Mammoth of an Expedition
A Mammoth of an Expedition On a freezing fall day in 1997, a nine-year-old reindeer hunter, Kostya Jarkov, spotted the tip of a tusk sticking out of the permafrost. ... He visited the site where the Dolgan boy found the tusks, and reunited them with their original owner, a nearly intact, as he thought at that point, body of a woolly mammoth encased in the ice. Buigues, together with a team of scientists and a film crew from the Discovery Channel, decided to dig out a twenty-three ton ice block in order to transport the Jarkov mammoth, named after its finder, to Khatanga, 2,000 miles distant. ... In this controlled environment kept at a constant seventy degrees Fahrenheit, the team of scientists started, by using ordinary hairdryers, to melt the mammoth slowly out of the ice and examine it. The main goal was not to clone, but use the DNA to probe further the evolutionary relationship of the woolly mammoth to elephants and others, and help solve the extinction question (Kluger, Stone 1-3). The scientists determined, by carbon-dating techniques, that the mammoth was forty-seven years old when he died 20,380 years ago. Unfortunately, the mammoth turned out not to be as complete as hoped, and, no useful soft tissue was found in the block. For many, this was a great disappointment, especially for the leader of the expedition who admitted, “I was expecting a lot and got a little” (qtd. ... Nevertheless, the Jarkov mammoth expedition developed new ways of evacuating carcasses, and may still shed light on unanswered questions about mammoths (Gasperini). ... The African mammoth, Mammuthus africanavus, migrated north, either across the Strait of Gibraltar, where a narrow strip of land once connected Africa to Europe, or through the Sinai Desert and Asia Minor. ... 8 million years ago, the African mammoth died out. Previously, it had given rise to a new species, the southern mammoth. Despite its name, the southern mammoth (Mammuthus meridionalis), which grew to fourteen feet high at the shoulder, never reached the Southern Hemisphere, but was adapted to life on the savanna, a warm, dry grassland with few trees. ... The extinction made more room for the surviving species, such as the southern mammoth, which spread out across Europe and northern Asia, and eventually even reached North America across the Bering Land Bridge. ... The southern mammoth disappeared, and, in its place, arose the steppe mammoth (Mammuthus trogontherii) which was better adapted to the life in cooler climates.