Vol. 24 No. 10 · 23 May 2002
pages 26-27 | 2391 words
Down to the Last Flea
Richard Fortey
- Mammoth: The Resurrection of an Ice Age Giant by Richard Stone
Fourth Estate, 242 pp, £14.99, January 2002, ISBN 1 84115 517 9
In 1901, a frozen mammoth’s penis was discovered on the Berezovka River in Siberia. The organ was erect, nearly three feet long and, having been flattened in the icy tundra, eight inches in diameter. The mammoth’s testicles, equally frozen, were tucked inside the overlying carcass. The meat was dark and marbled, like properly hung beef. Otto Herz and Eugen Pfizenmayer, who made the discovery, wondered if they shouldn’t eat it, rather than continue to subsist on horseflesh. They decided against it. Their dogs had no such scruples. The mammoth had been frozen for something like 44,000 years; its chestnut hair was still matted on the carcass. It differed from modern elephants in other features besides hairiness: it had four toes compared with an elephant’s five, and a flap of skin protected its anus from cold winds. Its tusks curved towards each other. According to the Russian geologist I.P. Tolmachoff, this mammoth had become bogged down in treacherous ground and had suffocated, which evidently accounted for its tumid state.
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Letters
Vol. 24 No. 17 · 5 September 2002
From J.F. Darycott
Can Richard Fortey (LRB, 23 May), or anyone in the know, please explain how the body of a mammoth (as distinct from its skeleton) was preserved? First, why is there a body at all, why wasn't it consumed by scavengers shortly after the animal died? Perhaps it was inaccessible, 'caught unawares in a bog' where it would then be 'preserved by the permafrost … frozen in time'. But if it sank in a bog, how would it find itself in the permafrost? Perhaps the bog froze in winter; but if so, presumably it would have thawed the following summer? I know that bodies have been preserved in (unfrozen) bogs – in Denmark, for example – but I thought that they emerged dried out, not with their meat 'dark and marbled, like properly hung beef'. Furthermore, if these bodies are found in permafrost today, but sank in bogs in the Ice Age (despite the fact that sea levels were lower and Siberia's climate drier than it is now), that would suggest that today's temperatures are lower than in the Ice Age, which doesn't sound right.
'Rot seems to proceed with indecent haste on the defrosted giants.' So it seems that the mammoth must be inaccessible at time of death, preserved perhaps anaerobically at first but without drying out, and that it must end up in permafrost despite the fact that we don't presently live in an Ice Age. I see that Richard Fortey is listed as Professor in the Public Understanding of Science. I have hopes.
J.F. Darycott
Staines, Middlesex
