Excellently preserved, Yuka bears signs of interactions with a top predator, possibly a lion, as well as with prehistoric humans. The Mammuthus scientific team is currently working on primary analyses.

> A preview of the documentary can be found here

It broadcasts on April 4th at 21:00 on BBC2 in the UK and in the US at a later date soon to be announced.

After the long Arctic night, the return of the sun is heralded in Taimyr with a great festival. The Dolgans, one of many ethnic nomadic groups that consider the tundra their home, gather in large numbers for this celebration every year. It was at this festival roughly fifteen years ago that Bernard Buigues first became familiar with a people whose hospitality and culture would become intimately familiar to him during subsequent returns to Taimyr. Their familiarity with the tundra makes them superior navigators and guides through an otherwise hostile environment.

Among 6,000 Dolgans, only a handful of families are still leading nomadic lives. Their livelihood is derived from hunting and fishing, as well as raising and herding reindeer. In search of grazing grounds for their herd, they traverse the tundra. This constant movement has taught them to read the tundra like a book. What may seem like a vast expanse of white monotony to the uninitiated visitor is an ancestral path to these nomads.

An ill omen

During the course of their seasonal migrations, they sometimes happen upon a mammoth having emerged from the ground. For the Dolgans, such an encounter has long been an unwelcome ill omen. Still, they make use of what is provided and in a landscape where wood and métal are hard to come by, ivory is an ideal material to craft into durable tools: harnesses, buttons and spoons.

Ivory trade

Today more and more foreign, often manufactured materials have been introduced to this remote region. But the mammoth has not lost its value. International trade in mammoth ivory has largely replaced traditional uses and offers a small fortune to those who seek out the material. This trade allows the economically disadvantaged Dolgans to trade for modern goods that have become part of their lifestyles: ammunition for hunting, snowmobiles, fossil fuel, sugar. The older generation is wary of the ivory trade. Some who strive to protect their culture are opposed to this new influence.

Science and tradition

The Jarkov family explained all of this to Bernard Buigues before they led him to the spot where they had found two tusks emerging from the permafrost. The first major success of Mammuthus owes much to this family and thus bears their name: the Jarkov Mammoth. Sensible to the traditions of the people in the tundra, Bernard Buigues learned how to respect their ways and in time he learned how to share his passion for the cultural and scientific heritage of their ancestral home. He ensures that his expeditions reflect a balance of research-driven inquiry and deference to the cultures and people who make it possible.

Today the nomadic peoples of the tundra are among the most enthusiastic supporters of Mammuthus. Not only the Dolgans but also the Yukagirs, the Yakuts and the Nenets play an essential and contributing role to the program’s mission of protecting and preserving the region’s unique heritage. This partnership formed across all boundaries and united by a shared vision is a key asset of Mammuthus and a source of strength.

From his logistics base-camp in Khatanga on the Taimyr Peninsula inside the Arctic Circle, he began by organizing expeditions for others – adventurers and tourists – to the geographic North Pole. Since his encounter with the Jarkov Mammoth in 1997, he has dedicated his life to salvaging the treasures of the Siberian Arctic’s permafrost. In 1998 he created the Mammuthus program with Professor Yves Coppens. Scientists around the world have responded to his efforts by joining the adventure.

Throughout his career, Yves Coppens has carried out extensive fieldwork that has led to the discovery of many fossil hominids and the oldest known manufactured stone tools (over three million years old). He has also constructed models to explain the origin of hominids (eight million years ago) and of Man (three million years ago), as well as a cultural model to explain the evolution of thought. Yves Coppens is one of the co-discoverers of the Australopithecus afarensis Lucy. He became known to the general public through The Odyssey of Species, a documentary-fiction on the evolution of man, which met a great success in France and the other countries where it was distributed. In January 2010, he was named President of the Scientific Committee in charge of the conservation of the Lascaux Cave. Yves Coppens is member of the French Academy of Science.

A co-founder of mammuthus, Yves Coppens took part in expeditions at the center of some of the most spectacular paleontological discoveries of the last dozen years. He considers the mammoth as a symbol par excellence of an ecosystem (the large, frigid faunae) and an ecological niche (the steppe of the mammoth) lost to the changing climate 10,000 years ago. Acting to contribute to the reconstitution of this biological diversity that has become accessible due to current climate, he maintains that this heritage carries the potential of an unprecedented lesson for the future of our own natural world.

Shortly after arriving in Ann Arbor, Professor Fisher was called to several local sites where remains of mastodons had turned up during excavation of farm ponds. Evidence at some of these sites suggested that humans had been involved in postmortem carcass processing (butchery), and thus began a long-term interest in whether human activity was a significant causal factor in the extinction of mastodons and mammoths.

Intrigued by evidence that some of these sites had been used for underwater meat storage, Professor Fisher put himself in the place of a Pleistocene human. He tested the feasibility of underwater meat storage by devising an experiment in which he substituted a draft horse for the mammoth, processed the meat with only prehistoric tools, submerged it in a pond for several months and eventually ate it.

An internationally renowned expert on mammoth and mastodon tusks, Professor Fisher’s involvement with Mammuthus began with analysis of the Jarkov mammoth’s tusks in 1999. Using data on the structure and composition of mastodon and mammoth tusks to reconstruct aspects of their behavior, growth history, nutritional status, reproductive biology, and response to environmental conditions, Professor Fisher’s research reminds us how rich and informative the relics of our past can be.