A short message about mammoths. Comparison of a mammoth and an elephant: size and weight, how they differ, are they relatives, who is bigger and stronger? Mammoth places and times of residence

† Woolly mammoth
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Animals
Type:	Chordata
Subtype:	Vertebrates
Class:	Mammals
Squad:	Proboscis
Family:	Elephantids
Genus:
View:	Woolly Mammoth
International scientific name
Mammuthus primigenius Blumenbach, 1799

Woolly Mammoth, or Siberian mammoth (lat. Mammuthus primigenius) is an extinct species of the elephant family.

Description

Fragments of a mammoth tusk (Rtishchevsky Museum of History and Local Lore)

The height at the withers of large male mammoths was about 3 meters, and the weight did not exceed 5-6 tons. Females were noticeably smaller than males. The high withers made the silhouette of the animal somewhat hunchbacked.

The entire body of the mammoth was covered with thick fur. The length of the fur on an adult animal on the shoulders, hips and sides reached almost a meter, resulting in a long dewlap that covered the belly and top part limbs. The thick, dense undercoat, covered with coarse guard hairs, reliably protected the animal from the cold. The color of the coat varied from brown, almost black in places, to yellow-brown and reddish. The cubs were somewhat lighter in color, with a predominance of yellow-brown and reddish tones. The size of the mammoth was approximately the same as that of modern elephants, but its thick and long hair made its figure more impressive.

The mammoth's head was massive, the top was stretched upward, and on the crown of it was crowned with a “cap” of coarse black hair. The fur-covered ears were small, smaller than those of an Indian elephant. The tail is short, with a brush of long, very stiff and thick black hair at the end. In addition to small ears and thick undercoat, protection from the cold was, according to Academician V.V. Zalensky, the anal valve - a fold of skin under the tail covering the anus. From the skin glands of the mammoth, the sebaceous glands of the skin and the postorbital gland were discovered, with the secretion of which modern elephants mark territory during the breeding season.

The appearance of the mammoth was complemented by huge tusks, which had a peculiar spiral curve. When exiting the jaw, they were directed downward and somewhat to the sides, and their ends were bent inward, towards each other. With age, the curvature of the tusks, especially in males, increased, so that in very old animals their ends almost closed or crossed. The tusks of large males reached a length of 4 m, and their weight reached 110 kg. In females, the tusks were less curved and thinner at the base. Mammoth tusks from a young age have wear zones, indicating their intensive use. They are located differently than in modern elephants, on the outside of the tusks. It is suggested that with the help of tusks, mammoths raked snow and dug out food from under it, stripped bark from trees, and in snowless cold times, broke out pieces of ice to quench their thirst.

To grind food on each side of the upper and lower jaws at the same time, the mammoth had only one, but very large tooth. The change of teeth occurred in a horizontal direction, the back tooth moved forward and pushed out the worn out front tooth, which was a small remnant of 2-3 enamel plates. During the life of the animal, 6 teeth were successively replaced in each half of the jaw, of which the first three were considered milk teeth, and the last three were considered permanent, molars. When the last of them was completely erased, the animal lost the ability to feed and died.

The chewing surface of mammoth teeth is a wide and long plate covered with transverse enamel ridges. These teeth are highly durable and well preserved, so they are found much more often than other bone remains of the animal.

Compared to modern elephants, the mammoth was slightly shorter-legged. This is due to the fact that he ate mainly pasture, while his modern relatives tend to eat branches and leaves of trees, tearing them from great heights. The mammoth's limbs resembled columns. The soles of the feet were covered with unusually hard keratinized skin 5-6 cm thick, dotted with deep cracks. Above inside On the soles there was a special elastic cushion, which acted as a shock absorber during movement, making the mammoth’s tread light and silent. On cutting edge the soles had small nail-like hooves, 3 on the forelimbs and 4 on the hind limbs. From exposure wet soil In the coastal tundra-steppe, the hooves grew and, taking on ugly forms, clearly interfered with the mammoths. The diameter of the large mammoth's footprint reached almost half a meter. The animal’s legs, thanks to its enormous weight, exerted great pressure on the ground, so mammoths avoided sticky and swampy places whenever possible.

Spreading

The famous Russian paleontologist A.V. Sher put forward the hypothesis that the homeland woolly mammoth was northeast Siberia (Western Beringia). The most ancient remains (about 800 thousand years ago) of this type of mammoth are known from the Kolyma River valley, from where it subsequently spread to Europe and, as the Ice Age intensified, to North America.

Habitats and lifestyle

The lifestyle and habitats of mammoths cannot yet be convincingly reconstructed. However, by analogy with modern elephants, it can be assumed that mammoths were herd animals. This is confirmed by paleontological finds. In a herd of mammoths, just like elephants, there was a leader, most likely an old female. Males kept in separate groups or alone. Probably, during seasonal migrations, mammoths united in huge herds.

Vast areas of tundra-steppes were heterogeneous in the productivity of biotopes. Most likely, the places richest in food were river valleys and lake basins. There were thickets of tall grasses and sedges. In hilly areas, mammoths could feed mainly on the bottom of valleys, where there were more dwarf willow and birch shrubs. The huge amount of food consumed suggests that mammoths, like modern elephants, led an active lifestyle and often changed their habitat.

Apparently, in the warm season the animals fed mainly on herbaceous vegetation. In the frozen guts of two mammoths that died in warm weather, sedges and grasses (especially cotton grass) predominated; lingonberry bushes, green mosses and thin shoots of willow, birch, and alder were found in small quantities. The contents of the stomach of one of the mammoths filled with food weighed about 250 kg. It can be assumed that in winter, especially when there was a lot of snow, shoots of trees and shrubs became of great importance in the mammoth’s diet.

The discoveries of mummies of baby mammoths - mammoths - have somewhat expanded the understanding of the biology of these animals. Now we can assume that the mammoth calves were born in early spring, their bodies were completely covered with thick hair. By the time winter arrived, they had already grown noticeably and were able to make long trips together with adults, for example, migrating south at the end of autumn.

Of the predators, the most dangerous for mammoth calves were cave lions. It is possible that a sick or distressed animal also became a victim of wolves or hyenas. No one could threaten healthy adult mammoths, and only with the advent of active human hunting for mammoths did they become constantly in danger.

Extinction

There are several theories about the extinction of woolly mammoths, but the exact reasons for their death remain a mystery. The extinction of mammoths probably occurred gradually and not simultaneously in different parts their huge range. As living conditions worsened, the habitat of animals narrowed and was divided into small areas. The number of animals decreased, the fertility of females decreased and the mortality of young animals increased. It is very likely that mammoths died out earlier in Europe and somewhat later in northeastern Siberia, where natural conditions did not change so dramatically. 3-4 thousand years ago, mammoths finally disappeared from the face of the earth. The last mammoth populations survived longest in northeastern Siberia and on Wrangel Island.

Finds on the territory of the Rtishchevsky district

Part of a mammoth jaw. Found in the vicinity of the village of Elan in 1927. Serdobsk Local Lore Museum

In the territory of the present Rtishchevsky district, bones, teeth and tusks of mammoths were often found.

In 2011, mammoth bones were found in the eroded bank of the Iznair River near the village of Zmeevki.

On September 9 of this year, in the Kalinov ravine near the village of Elan, archaeologists discovered the humerus of the front leg of a mammoth. The length of the bone is 80 cm, in diameter - 17 cm and in circumference - 44.4 cm. Here, during the spring flood of the year, the peasant M. T. Tareev found a well-preserved mammoth tusk. The length of the tusk was more than two meters, weight - about 70 kg. These finds are kept in the collections of the Serdob Local History Museum.

In the early 1970s, near the village named after Maxim Gorky, mammoth bones were discovered. According to eyewitnesses, they were discovered by a fifth grade student at Shilo-Golitsynskaya high school Sasha Gurkin. As a result of excavations, vertebrae, shoulder blades, shin bones, ribs and a piece of tusk were extracted from the clay slope of a deep ravine. The remaining parts of the skeleton could not be found. Next to the bones of an adult animal, a fibula was found, clearly belonging to a cub.

The Rtishchevsky Museum of History and Local Lore contains parts of a mammoth's tusk and teeth.

Literature

• Izotova M. A. History of the study of archaeological monuments of the Rtishchevsky district of the Saratov region. - P. 236
• Kuvanov A. Into the depths of centuries (From the series of essays “Rtishchevo”) // Lenin’s Path. - December 15, 1970. - P. 4
• Oleynikov N. From time immemorial // Lenin’s Path. - May 22, 1971. - P. 4
• Tikhonov A. N. Mammoth. - M. - St. Petersburg: Partnership of Scientific Publications KMK, 2005. - 90 p. (Series “Animal Diversity”. Issue 3)

Flora and fauna of the Rtishchevsky district
Flora of Rtishchevsky district
Mushrooms of the Rtishchevsky district
Fauna of Rtishchevsky district	Invertebrates Vertebrates Paleofauna
Red Data Book of the Saratov Region

Rtishchevo and Rtishchevsky district in topics
Symbols and awards
People of the city and region
Administrative territorial division

Abstract of a series of articles

In the last years of the 20th century, a real boom in mammoth research began. If before this, discoveries of frozen mammoth corpses in Siberia (they are not found in other places) happened once every 20-30 years, now they occur almost every year. Especially for their excavation, preservation and study, the International Mammoth Committee was created in Geneva, with branches in Paris, St. Petersburg and Yakutsk. A series of publications on this topic will help amateurs and scientists keep abreast of the latest findings.

The cooling that began millions of years ago in the Northern Hemisphere caused changes in the flora and fauna. Huge feed resources open spaces contributed rapid development and the prosperity of deer, roe deer, bison, and their movement to the north. New episode cold snaps in the second half of the Pleistocene had a noticeable impact on the species depletion of the animal world and the transformation of surviving species into cold-resistant forms. These include the “early” mammoth. Very rapid adaptive evolution is a completely unique phenomenon. The reasons for such rapid adaptation of the inhabitants of these harsh zones to little snow, although cold, winters are considered. Mammoths, as well as their “companions,” existed very successfully in steppe, forest-tundra and tundra landscapes. The woolly mammoth, whose homeland is considered to be northern Siberia, replaced the steppe mammoth. But at the end of the last ice age, mammoths disappeared.

About a million years ago, under the influence of cosmic and terrestrial causes, cooling began in the Northern Hemisphere. Snow caps grew on the mountain peaks, and tongues of glaciers descended into the valleys. Because the a large number of water settled in a crystalline state on the continent, the coastal level decreased, significant areas of the shelf were dried, and the outlines of the seas and oceans changed. Under the influence of the physical environment, plant and animal world. Growing in the Tertiary period at the latitude of Moscow, Novosibirsk and Yakutsk,

subtropical evergreen forests were replaced by coniferous and deciduous ones. Vast steppes began to appear in watershed areas. At the junction of the Pliocene and Anthropocene, the hipparion fauna, represented by the three-toed ancestors of horses - hipparions, the ancestors of mammoths - mastodons, and saber-toothed cats- mahairodami. They were replaced by single-toed high-toothed horses, long-proboscis elephants with straight tusks - trogonterias and modern-type cats. Huge food resources of open spaces contributed to the rapid development and prosperity of deer, roe deer, antelope, aurochs, and bison. Following them, primitive humanoid creatures moved north from Africa and South Asia. In general, this Early Pleistocene fauna became the basis for the formation of the next mammoth group.

A new series of cooling events in the second half of the Pleistocene was accompanied by further development of glaciation and a decrease in ocean levels. Accordingly, in the Northern Hemisphere there was a noticeable depletion of species in the animal world and the transformation of surviving species into cold-resistant forms. These include the “early” mammoth, bactrian camel, long-horned bison, cave lion and cave hyena. During this period, they reached their maximum size and biological flourishing, resembling the modern savannah in numbers. equatorial Africa. In the vastness of Southern Siberia, thousands of schools of horses, bison, donkeys grazed, herds of camels, mammoths, deer passed by, and woolly rhinoceroses were often encountered. During catastrophic spring floods and during crossings, hundreds and thousands of animals died, forming cemeteries of their bones in the sharp bends of the rivers.

Vereshchagin, 2008

How quickly could hairless trogontherians turn into woolly mammoths during climate cooling? An interesting observation on this topic was made by a participant in the hydrographic expedition of the Northern Arctic Ocean(1910-1915) N.I. Evgenov:

Evgenov, 2012, p. 252

The last ice age, which began 60-70 thousand years ago (Wurm in Europe, Valdai in Russia), left noticeable traces in the landscape, flora and fauna of the northern half of Eurasia. Late mammoth fauna existed in steppe and tundra-steppe conditions. With the ocean level falling by 100-200 m, the archipelagos of Spitsbergen, Franz Josef Land, Novaya Zemlya, the New Siberian Islands, and Wrangel Island were one with the mainland. A vast zone of frozen tundra-steppes stretched from Britain to Sakhalin, including the Russian Plain, the Yama Peninsula, Taimyr, Northern Yakutia and Chukotka.

Permafrost limited the existence of coniferous and deciduous forests only along river valleys and on the southern slopes of the mountains. From the margins of the glaciers, the winds carried loess dust deposited among the grass vegetation. In winter, severe frosts tore the surface of the earth with deep cracks. In the summer, these cracks were filled with water, which froze during the next cold snap and formed ice veins that went tens of meters deep. Living conditions were harsh, but with an abundance of grassy food, it was possible to live on hard soil. Moreover, the inhabitants of this harsh zone have long adapted to winters with little snow, albeit cold ones.

Yedomas are the remains of the Upper Pleistocene plain, in the thickness of which are the bones of mammoths. Currently, the edomas are being intensively destroyed under the influence of the Sun, the heat of oxbow lakes that melt ice veins, and rivers that wash away steep coastal cliffs. It is along the coastal cliffs that the Yedomas and Baijerakhs collect mammoth ivory. It is believed that the lakes, with their large heat reserves, reworked the former Pleistocene plain, lowering it by 12-15 meters. After all, 30-60% of the thickness of the Yedoma is ice. As a result of thawing, silty soil flows from the cliffs, carrying the bones of mammoths and their companions to the bottom of the lakes and forming redeposited deposits. Therefore, lakes are the second most important reservoir of remains of mammoth fauna.

Mammoths are extinct elephants, differing only in a few features from modern African and Indian elephants. In origin and morphology they are closer to the latter. At the same time, numerous attempts by geneticists to find out which of the modern elephants mammoths are genetically closest to have led to a curiosity - for some it turned out to be closer to Indian, for others - to African, and for others - even equidistant. The mistake was that short pieces of mammoth DNA chains extracted from tissues frozen in the permafrost for thousands of years were taken for research, which at this stage The development of gene research in systematics is clearly insufficient. Modern elephants live mainly in tropical forests and savannas, less often - in mountains and deserts. In contrast, mammoths were adapted to exist in steppe, forest-tundra and tundra landscapes, cold and temperate climates.

As already noted, mammoths belong to the genus Mammuthus (Brookes, 1828), which includes 4 or 6 species, depending on the opinion of systematic paleontologists. Mammoths were large in size - the height of the skeleton of adult male mammoths at the most convex point of the spine reaches 450 cm, for a woolly one 320-265 cm, and for a small species from the California Chanel Islands 200-180 cm. The most ancient representative of the genus was the steppe or trogontherian mammoth - M. trogontherii(Pohlig, 1886). It lived in the early Pleistocene of Eurasia and North America, where it is sometimes called the imperial elephant. The climate of that era (350-450 thousand years ago) in the middle latitudes was still moderately warm, and in the high latitudes it was moderate. In the extreme North-East, mixed deciduous forests grew, vast meadow-steppes and tundra-steppes stretched, where these animals, with massive, slightly curved tusks, measuring up to four or more meters, weighing up to 130 kg, grazed. But the ancestor of Trogontherium is considered to be the southern elephant, or Archdiscodon, the skeletons of which are in the museums of Stavropol, Rostov and St. Petersburg.

Steppe mammoths were poorly adapted to the cold, so at the end of the Middle Pleistocene in Eurasia it was replaced by the hero of our book, the woolly mammoth - M. Primigenius (Blumenbach, 1799), and in North America Colombian mammoth - M. columbi. At the end of the Pleistocene, the woolly, or, as it is also called, the Siberian mammoth, entered America through the Berengia Bridge, where it lived together with its Colombian brother until extinction.

The famous Russian paleontologist A.V. Sher (Sher, 1974) put forward a hypothesis that the homeland of the woolly mammoth is the north of Siberia, and more precisely, the North-East, or Western Beringia. Based on verified geological data, the scientist showed that the most ancient remains (about 800 thousand years ago) of this type of mammoth are known from the Kolyma River valley, from where it subsequently spread to Europe and North America as the Ice Age intensified. So the name “Siberian mammoth” correctly reflects the origin of this species.

Mammoths disappeared at the end of the last ice age or at the beginning of the Holocene. The extinction of mammoths probably occurred gradually and not simultaneously in different parts of their vast range. As living conditions worsened, the habitat of animals narrowed and was divided into small areas (refugia). The number of animals decreased, the fertility of females decreased and the mortality of young animals increased. It is very likely that mammoths died out earlier in Europe and somewhat later in North-East Siberia, where natural conditions did not change so dramatically. 3-4 thousand years ago, mammoths finally disappeared from the face of the Earth.

The latest absolute dates of the bones of these animals are as follows: Berelekh “cemetery” - 12.6 thousand years, Taimyr mammoth - 11.5 (about a dozen datings are known from Taimyr between 9 and 10 thousand years), Yuribey (Gydan) mammoth - 10, 0 thousand years. In the west of Chukotka, in the river valleys of the western coast of the Chaunskaya Bay, bones with an age of 8 thousand years were found, and on Wrangel Island - 4 thousand years old. Here, apparently, was the last population of short mammoths with obvious signs of degradation.

Why did mammoths become extinct? It is very doubtful that failures under the ice during crossings and into ice cracks, hunting of primitive man, acting separately, could lead to the complete disappearance of these giants. After all, mammoths lived on a vast territory of Eurasia and North America. However, the bulk of animals became extinct 10-12 thousand years ago. Biologists believe that the process of extinction of a species begins with a decrease in the fertility of the animal, the birth of predominantly males, and a slowdown in the rate of reproduction. Judging by archival data and old photographs from Yakut fairs, when harvesting mammoth ivory, male tusks always predominated. Of the dozen skeletons stored in Russian museums, only Novosibirsk has the skeleton of a mammoth on display.

The climatic boundary at the end of the last ice age (9-12 thousand years ago) was marked by a series of sharp temperature fluctuations that negatively affected the animal world of the middle and northern latitudes. In place of the cold but dry steppes, swamp-tundra landscapes with abundant snow and crusty conditions began to develop. Under these conditions, specialization for dry cold turned out to be an evolutionary dead end and led to the extinction of not only the mammoth, but also many of its companions: the hairy rhinoceros, the horse, the bison, the cave lion, and the musk ox (in Eurasia). Primitive hunters only accelerated this process.

Word to Professor N.K. Vereshchagin:

Mammoths died in droves and in places where the role of primitive man was insignificant. In the tundra and forest-tundra of the Far North of Siberia, rivers reveal bone-bearing layers in places, bound by ice, stretching for tens of kilometers. These burials and deposits of bones are known as the “mammoth horizon.” They contain roughly broken bones of mammoths, rhinoceroses, horses, deer, bison, and sometimes whole carcasses of these animals. In the summer, as it thaws, the “mammoth horizon” emits a characteristic corpse-like odor. The broken bones of mammoths and other animals here bear no traces of the activity of primitive hunters and are not associated with Paleolithic sites. The ice broke them.

Vereshchagin, 2008

The ending follows

Additional information for the series of articles

Yuri Burlakov decided to publish this interesting book here in the Encyclopedia. The book was written by him in collaboration with Alexei Tikhonov..K. Vereshchagin. Let this book become a monument to both him and Russian science about mammoths.

Burlakov Yuri Konstantinovich

Therefore, his magnificent essays appear on the pages of the Encyclopedia on behalf of the Information Department.

In 1959, Yuri Burlakov entered the geological faculty of Leningrad University, from which he graduated at the end of 1964 with a degree in surveyor-exploration geologist. During educational and practical training, he took part in expeditions to the Pamirs (1961), Tien Shan (1962 and 1963), Chukotka (1964). By assignment he was assigned to the Verkhne-Indigirsk expedition of the Yakut Geological Department (Ust-Nera settlement, Oymyakon region of the YASSR. In 1990-1993 he worked in the newly formed Association of Polar Explorers (in 2002-2012 he was its vice president), in 1994-2002 - in the apparatus State Duma RF, assistant to the Deputy Chairman of the Duma A.N. Chilingarova. During this time, he took part in five sea expeditions to the Arctic archipelagos, the Northern Sea Route and to the North Pole. From 1991 to 2002 he annually participated in expeditions to the North Pole. In the fall of 1999, he took part in an experimental flight of the Mi-26 heavy helicopter to the North Pole without refueling. In the winter of 1995/1996 and 2001/2002, he visited Antarctica with the Metelitsa sports team and organized a flight to South Pole light aircraft An-3.

In 1997-2007, he annually participated in the summer searches and excavations of the remains of the mammoth fauna through the International Mammoth Committee (1997-2000 - in Taimyr, 2001-2005 - in the north of Yakutia, 2006-2007 - in Yamal). In total, between 1956 and 2007 he chalked up about 30 expeditions. Since 2001, I became interested in studying the history of exploration and development of the Russian Arctic. In recent years, he has published two books and about fifty articles in collections, magazines and newspapers on historical, geographical and paleontological topics. Participates in the work of the Polar Commission of the Moscow branch of the Russian Geographical Society, International Mammoth Committee (as consultant on paleogeography).

Hobbies include collecting minerals and polar philately. Loves dogs, dark beer and whitefish stroganina.

Tikhonov Alexey Nikolaevich

Deputy Director for Scientific Work of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (St. Petersburg), Head of the Zoological Museum. He has been working at ZIN since 1982. Total experience is 22 years, scientific experience is 14 years. He has 87 scientific works, including 4 monographs. Candidate biological sciences. Member of the Triological Society (since 1982), Paleontological Society (since 1999), Commission on Recently Extinct Organisms (CXREO) (since 1998). Scientific Secretary of the Mammoth Committee of the St. Petersburg Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences (since 1998). Head of international projects: “Lenfauna” (2000-2003), RFBR-INTAS JR97-1532 “Palaeogeography and archeology of the late Pleistocene and Holocene of Wrangel Island and Chukotka” (1999-2002).

Coordinator of the international project “Mammuthus” from the Russian side (1999-2004). Participant and leader of several international projects. Since 2002 - Chairman of the International Mammoth Committee. Since 1983 he worked together with N.K. Vereshchagin, behind him are dozens of expeditions to excavate mammoths and other Pleistocene animals, the author of several finds, including.

*****

site expresses deep gratitude Valery Igorevich Sements, - only with his editorial and organizational help was the series of articles “The World of the Mammoth” able to appear on the pages of the Encyclopedia.

Semenets Valery Igorevich

Born August 23, 1942, Muscovite. In 1966 he graduated from MINHIGP (Moscow Institute of Petrochemical and gas industry) them. THEM. Gubkina. After graduating from the institute, he worked for more than 4 years at the Design Bureau working on rodless pumps (for oil production). In 1971 he moved to the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Drilling Equipment, where he worked until 1991. While working at the institute, he took an active part in the development of new screw downhole motors for drilling oil and gas wells. Has several copyright certificates and patents (foreign). In 1991 he headed a company organized with colleagues, focused on drilling horizontal wells. The construction of such wells was carried out in many oil regions of Russia. Business trips to various corners countries left indelible impressions.

The fate of ideas about this northern elephant was curious. Mammoths - their way of life, habits - were well known within 70-10 thousand years ago by our distant ancestors - the people of the Paleolithic. They hunted them and depicted them in flat drawings and sculptures. Then, after the extinction of the nose-handed giants, the memory of them was probably almost erased in a series of generations for many millennia. In any case, we do not know their images in the monuments of the Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Ages. In ancient times, and then in the Middle Ages and in our era, ideas about mammoths arose anew, but in the form of fantastic retellings of Hyperborean legends and discussions of the facts of discoveries of their fossil remains.

Natives Northern Siberia historical era, wandering along the rivers, they observed the melting of bones, tusks, and sometimes entire mammoth corpses from the frozen soil of the banks. This is how naive ideas arose about the mammoth as a giant rat living underground, after whose passage the earth sags in ditches and pits, and the animal itself dies as soon as it touches the air. This legend lasted until the 18th century, and in some places longer. Naturally, Europeans’ ideas about the mammoth were born on the basis of Siberian stories, fables and legends. The latter, apparently, are best reflected by the state councilor of the Peter the Great era V.N. Tatishchev. His remarkable study, published in 1730, was recently republished in Kyiv (Tatishchev, 1974).

Explaining the legends, Tatishchev adhered to quite reasonable views on the fact of the habitat of hairy elephants in northern Siberia. He resolutely rejected the idea that these animals were brought to the North by Alexander the Great and that their corpses were carried there by a global flood, and tried to explain their life in Siberia by a warmer climate.

Scientists have always been especially interested in the frozen corpses of mammoths. In the Pleistocene, in the presence of permafrost (permafrost), such carcasses were also in Europe, but when the soils thawed, they decomposed. Obtaining information about the finds of corpses in Siberia, especially Yakutia, is hampered by prejudice local residents that the first finder who communicated with the mammoth should die in the first year. In addition, such information was simply lost and is being lost locally, and the exposed carcass is hidden in a landslide the next season. In Taimyr, mammoth meat is considered the best bait for catching arctic foxes. This meat is also fed to sled dogs. Therefore, reindeer herders and hunters prefer to dispose of the discovered carcass themselves, without bothering themselves with the dissemination of information, the benefit of which is very problematic.

One of the first literary reports about the frozen corpse of a mammoth on the river. Alazeya was made by Vice Admiral G. A. Sarychev (1802, reprint: 1952, p. 88). On October 1, 1787, while still a lieutenant commander and being in the Alazeya village, he wrote down:

“The Alazeya River, flowing near the village itself, flows at its mouth into the Arctic Sea. The local residents said that along this river, about a hundred versts from the village, half the carcass of a large animal, the size of an elephant, in a standing position, completely intact and covered with skin, on which long hair was visible in places, washed up from its sandy bank. Mr. Merk really wanted to inspect it, but since it was far away from our path and, moreover, deep snow fell at that time, he could not satisfy his desire.”

Already E. Pfizenmayer (Pfizenmayer, 1926) listed in the 20s of our century 23 locations where frozen corpses of mammoths and rhinoceroses and their parts were found, starting with the Izbrand Ides mammoth (1707 on the Yenisei) and ending with the Vollosovich mammoth on the island. Kotelny in 1910. Of this number, rhinoceroses accounted for 4 finds. This information - 11 finds for a century - was repeatedly published and reprinted in special and popular reviews (Byalynitsky-Birulya, 1903; Pfizenmayer, 1926; Tolmachoff, 1929; Illarionov, 1940; Augusta, Burian, 1962, etc.). Here we provide only a map of the locations of these finds, supplemented by the latest data (Fig. 2).

The most outstanding finds in the past were: the carcass of an old mammoth from the lower reaches of the Lena (Adams mammoth, 1799), the carcass of an adult mammoth from the Berezovka River (Hertz mammoth, 1901). Their skeletons and parts of carcasses are in the Museum of the Zoological Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Leningrad.

Let's give short description conditions of occurrence of intact skeletons and carcasses of mammoths at three newest locations.

In 1972, on the right bank of the Shandrin River, east of the mouth of the Indigirka, a fishery inspector discovered tusks with a diameter of 12 cm protruding from a cliff and broke them out of the skull. Yakut geologists B. Rusanov and P. Lazarev here washed away an entire skeleton, thickly painted with vivianite, with a fire truck. Under the protection of the ribs and pelvic bones, frozen internal organs, especially the intestines, were preserved. The skeleton lay in river cross-layered silty loams with bark, wood chips, larch cones and... the lenses of fish eyes. The front legs stretched forward and the hind legs bent under the belly, the intestines filled with food, the venerable age of the animal (about 60-70 years) showed that it quietly died lying in a shallow river bed, and then the remains of its carcass and the skeleton cleaned by fish and water were washed away in silt and froze about 41 thousand years ago.

In 1977, in a steep cliff on the left bank of the Bolshaya Lesnaya Rassokha River (Khatanga River basin, Eastern Taimyr), local reindeer herders discovered and sawed off tusks sticking out of the sand, with a diameter of 18-19 cm at the alveoli (!). Having eroded the frozen river sands and pebbles of the coastal ravine to a depth of 5.5 m, an expedition from the Zoological Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences recovered in July 1978 a frozen head, a left hind leg, a humerus and shoulder blade gnawed by predators, cervical vertebrae, and ribs. Under the lower jaw there is a fragment of pink tissue of the tongue and salivary gland. A large section of the trunk with fresh pinkish cartilage and the right leg with muscles were extracted by an exploration party of the Academy of Sciences back in 1977. Currents and surf waves in the bed of an ancient stream dismembered the corpse and skeleton of this specimen about 40 thousand years ago. Later, the restructuring of the river network changed the local topography so much that the remains of the mammoth ended up at a height of 8 m above the low-water level of the river.

The results turned out to be completely unique in the conditions for preserving the carcass of a Magadan mammoth, discovered by prospectors in the summer of 1977 near the town of Susuman. This cub died from exhaustion about 40 thousand years ago. Having weakened, the baby mammoth fell into a stream of water on the gentle right slope of the taiga valley Kirgilyakh in the upper reaches of the river. Kolyma. Unable to raise his head, he swallowed muddy sediment and fell silent, lying on his left side. Post-mortem peristalsis drove the sludge from the stomach into the large intestine. This happened at the end of summer. In the cold slurry, at the intersection of veins of ground ice, the carcass was preserved until frost and soon froze. The following summer, the frozen puddle with the baby mammoth was blocked by a new discharge of rubble and silt, forming a reliable frost shield. By now, the carcass was already at a depth of two meters under frozen silt and rubble, interlayered in places with brown peat. Thanks to the care of bulldozer operator A. Logachev, the mummified carcass of a baby mammoth, with peeling fur, was saved for science.

It is interesting that, despite the colossally increased volume of exploration and industrial work in the North, the appearance of helicopters, all-terrain vehicles, motor boats, the media, the rate of discoveries of frozen carcasses of mammoths and other animals in the 20th century increased compared to the 19th century. only doubled. This is partly explained by the high payment to pioneers in the last century for finding a whole carcass (up to 500 and even up to 1000 rubles). In addition, in the first forty years of Soviet power, there was obviously no time for mammoths. The most important finds of the last decade are an extensive collection of bones (8300 specimens) from the Berelekh cemetery (1970); skeleton and skin of the Terektyakh mammoth (1977); skeleton and intestines of the Shandrinsky mammoth (1972); carcass of a Magadan mammoth (1977); head in skin and parts of the skeleton of the Khatanga mammoth (1977-1978).

The appearance of the mammoth is now known from drawings and sculptures by Stone Age masters, as well as from frozen corpses (Fig. 3). The hairy giant was impressive - his height at the withers reached 3.5 m, weight - up to 6 tons. A large head with a hairy trunk, huge tusks curved up and inward, with small ears overgrown with thick hair, sat on a short neck. With long spinous processes of the thoracic vertebrae, the withers protruded noticeably. Judging by the mounted skeletons, the butt was lowered less than usually depicted by artists. The columnar legs were each equipped with three rounded horny plates - nails on the front surface of the hoof phalanges. The thick, rough soles of the feet were as hard as horn. Its diameter in adult animals reached 35-50 cm, in a one-year-old mammoth - 13-15 cm. The tail was short, densely overgrown with coarse hair. Mammoths were warmly dressed, especially in winter. From the shoulder blades, sides, hips, and belly, hard guard hairs of the dewlap hung almost to the ground - a kind of “skirt” of a meter or more in length. Under the guard hairs there was hidden a warm undercoat, up to 15 cm long. The thickness of the guard hairs reached 230-240 microns, and the undercoat - 17-40 microns, i.e. it was 3-4 times thicker than merino wool. The yellowish hair of the undercoat was hollowly crimped along its entire length, which increased its thermal insulation properties. However, both the guard hairs and the downy hairs of mammoths were devoid of the axial canal and medullary cells. Judging by the partially faded hair collected in different places from the soil and from the skin, the main color tone was yellowish-brown and light brown. Coats of black hair predominated on the withers and tail, as well as in places on the upper legs (Fig. 4). Coarse black hair on his forehead grew obliquely forward. Baby mammoths were also born furry. In a 7-8 month old Magadan mammoth from the upper Kolyma, the fur on the legs reached 12-14 cm in length, on the trunk - up to 5-6 cm, and on the sides - 20-22 cm.

The skull of a mammoth, like other elephants, is sharply different from the skulls of other land animals. The long maxillary and premaxillary bones, forming thin-walled tubes, held heavy tusks. The nasal opening was located high on the forehead between the eyes, almost like a whale's. A small brain capsule was located deep under a thick (up to 30-35 cm) layer of the frontal sinuses - cells separated by thin bone walls (Fig. 5). The upper molars sat in thin-walled alveoli. The lower jaw was more massive.

The heaviest part of a mammoth skull is the dental apparatus, especially the tusks. Mammoth tusks are basically what made him famous. Many people think that these are overdeveloped fangs and are often called that in the literature. In fact, the tusks are the middle pair of incisors, and the canines in elephants do not develop at all, neither in the upper nor in the lower jaw. Tiny, 3-4 cm long, milk tusks were already present in the newborn mammoth, and they were replaced by permanent ones at the age of one. The tusk of an adult mammoth is a series of dentin cones, as if strung on top of each other. The tusk had no enamel coating, and therefore its surface was not hard. It was easily scratched and worn down during work. The tusks grew in length and thickness throughout the animal's life. The size of the tusks varies greatly. The author found and knocked out a tusk 380 cm long, 18 cm in diameter and weighing 85 kg from the permafrost near the Laptev Strait. Two huge tusks on display at the Zoological Museum of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Leningrad from the Kolyma River have the following dimensions: the right one - length 396 cm, diameter at the alveolus 19 cm, weight 74.8 kg; left - 420 cm, 19 cm and 83.2 kg, respectively. The largest tusks of males reach a length of 400-450 cm, with a diameter at the exit from the alveoli of 18-19 cm. The weight of such a tusk reaches 100-110 kg, but, apparently, there were heavier ones - up to 120 kg.

Tusks African elephants usually do not reach such sizes. The largest tusks, now kept in the British Museum in London, belong to an elephant killed at Kilimanjaro in Kenya in 1897. They weigh 101.7 and 96.3 kg each. The “monarch” of the African jungle, the elephant Ahmed in Kenya, who died at the age of 60-67, had tusks reaching a length of 330 cm and a weight of 65-75 kg each. The tusks of Indian elephants are significantly smaller in size than African ones. The difference in tusk work between African elephants and mammoths is also clearly visible. The ends of the Africans' tusks were ground down evenly, forming a rather steep, pointed cone. This type of tusk abrasion has not been seen in mammoths. Sometimes mammoths developed second, thin tusks. They either sat in the jaw independently or fused along the entire length with the main ones. Diseases of the tusks also occurred, when they grew in the form of ugly warty formations. Such growths of tusks are found on the New Siberian Islands.

Mammoth tusks were always weaker, thinner, and straighter. In an 18-20 year old female from Berelekh they reached a length of 120 cm and a diameter of 60 mm at the alveoli. As a rule, they did not curl as tightly as those of males, but their ends were also noticeably worn away on the outside.

The tusks contain a lot of organic matter - protein, and when burned they produce black coal. It is believed that during their lives, mammoths grew and wore out, like modern elephants, six molars in each half of the jaw.

The first three teeth are considered to be primary premolar teeth and are designated Pd 2/2; Pd 3/3; Pd 4/4 . The last three are designated M 1/1; M 2/2; M 3/3 and are actually radical. Before the loss of the remainder of the fifth tooth (M2/2) and the complete functioning of the sixth M 3/3, two teeth were present and worn out at once in each half of the jaw: Pd 2/2+Pd 3/3; Pd 3/3+Pd 4/4; Pd 4/4+ M 1/1; M 1/1+M2/2; M 2/2+M 3/3.

A 7-8 month old, severely emaciated Magadan male mammoth, weighing 80-90 kg, had unerupted milk tusks supported by permanent, strongly worn second Pd 2/2 and medium worn third Pd 3/3 milk molars. The fourth ones (Pd4/4) were already formed, but still sat deep in the jaws (Fig. 6).

Mammoth molars consisted of a series of flat, thin-walled enamel pockets surrounded and welded together by a mass of dentin. In the last - sixth - teeth, upon the final wear of which the mammoths died, the number of such pockets, as if folded into an accordion, reached 28, and the thickness of the enamel walls - 2.2 mm, rarely more. The usual thickness of the enamel of the teeth of Late Pleistocene mammoths was only 1.2-1.5 mm.

Possessing enormous strength, elephant molars were preserved even after the complete destruction of shards and skeletons. They are usually found by geologists in lake, river, slope and even marine sediments.

To hold several tons of skin, muscles and internal organs, the mammoth needed a strong skeleton. In total, the mammoth skeleton contains about 250 individual bones, including 7 cervical, 20 thoracic, 5 lumbar. 5 sacral and 18-21 caudal vertebrae. There were 19-20 pairs of gently curved, moderately wide ribs (Fig. 7).

The limb bones of mammoths are massive and heavy. To wide shoulder blades and pelvic bones a huge mass of muscles was attached. The heaviest and thickest-walled bones were the humerus and femur, weighing 15-20 kg each in an adult animal. The short bones of the hand and foot resemble heavy logs. The internal organs of mammoths are still poorly studied. The severely deformed corpse of the Magadan mammoth was found to have a small tongue 19X4.5 cm, a simple and empty stomach, a collapsed small intestine about 315 cm long and a thick intestine filled with earth about 132 cm long. The lungs, weighing 520 g, looked like triangular sheets with a length along the upper edge 34 cm and an anterior height of 23 cm. Heart, weighing 405 g with the pericardial sac and 375 g without it, in the form of a collapsed sac 21 cm long and 16 cm wide along the atria. Liver - weighing 415 g, whole, without lobes, size - 19X14 cm. The kidneys, weight 40 g, looked like flat elongated plaques 22x4 cm with a thickness of 1.7 cm. A testis measuring 20X35 mm was found under the left kidney. The penis with cavernous bodies 30 cm long and 35 mm in diameter had a smooth oval head, retracted into the preputial bursa.

The lifestyle and living conditions of mammoths were still little known. Animal artists and zoologists usually depict mammoths in the landscape of tundra, forest-tundra, among ice and swamps. In museums, such paintings represent mammoths, bison and horses grazing on swampy plains bordered by vertical walls of ice, and sometimes directly on glaciers with their cracks, boulders, etc. Such vulgarization of glacial ideas brings little educational benefit.

Huge herbivorous animals required three to four centners of loose feed mass daily. It could be obtained in the summer only in river valleys, along the outskirts of lakes and swamps - in thickets of reeds, reeds and grass-forbs, among clumps of riverine willow grass. These are the places where mammoths lived and grazed. There was no place for them in the mossy tundra and dry steppe of modern types, as well as in the dark coniferous taiga. It is very likely that mammoths went far north, beyond the Arctic Circle, into the cold but grass-rich Pleistocene tundra-steppe only in the summer; in winter, they roamed the valleys to the south, as modern reindeer do in Siberia and Canada. In winter, they probably fed, like moose, on shoots of pine, larch, willow and shrubby alder, forming impenetrable jungles in the floodplains northern rivers. During floods, mammoths were forced to watersheds and fed along the edges of forests, in meadows and meadow-steppes on young grass.

The attraction to the floodplains of rivers also concealed great dangers during floods and freeze-ups. The main death of mammoths occurred precisely in the floodplains, when crossing the fragile ice of rivers and lakes and during sudden floods, when the animals tried to escape on the islands. Mammoths also lived in mountainous areas along the wide intermountain valleys and plateaus of the Caucasus, Crimea, Urals, Siberia, and Alaska. In the desert Central Asia mammoths entered only along river valleys. It was dry and poor food for them here. The modern landscape of Central Asia is unsuitable even for Indian elephants. Interesting in this regard is the “experiment” of Genghis Khan after the capture of Samarkand, noted by the chronicler Rashid Ad-Din (1952, p. 207).

“The leaders of the elephants (Khorezm Shah had 20 war elephants in Samarkand, - N.V.) brought elephants to Genghis Khan and asked him for food for them, he ordered them to be released into the steppe so that they themselves would look for food there and eat. The elephants were untied and they wandered until they died of hunger.”

The nutrition and feeding regime of mammoths are known from the contents of the stomachs and intestines of two adult animals that died in the summer. In the Berezovsky mammoth (Kolyma basin), according to the research of V.N. Sukachev, small cereals and sedges, with mature seeds, as well as shoots of green mosses were found in the stomach - obviously, the animal died at the end of summer.

The food mass of the stomach and intestines of the Shandri mammoth (east of the lower Indigirka River) weighed more than 250 kg in frozen, and therefore dried, form. The mass of this monolith consisted of 90% stems and leaves of sedges, cotton grass and cereals. A smaller part consisted of thin shoots of bushes - especially willow, birch, and alder. There were also lingonberry leaves and abundant shoots of hypnum and sphagnum mosses. No mature seeds were found; the animal died, probably in early summer - June, July.

The Magadan baby mammoth's large intestine was 90% clogged with a dark earthy mass. The remains of herbaceous plants made up about 8-10% of the contents. Gadfly larvae were found in the stomach of the Shandri mammoth special type from the family Cobboldia, characteristic of modern elephants.

The predominant herbivory of mammoths is also indicated by the thin enamel of their teeth.

From the age of one and a half to two years, mammoth calves used their 5-6 cm tusks, working with lateral movements of the head, so the ends of the tusks were ground down from the side, outer side. Based on such abrasion zones, it is easy to determine whether the tusk belongs to the right or left side. With age, the ends of the tusks curved upward and inward “heteronymously,” that is, the left one curled to the right, the right one to the left. Therefore, the zone of abrasion of the end of the tusk, formed in youth, moved partly to the upper - frontal surface in old age. The wear of the ends of the tusks indicates their vigorous use for obtaining some kind of food, but what kind!? With tusks 5-6 cm long, young animals could not pick the soil in search of rhizomes, since to do this they would need to lie on their sides or graze on very steep slopes. Such small tusks were probably used in the summer to strip the bark of trees. willows, aspens, perhaps even larch and spruce.

On the strongly curved, huge tusks of old males, “erasure zones” can also be traced, 30-40 cm or more in length. The main part of such abrasions due to the bending of the tusks now appeared inside and on top. It was no longer possible to dig, pierce, or peel the bark with the tusks bent upward and inward. They could only break branches of bushes and trees.

Almost nothing is known about the reproduction of mammoths, and we have to use the method of analogies.

Sexual maturity and first mating in African and Indian elephants occurs in the 11-15th year of life (Sikes, 1971; Nasimovich, 1975). Pregnancy lasts an exceptionally long time - 660 days, i.e. almost 22 months. Most often mating occurs in May and June. Usually one baby elephant is born, and twins range from 1 to 3.8%. A baby elephant is fed until it is 1.5 years old. The interval between two births ranges from 3 to 13 years for African elephants. Elephants aged 1-2 years in a herd of African elephants range from 7 to 10%. The sex ratio is usually 1: 1. At one year of age, an African elephant calf has a height at the withers of about a meter; a Magadan mammoth calf had a height at the withers of 104 cm, with an oblique body length of 74 cm (Fig. 8).

It was previously believed that elephants live a very long time - more than a hundred years. It has now been found that 80-85 years is the extreme limit to which Indian elephants live in nature and zoos. The lifespan of African elephants is less - about 70 years.

Whether this was the case with mammoths is not known, but the severity of the conditions in their homeland must have left an imprint on both the seasonality of mating and the timing of pregnancy. According to our research (Mammoth fauna..., 1977), in the herd of Berelekh mammoths, about 15% of all individuals died young, at the age of 1-5 years. Approximately the same ratio was noted by Ukrainian scientists from the remains of mammoths in the Desninsky Paleolithic sites.

Polar explorer V.M. Sdobnikov (1956, p. 166) wrote that the bones of mammoths in the Taimyr tundra are found more often than the bones of a hairy rhinoceros, horse, reindeer, elk, bison, and musk ox. But the frozen corpses of these mammoth companions were never found at all. He explained this by the special abundance of mammoths. In reality it was different. Large bones are more noticeable and less lost in the rock. Finds of the corpses of horses and bison are now known, and the corpses of rhinoceroses were also found in the time of Pallas. Less attention was paid to small frozen carcasses without tusks.

The geographical distribution of mammoths was extensive. They inhabited different time Pleistocene throughout Europe, the Caucasus, northern half Asia, Alaska and the southern half of North America that was not subject to glaciation. Their teeth are found even in the area of ​​the modern shelf - on banks North Sea and in the Atlantic against New York.

A little about the “mammoth bone”. When talking about the mammoth, one cannot remain silent about the history of the use of mammoth tusks. Already in the Middle Ages, merchants and learned people, and especially bone carvers and jewelers. The material was perfectly processed with a chisel, had a beautiful mesh pattern in cross-section and was suitable for making expensive snuff boxes, figurines, chess pieces, combs, bracelets, necklaces, inlays of boxes, sheath covers and handles of blades and sabers, canes, etc. In general, “Mamontova” bone" was not inferior to the more expensive ivory imported from India and Africa. It was obvious to the jewelers that it also belonged to elephants. But what kind of elephants could live in Muscovy and Siberia - the land of eternal frost and snow? Here even bright minds began to get confused, express and build fantastic guesses and hypotheses.

And these days, as soon as it comes to finding a mammoth, usually the interlocutor immediately asks stereotypical questions: “And the tusks?”, “Large?”, “Whole?”, “How and where can I get at least a piece?”... Mammoth tusk - This is both an original souvenir and a rare material for jewelry. Moreover, it turned out that even now, with the presence of polymers, “Mammoth bone” has occupied a special place in electronics. It is almost irreplaceable in radio relay devices as an excellent elastic dielectric that cannot be deformed.

In the tundra and taiga of Siberia, mammoth tusks are held in high esteem. Their main use among the Evenks, Yakuts, Yukagirs, Chukchi, and Eskimos is the manufacture of knife handles and parts of reindeer harnesses. Participants in geological, geophysical, topographical and other expeditions will also not miss the opportunity to purchase or personally search for a mammoth tusk. And it often happens that, having found and dug up a tusk weighing 50-60 kg, its owner throws it away, since it is very difficult to carry the load across the hummocky tundra, and transportation by air does not justify the cost. A lot of finds priceless for science and museums have been and are being lost as a result of pitiful and selfish aspirations! After all, behind the tip of a tusk protruding from the permafrost there is often hidden a skull, and sometimes an entire corpse of a strange animal. This happened with the Adams mammoth in the Lena delta in 1802, with Berezovsky in 1901, with Shandrinsky in 1972, with Khatanga in 1977.

If today you can practically do without mammoth bone, then in the late Stone Age the situation was different. In the Paleolithic, mammoth tusks were used to make spearheads up to a meter long, and even solid asegais two meters long. Such asegais were discovered by Professor O. N. Bader in the burial of two boys at the Paleolithic site of Sungir near Vladimir.

Making arrowheads, and even more so whole asegais, was no laughing matter. The tusks of females were probably taken as they were straighter, with a diameter of 70-80 mm. They were soaked in water for a long time, and then cut longitudinally in a cross shape on four sides with flint blades. It was hardly possible to make such longitudinal notch grooves deeper than 8-10 mm, and therefore the tusk was split with wedges into four longitudinal segments and then processed with blows of flint knives to a round section. The method of straightening such a tip is still not clear, but using the example of a finished rod with a diameter of 25 mm and a length of 94 cm from the Berelekh site, it was calculated that at least 3,500 blows with flint knives were spent on its final processing. There is reason to think that heavy spears with such tips were used specifically for hunting pachyderms.

Judging by the inventory from the Kostenkovsko-Borshevsky Paleolithic sites on the Don and the sites of Eliseevichi, Berdyzh, Mezin, Kirillovskaya, Mezhirich and others on the Desna and Dnieper, tusks were also used to make spatulas of unknown purpose, awls and needles, bracelets, figurines depicting Mammoths, bears, lions, plump women and other objects. It is possible that as a result of making bracelets from mammoth tusk plates, the swastika sign arose in such ancient times, which appears on sections of the mesh structure of the layers when polishing and laying the plates in a special order.

Fishing - searching for and exporting - tusks existed long before the first Russian Arctic explorers. Mammoth tusks and walrus tusks first went to Mongolia and China. Already in 1685, the Smolensk governor Musin-Pushkin, being the government intendant in Siberia, knew that at the mouth of the Lena there were islands where the population hunted “hippopotamus” - an amphibious animal (obviously a walrus), whose teeth were in great demand. At the end of the 18th century, on the Lyakhov Islands, tusks were already collected and transported on deer and dogs by the Cossacks Vagin and Lyakhov. Cossack Sannikov exported 250 pounds of tusks from the New Siberian Islands in 1809, from approximately 80-100 animals. In the first half of the 19th century. From 1000 to 2000 pounds of mammoth ivory passed through Yakut fairs, up to 100 pounds through Turukhansk and the same amount through Obdorsk. Academician Middendorf believed that at that time the tusks of about 100 mammoths were mastered annually. Thus, over 200 years this will amount to 20,000 heads. Various authors have tried to calculate in more detail the amount of bone exported from Siberia. Unfortunately, these statistics are conditional. I.P. Tolmachev (1929) provided some data on the export of mammoth tusks to England. In 1872, 1630 excellent tusks arrived there from Russia, and in 1873 - 1140, weighing 35-40 kg each. In the second half of the 19th century. and at the beginning of the 20th century. According to statistics at that time, up to 1,500 pounds of bone passed through Yakutsk. If we assume that the average weight of a tusk was 3 pounds (i.e. 48 kg - a figure clearly exaggerated - N.V.), then we can calculate that the number of mammoth specimens discovered in Siberia (not necessarily whole skeletons and carcasses) over 250 years was 46,750. The same figure was also indicated by V. M. Zenzinov (1915), citing a large table of bone mining by year in the past and our century. Similar calculations and figures usually migrated from article to article by later compilers.

At the beginning of the 20th century. purchases of mammoth ivory at Yakut fairs were made annually in the amount of 40 to 90 thousand rubles.

IN Soviet time organized collection of mammoth ivory almost ceased. True, it occasionally came from reindeer herders and hunters at the Soyuzpushnina trading post, at the bases and stations of the Main Northern Sea Route, and at the procurement offices of the Integral Cooperation. In the Yamalo-Nenets National District of the Tyumen Region in the 20-50s, bone harvesting reached only 30-40 kg per year. It is known that from October 1, 1922 to October 1, 1923, the Yakut consumer union “Kholbos” procured 56 poods 26.5 pounds of mammoth ivory worth 2,540 rubles 61 kopecks (“Kholbos is 50 years old,” 1969). Later figures were not preserved, until 1960, when Holbos prepared 707.5 kg; in 1966, this organization prepared 471 kg, in 1967 - 27.3 kg, in 1968 - 312 kg, in 1969 - 126 kg and in 1971 - 65 kg. In the 70s, procurement continued more intensively due to the revival of the bone-carving craft and the establishment of a procurement price (4 rubles 50 kopecks per 1 kg of tusk), as well as with the requests of the aviation industry. A significant number of tusks are now exported by participants of various expeditions, employees of polar stations, and tourists.

Searches for tusks have been and are being carried out mainly along the eroded shores of seas, rivers, lakes, i.e. in areas of water erosion and melting of ground ice - the so-called thermokarst. The most interesting have always been the edge areas of gentle hills - food, with their large landslides and thick layers of ice that melt in the air. Such hills are nothing more than the remnants of a former ice-loess plain, on which mammoths, rhinoceroses, horses, and bison once grazed, died, and in some places were buried. Tusks, washed out of the original frozen soil by a river, sea, or lake and redeposited at their bottom, deteriorate and are destroyed.

Such valuable raw materials, which melt every year and are again deposited for thousands of years, should be collected and utilized as completely as possible through properly organized searches. Along the way, you can expect to find whole carcasses. To do this, large-scale aerial maps should be used, highlighting promising areas of baijerakhs and erosion of relict hills.

The author of this book tried to determine total reserves tusks in Siberia and the number of dead mammoths based on field observations. The frequency of finds of tusks was calculated along the cliffs of “mammoth graves” - on relict ice-loess outcrops of the Yana-Kolyma - Primorskaya lowland, namely in the upper layer of cover loess. And in particular, calculations were carried out according to south coast Laptev Strait - Oyagos Yar and along the Yedoma River. Allaihi. According to these data, it turned out that at the bottom of the Laptev and East Siberian seas it was washed out and reburied on the shelf as a result of erosion ancient sushi about 550 thousand tons of tusks. Within the surviving Primorskaya Lowland, between Yana and Kolyma, there are still about 150 thousand tons of tusks that may be found. If we assume that the average weight of one tusk is 25-30 kg (i.e. 50-60 kg per animal), then the total number of male mammoths that lived and died in the late Pleistocene - Sartan on the plains of north-eastern Siberia can be estimated at approximately 14 million individuals. Considering that the same number of adult females also lived here, whose tusks were not collected, we get a total population of adult individuals of 28-30 million, plus approximately 10 million young animals of different ages. Taking the duration of the late segment of the last ice age to be 10 thousand years, we can assume that during one year about 4,000 mammoths lived in the extreme northeast of Siberia - a figure that is probably underestimated by 10-15 times, since when searching for tusks in abrasive and landslide outcrops reveal no more than 3-5% of the actual presence of tusks.

Mammoth ancestors. The origin of the species is little studied. A hairy elephant that endures the fierce cold and snow storms, was not born suddenly, not as a result of supermutation. Today's living African and Indian elephants are inhabitants of the tropics, although they sometimes climb Kilimanjaro and the Himalayas to the snow line. In terms of exterior, structure of the skull and teeth, and blood composition, the mammoth is closer to the Indian elephant than to the African one. The distant ancestors of mammoths - primitive elephants and mastodons - also lived in a warm climate and were poorly dressed, almost hairless.

Among fossil elephants, the closest thing to a mammoth in the structure of teeth, skull and skeleton is the huge trogontherian elephant, which lived in Europe and Asia about 450-350 thousand years ago. The climate of that era - the early Pleistocene - was still moderately warm in the middle latitudes, and moderate in the high latitudes. In the extreme northeast of Asia and Alaska, mixed deciduous forests grew and meadow-steppes and tundra-steppes were located. This elephant probably already had the rudiments of hair. His last - sixth - teeth had up to 26 enamel pockets, and the thickness of their enamel reached 2.4-2.9 mm. Finds of isolated teeth, bones, and sometimes even entire skeletons of this elephant are known throughout the vast territory of Europe and Asia. It is assumed that the ancestor of the trogontherian elephant was a southern elephant, probably almost hairless; it reached 4 m in height at the withers, the sixth teeth of this elephant had up to 16 pockets, the thickness of the enamel reached 3.0-3.8 mm. Its skeletons and teeth are found in layers of the late Pliocene - Eopleistocene. The ancestors of the southern elephant have not yet been found within our borders.

The most frequent finds of remains of the southern elephant are in Ukraine, Ciscaucasia, and Asia Minor. In the museums of Leningrad, Rostov, Stavropol there are even his entire skeletons.

Since the work of G. F. Osborne (1936, 1942), the hypothesis has been accepted that the mammoth represents the last stage in the genetic line: southern elephant, trogontherian elephant, mammoth. This was to some extent confirmed by the consistent dating of geological layers, with the remains of elephants, and by other geomorphological characteristics. However, in recent decades, finds of thin-enamel mammoth-type teeth have been made in North-Eastern Siberia in Early Pleistocene layers. In this regard, the mammoth should probably be considered a descendant of a special line of cold-hardy elephants that lived within the northeast of Siberia and Beringia, and then spread widely during the last ice age.

It is still generally accepted that mammoths became extinct at the end of the last ice age or at the beginning of the Holocene. On the archaeological scale, this is Mesolithic bad. The latest absolute dates of mammoth bones based on radioactive carbon are as follows: Berelekh “cemetery” - 12,300 years, Taimyr mammoth - 11,500, Kunda site in Estonia - 9,500 years, Kostenkovo ​​sites - 9,500-14,000 years. The causes of the death and extinction of mammoths have always caused a lively discussion (see Chapter V), but it could never be complete without considering the living conditions of other members of the mammoth fauna, some of which also became extinct. One of these contemporaries of the mammoth was the hairy rhinoceros.

Many prehistoric animals arouse burning curiosity among our contemporaries. Take, for example, mammoths, images of which flash on the pages of zoology textbooks and television screens. Were they the progenitors of the current representatives of the fauna world, and for what reason did they die out? The answers to these questions concern many to this day. We will try to analyze how a mammoth differs from an elephant.

Definitions

Mammoth

Mammoth- an extinct species of mammals belonging to the elephant family and living in Quaternary period. They were distributed throughout modern Europe, Asia, Africa and North America. Numerous bones of these animals were found in sites of ancient people. In Alaska and Siberia, there are known cases of the discovery of mammoth corpses, preserved due to centuries of exposure to permafrost. Most representatives of the species became extinct about 10 thousand years ago during the Vistula Ice Age.

Elephant

Elephant- a representative of the family of mammals of the order Proboscidea. It is the largest land animal. The lifespan of an elephant is equal to that of a human and reaches an average of 70 years. This is the only representative of the fauna that cannot jump. Surprisingly, such a large and clumsy animal is capable of developing an impressive speed when running (about 30 km/h). In addition, elephants swim quite well. They can cover distances of tens of kilometers through water. At the same time, animals do not need long sleep - four hours of rest a day is enough for them.

Comparison

Let's start with the fact that the average height of a prehistoric animal was about 2 meters, and its weight reached 900 kg. These indicators are quite comparable to the parameters of modern elephants. However, there were subspecies of mammoths that were about 4-6 meters tall and weighed up to 12 tons. The body, head and trunk of the animal were covered with thick hair of a light brown or yellowish-brown hue. The mammal's superbly developed sebaceous glands increased the thermal insulation properties of its fur. The 8-10 centimeter subcutaneous fat layer also perfectly protected the animal from the cold. The large, pointed head of the mammoth had huge curved tusks, the length of which sometimes reached 4 meters. It is believed that they were used not only for reasons of self-defense, but also to obtain food. With their help, animals stripped bark from trees, dug up food under a thick layer of ice, etc.

Another difference between a mammoth and an elephant is the size of the ears. In extinct animals they were small (about 30 cm in length) and tightly pressed to the head. Whereas an elephant's ears stick out to the side. Their average length is 180 cm. It is also worth noting that the trunk and tail of the mammoth were significantly shorter than those of the elephant. On the back of the prehistoric animal there was a hump in which fat reserves accumulated. Tall mammoth teeth with big amount thin dentin-enamel plates were adapted for chewing coarse plant food. The animals' feet had very thick (almost horn-like) soles, reaching 50 cm in diameter. The feet of their modern relatives are particularly sensitive. Thanks to the thick “cushions” located on them, they move almost silently.

A comparative table will help you find a more complete answer to the question of what is the difference between a mammoth and an elephant.

Mammoth	Elephant
extinct animal	A modern representative of the fauna world
The height of some individuals reached 6 meters, and weight - up to 12 tons	The average height is about 2 meters, weight reaches 1 ton
The body is covered with thick hair	There is almost no hair on the skin
Pointed head, hump on the back	The head is more flattened, there is no hump
Huge curved tusks up to 4 m long	Tusks are several times shorter and less curved
Small ears, close to the head	Large protruding ears
Short tail and trunk	The trunk reaches the ground, the tail is long enough
Thick, almost horn-like soles of the feet	Feet are particularly sensitive

Numerous mammoth bones have been found in sites of ancient Stone Age man; Drawings and sculptures of mammoths made by prehistoric man were also discovered. In Siberia and Alaska, there are known cases of the discovery of mammoth corpses that were preserved due to their presence in the thickness of permafrost. The main types of mammoths were no larger in size than modern elephants (while the North American subspecies Mammuthus emperor reached a height of 5 meters and a mass of 12 tons, and dwarf species Mammuthus exilis And Mammuthus lamarmorae did not exceed 2 meters in height and weighed up to 900 kg), but had a more massive body, shorter legs, long hair and long curved tusks; the latter could serve the mammoth for getting food from under the snow in winter. Mammoth molars with numerous thin dentin-enamel plates were well adapted for chewing coarse plant food.

Baby mammoth Dima extracted from permafrost

One of the latest, most massive and southernmost burials of mammoths is located in the Kargat district of the Novosibirsk region, in the upper reaches of the Bagan River in the area “Volchya Griva”. It is believed that there are at least 1,500 mammoth skeletons here. Some of the bones bear traces of human processing, which makes it possible to build various hypotheses about the residence of ancient people in Siberia.

Skeleton

In terms of its skeletal structure, the mammoth bears a significant resemblance to the living Indian elephant, which it was somewhat larger in size, reaching 5.5 m in length and 3.1 m in height. Huge mammoth tusks, up to 4 m in length, weighing up to 100 kg, were inserted into the upper jaw, protruded forward, bent upward and diverged to the sides.

The molars, of which mammoths had one in each half of the jaw, are somewhat wider than those of an elephant, and are distinguished by a large number and hardness of lamellar enamel boxes filled with dental substance.

Reconstructed appearance of a mammoth at the age of 5 years

History of the study

Map of finds of mammoth bones in Russia

American Indian legends about mammoths

1. Asian group that appeared more than 450 thousand years ago; 2. American band, which appeared about 450 thousand years ago; 3. intercontinental group that migrated from North America about 300 thousand years ago

Notes

Synonyms:

See what "Mammoth" is in other dictionaries:

- (from Tat. mamma earth, because the Tungus and Yakuts think that a mammoth burrows underground like a mole). A four-legged fossil animal similar to, but larger than, an elephant. Dictionary foreign words, included in the Russian language. Chudinov A.N., 1910.… … Dictionary of foreign words of the Russian language

Sources for the reconstruction of the mythopoetic image of M. are images of M. (engraved, the oldest of them in the La Madeleine cave, France; paintings, sculptures), known throughout the northern zone of Eurasia, China and some adjacent... ... Encyclopedia of Mythology

MAMMOTH, mamut husband. a fossil animal, partly similar to an elephant, but even larger. related to him. Mammoth bone, its fossil fangs, used in crafts. Dahl's Explanatory Dictionary. IN AND. Dahl. 1863 1866 … Dahl's Explanatory Dictionary

- (Mammuthus primigenius), an extinct species of elephant. Known from the 2nd half of the Pleistocene of Eurasia and Northern. America. It was somewhat larger in size than the modern one. elephants, had a more massive body, shorter legs and tail, long hair and... ... Biological encyclopedic dictionary

Strongman, big man, closet, mastodon, brute, mammoth Dictionary of Russian synonyms. mammoth noun, number of synonyms: 10 big guy (36) ... Synonym dictionary