should have found, ere now, some of the usual indications which man, even in his wildest state, must leave behind him; some few traces of savage utensils, arrows, knives, and other instruments of stone and bone, and the rudest pottery; or, at all events, some bones of man himself would, ere this, have been discovered amongst the numberless remains of the lost species which he had extirpated.  It follows, therefore, from the absence of human bones and of works of art in the same deposits with the remains of mammoths, that man did not exist in these northern regions of the earth at or before the time in which the mammoths were destroyed; and the enormous accumulation of the wreck of mountains that has been mixed up with their remains points to some great aqueous revolution as the cause by which their sudden and total extirpation was effected.

It cannot be contended, that like small and feeble species, they may have been destroyed by wild animals more powerful than themselves.  The bulk and strength of the mammoth and rhinoceros, the two largest quadrupeds in the creation, render such an hypothesis utterly untenable.

The state of the argument then respecting the former climate of the polar regions is nearly as follows:  It is probable that in remote periods, when the earliest strata were deposited, the temperature of a great part of the northern hemisphere equaled or exceeded that of our modern tropics, and that it has been reduced to its present state by a series of successive changes.  The evidence of this high temperature and of these changes consists in the regular and successive variations in the character of extinct plants and animals which we find buried one above another in the successive strata that compose the crust of the globe.  These have in modern times been investigated with sufficient care and knowledge of the subject to render it almost certain that successive changes, from extreme to moderate heat, have taken place in those parts of the northern hemisphere which constitute central and southern Europe: and although we are not yet enough acquainted with the details of the geology of the arctic regions to apply this argument to them with the same precision and to the same extent as to lower latitudes, still we have detached examples of organic remains in high latitudes sufficient to show the former existence of heat in the regions where they are found — a few detached spots within the Arctic Circle than can be shown to have been once the site of extensive coral reefs are as decisive in proof that the climate in these spots was warm at the time when these corals lived and grew into a reef, as, on the other hand, the carcass of a single elephant preserved in ice is decisive of the existence of continual and intense cold ever since the period at which it perished.  We have for some time known that in and near Melville Island, and it has been ascertained by Captain Beechey’s expedition, that at Cape Thompson, near Beering’s Strait, there occur within the Arctic Circle extensive rocks of limestone containing many of the same fossil shells and fossil corals that abound in the carboniferous limestone of Derbyshire: the remains of fossil marine turtles also (chelonia radiata) have been ascertained by Professor Fischer to exist in Siberia.  These are enough to show that the climate could not have been cold at the time and place when they were deposited; and the analogy of adjacent European latitudes renders it probable that the same cooling process that were going on in them extended their influence to the polar regions also, producing successive reductions of temperature, accompanied by corresponding changes in the animal and vegetable creation, until the period arrived in which the elephant and rhinoceros inhabited nearly the entire surface of what are now the temperate and frigid zones of the northern hemisphere.

Assuming then on such evidence as I have alluded to, the former high temperature of the Arctic Circle, and knowing from the investment in ice and preservation of the carcass of the mammoth, that this region was intensely cold at the time immediately succeeding its death, and has so continued to the present hour, the point on which we are most in want of decisive evidence is the temperature of the climate in which the mammoth lived.  It is a violation of existing analogies to suppose that any extinct elephant or rhinoceros was more tolerant of cold than extinct corallines or turtles; and as this northern region of the earth seems to have undergone successive changes from heat to cold, so it is probable that the last of these changes was coincident with the extirpation of the mammoth.  That this last change was sudden is shown by the preservation of the carcass in ice: had it been gradual it might have caused the extinction of the mammoth in the polar regions, but would afford no reason for its equal extirpation in lower latitudes; but if sudden and violent, and attended by general inundation, the temperature preceding this catastrophe may have been warm, and that immediately succeeding it intensely cold; and the cause producing this change of climate may also have produced an inundation, sufficient to destroy and bury in its ruins the animals which then inhabited the surface of the earth.

80. There remains, then, three important points, on which all the English officers concur in the same opinion: 1st, That the bones and tusks of elephants at Eschscholtz Bay are not derived from the superficial peat; 2dly, That they are not derived from any masses of pure ice; 3dly, That although collected chiefly on the shore at the base of the falling cliff, they are derived only from the mud and sand of which this cliff is composed.  page 80.
81. Mastodon bones and tusks are common along the coast between Bristol Bay and Norton Sound (see Veniaminoff Notes on the Unalaska District, St. Petersburg, 1840, p. 105); furthermore they have been found on the Pribilof Islands, and lastly also on Unalaska (Island) according to Dr. Stein. (From Smithsonian Institution, Misc. Col. 49. page 8.)
82. In no case known may we be sure in stating that the remains are found where the animal actually died and was entombed …. all of the material found is dismembered and the bones scattered, while most of it is water worn and shows other evidence of having traveled, in some cases considerable distances. (page 20.)
83. (Concerning glaciation)  It is an interesting fact that all the bones of the mammoth and of other large animals that have been found in Alaska occur, as far as I am aware, in regions not glaciated during the Pleistocene period — (Same in Siberia)  In view of this fact, it may be suggested that the abundance of mammalian bones is due to the crowding northward and final extinction of land animals of the Pleistocene period by the advance of continental glaciers from the south.  (page 24.)  (Note: This would not explain the entrapment in ice or mud followed by instant freezing. WLC).
84. Whatever their age (referring to the ice beds being older than mammoth deposits) it seems to be quite certain that they must be the result of infiltration unless trees can grow on blue ice and mammoths browse on snow.  page 31.
85. (Note:  In a separate account of the taking of the mammoth mentioned here, it is recorded that some of the ice from below where its body had lain was collected and taken to Petersburg for study and analysis.  Thus the report that it was encased in ice, not mud or sand, is accurate.

There is considerable discussion in this report concerning this point.  Apparently if it was encased in ice, the case for a giant flood as the agent of its death was thought to be considerably strengthened.  For it is nearly impossible to conceive of any way other than a flood that it could have come to be frozen in ice.  On the other hand, even though it was encased in frozen mud, the case for a general flood is only slightly weakened, if at all.  For it was either overtaken by a wall of water or a wall of mud and instantly frozen.  Note also that this particular mammoth was watched over a period of five years as it was slowly detached from its surroundings by melting.  This too points to its being encased in ice or muddy water, certainly not soil of any solidity.  The painstaking care with which the scientists reported their findings and conclusions makes one feel almost as if he were present.

Also it was reported in several cases that in the areas where these formerly frozen bones were found there was a terrible stench, as of burning bone or leather.  This was true even where only small numbers of bones were found.  The soil itself seemed to be permeated with the smell.

A change in climate following the flood, from generally mild to what it is now, seems possible.  For the Bible says,

“By water also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed.”  (II Peter 3:6).  This suggests not only the destruction of all life, but a radical change of the earth itself.  “On that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened.”  (Genesis 7:11).  What followed?  Earthquakes?  Violent tidal waves?

It was certainly no spring shower!  The effects were lasting and final.  The previous earth, its climate, its landscape, etc., were irrevocably changed.  After it was over, God promised, “Never again will all life be cut off by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”  (Genesis 9:11).  A flood which deposited mammals of the same species throughout Asia, from Siberia to England and beyond and which irreversibly altered the climate of the whole earth was certainly a worldwide flood.  The instant freezing of millions of animals and their undisturbed preservation from that time to the present points to its being the last such flood.  Therefore this must be the flood of which the Bible speaks.

Our earth bears mute evidence to the occurrence of a flood of almost unimaginable violence and extent.  The elephants in Siberia are part of this evidence.  WLC).