The Ghost Lands

{ } Text and Photos Jean-françois Lagrot The Lyakhovsky Islands are home to a high concentration of mammoth remains, drawing tusk hunters and palaeontologists to their icy, barren shores

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Amongst

a bed of thick, pitch-black seaweed, Pavel Nikolskiy, a palaeontologist and senior researcher at the Moscow Geological Institute, is crouched down, searching for artefacts from the Pleistocene period. Above him, a grey, icy cliff is splintering and falling apart, cascading down in small pieces, and falling into the Laptev Sea.

Suddenly, 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.

Their mission is guided by a set of questions: Why – and how – did the mammoth disappear some 10,000 years ago?

• Woolly mammoths are closely related

to today’s Asian elephants • The giants of the Ice Age weren’t as large as you think: They were about the size of today’s African elephants, growing to a height of between 2.7 and 4.6 metres (in the case of the steppe mammoth) • A mammoth’s ears were shorter than the modern elephant’s ears – an adaptation to prevent frostbite • Mammoth ivory trading – unlike

elephant ivory – is legal • The hunt for mammoth tusks in Arctic Siberia has been enabled by global warming, as the permafrost melts, revealing the remains • A mammoth tusk can range from three

to four metres in length • A top-grade mammoth tusk can fetch

around USD400 per 500 grams The concept of mammoth cloning is contested – and controversial – in scientific circles, primarily because there is concern that the woolly mammoth’s habitat is no longer, so it would not survive in today’s climate. Microbes – which animals rely on to digest food – have changed in the 10,000 years since the woolly mammoths were around

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 of 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. ag