Well-preserved mammoth carcass found in Siberia
Scientists think Jenya was killed by a hunter
MOSCOW — A teenage mammoth who once roamed the Siberian tundra in search of fodder and females might have been killed by an Ice Age man on a summer day tens of thousands of years ago, a Russian scientist said Friday.
Professor Alexei Tikhonov of the Zoology Institute in St. Petersburg announced the finding of the mammoth, which was excavated from the Siberian permafrost in late September near the Sopochnaya Karga cape, 3,500 kilometres northeast of Moscow.
The 16-year-old mammoth has been named Jenya, after the 11-yearold Russian boy who found the animal’s limbs sticking out of the frozen mud. The mammoth was 2 metres tall — “small for his age,” said Tikhonov — and weighed 500 kilograms.
The examination of Jenya’s body has already proved that the massive humps on mammoths seen on Ice Age cave paintings in Spain and France were not extended bones but huge chunks of fat that helped them regulate their body temperatures and survive the long, cold winters, Tikhonov said.
Jenya’s hump was relatively big, which means that he died during a short Arctic summer, he said.
Jenya’s carcass is the bestpreserved one since the 1901 discovery of a giant mammoth near the Beryozovka River in Russia’s northeaster n Yakutia region, Tikhonov said.
Unfortunately, its DNA has been damaged by low temperatures and is “hardly” suitable for possible cloning, he said.