Gold — and fossils — in them thar hills
Yukon paleontologist visiting Hamilton to talk ice age and modern gold rushes
Short moments ago (100,000 years, give or take a decade), this planet teemed with massive beasts brandishing elongated tusks with graceful questionmark curves; not to mention fearsome powerful cats with overbites more pronounced than Freddie Mercury’s.
Oh, and giant sloths and camels. In the Yukon, of all places.
Humans were different, too. Everyone believed in climate change. Hard to deny when roaming over ice sheets two miles thick and not a bag of rock salt to be found, on account of it not having been invented.
Grant Zazula, who will be talking in Hamilton on Saturday, lives amid the residua of this amazing time in geologic and natural history. And, no, it was nothing like The Flintstones.
We all live in the midst of the telescopic past, in a way — there are fossils even here, I suppose. But the Yukon, where Grant is, where he works as a paleontologist, stands apart as an ideal place to access and understand the flora and fauna of the ice age.
There are several reasons. One is the historical climate, says Grant, who is delivering the annual John Rae Lecture on Jan. 12, at the invitation of the Hamilton Association for the Advancement of Literature, Science and Art.
The Yukon is part of what used to be a relatively dry subcontinent, the land mass that stretched from what is now Siberia to the Mackenzie River (including the land bridge over what is now the Bering Strait).
While other parts of northern Canada were covered in snow and glaciation, the Yukon was clear, with grassland steppe terrain. And the fossils, so well preserved in permafrost, often contain DNA. Even today, the Yukon doesn’t get that much snow, despite its cold temperatures, says Grant.
“The Yukon was too dry for glaciers, and glaciation stopped at the mountains that separate the Northwest Territories from the Yukon.”
But another fascinating reason is — can you guess? — the Gold Rush. We think of the Klondike, the Robert Service poems and the mad craze to cash in during the 1890s. But it’s still going on in the Yukon, albeit on a more modest scale.
“Small-scale mines are like the family farm of the north,” says Grant. “You can make a reasonable living at it. There are more than 140 gold mines operating in the Yukon.”
More recently, popular gold prospecting reality shows like Gold Rush and Yukon Gold drive both tourism and global interest in the practice. So, the connection with fossils?
The more people rooting around for deposits, the more fossils get found, as a serendipitous byproduct.
“In the gold rush of the 1890s, part of the story is that as soon as they showed up and looked for gold in the frozen ground, they found fossilized bones,” says Grant. “There’s an iconic photo of these scruffy-looking miners
holding up the skull of a woolly mammoth. That role continues.”
A symbiosis developed between gold miners and prospectors and paleontologists, says Grant. The “gold people” are in the habit now of letting the paleontologists know when they find fossils.
Of course, paleontologists, archaeologists and other scientists do fossil hunting of their own. And between them all, the Yukon has become recognized as among the world’s richest sources.
“What we’re finding is being used by biologists, geneticists. Camels, giant sloths, ancestors of bison, woolly mammoth tusks; when they’re found in frozen ground, the DNA can be preserved.”
The work of people like Grant is of enormous interest to people like Hamilton’s Hendrik Poinar, evolutionary biologist and director of
the Ancient DNA Centre at McMaster University.
One of the latest finds Grant’s excited about is an “entire frozen carcass of a wolf pup, about 50,000 years old,” with the fur and skin still intact.
It all helps us understand, says Grant, “how climate is in constant change and how animals and plants adapt. The wolf survived the ice age, but the sabertooth cats didn’t,” perhaps because the cats were more specialized hunters.
There are lessons in all of it for us today. Grant’s promises to be a fascinating lecture, featuring samples and pictures from his work and from the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre.
For more, visit haalsa.org.