Woolly mammoths resurfacing in Siberia

The bones and tusks of the ancient creatures are becoming more prevalent as permafrost thaws. Now entire villages are surviving on the trade in mammoth bones.

by Megan K. Stack
March 2, 2010

Reporting from Moscow — The beasts had long lain extinct and forgotten, embedded deep in the frozen turf, bodies swaddled in Earth's layers for thousands of years before Christ.

Now, the Russian permafrost is offering up the bones and tusks of the woolly mammoths that once lumbered over the tundra. They are shaped into picture frames, chess sets, pendants. They are gathered and piled, carved and whittled, bought and sold on the Internet.

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The once-obscure scientists who specialize in the wastelands of Siberia have opened lucrative sidelines as bone hunters, spending the summer months trawling the northern river banks and working networks of locals to gather stockpiles of bones. They speak of their work proudly, and a little mystically.

"You need to have luck to find bones," said Fyodor Romanenko, a geologist at Moscow State University. "I don't look for bones. I find them. They find me.

"Every find gives you a huge joy," he said. "It's a gift from nature, from the Arctic, from fate."

The mammoth finds have been growing steadily over the last three decades as Russia's vast sea of permafrost slowly thaws.

Russian scientists disagree over whether global warming is responsible. Some say yes, others are skeptical. But nobody argues that the permafrost is dwindling -- and they're glad to have the bones and tusks, especially when the increased yields coincide with bans on elephant ivory.

Hand-to-mouth reindeer herders on Russia's desolate tundra have coexisted with the traces of mammoths for generations. Romanenko claims that there are cases of long-frozen mammoth meat being thawed and cooked, or fed to the dogs.

Now entire villages are surviving on the trade in mammoth bones. And a new verb has entered the vernacular: mamontit, or "to mammoth" -- meaning, to go out in search of bones.

"People used to just come across bones and throw them aside or take them to the garbage, because they were not interested in them," said Gennady Tatarinov, who oversees a reindeer farm in Anyuisk, a frigid village 4,000 miles northeast of Moscow.

"But now there's a big demand," Tatarinov said. "And of course there's a lot of competition, and people who make it their main trade."

Many of the populated areas have been picked clean, driving scavengers deeper and deeper into the wilderness in the hunt for bones.