Woolly offering
Warsaw's Museum of the Earth received an unusual gift last Thursday.
Unusual because it's not every day that Krzysztof Jakubowski, the museum's director, is asked whether he would like some long red hair from a 23,000-year-old woolly mammoth.
In October, French explorer Bernard Buigues and his expedition team excavated the complete body of a mammoth, perfectly preserved in Siberia's permafrost. Last week Buigues offered some of the animal's hair to the Warsaw museum.
"We already have a sample of the mammoth's hair found in Siberia, but this gift is priceless," Jakubowski said.
Buigues's visit to the Museum of Earth was linked with the presentation of a documentary on the expedition and the mammoth itself, which became extinct 10,000 years ago for reasons that scientists still don't know.
"So far a lot of mammoth remains bones, pieces of muscle have been recovered," Biugues said. "But this time we found a mammoth's body, untouched, in the same condition as the mammoth died 23,000 years ago."
Buigues is one of the most well-known explorers in the world, having navigated the North Pole region, among other areas, for more than 20 years. "I started working in Siberia in 1985 and since 1991 I've met local citizens who told me about the mammoth's tusks they had found," he said.
The Yarkov family, which breeds reindeer in Siberia, found the mammoth's tusks. Buigues decided to try to find both the family and the place where the tusks had been found. It wasn't easy, though.
"The Yarkovs are Siberian nomads and they move from place to place every 10 days," Buigues said. "It took quite a long time to find them." Buigues first went to Siberia in May 1998 but it wasn't until his second visit that he found the animal.
Now, in a Discovery Channel series called "Watch with the World," the French explorer's search for the mammoth will be made public. The documentary "Raising the Mammoth," airs March 12.
Buigues brought his film crew along from the expedition's beginning. "It was a very difficult project," said Maurice Paleau, executive producer of movies at the Discovery Channel. "We had to excavate the mammoth, lift it and transport to the nearest inhabited place."
That place, a settlement called Chatanga, is located 250 kilometers from where the mammoth was found. Needless to say, winter temperatures there are frigid.
"We were conscious that the project had to be finalized in mid-October, because Siberia becomes a dark place and even colder after Oct. 15," Paleau said. "Finally, the permafrost bloc with the mammoth inside was transported to Chatanga on Oct. 17."
Today, the mammoth is preserved in an ice chamber in Chatanga and waiting for scientists to discover its secrets. The international scientific committee, set up to examine the Yarkov mammoth, will start research in a few months. So far, a handful of scientists from Utrecht University in Holland have learned some things about the animal. "The teeth and tusks show that the Yarkov (mammoth) was a male, 47 years old," Buigues said. "He was middle-aged, because mammoths used to live a maximum of 70 years."
While biological study of the mammoth hasn't yet started, scientists already regard the permafrost bloc in Chatanga as an unlimited source of knowledge.
"We took a lot of organic samples from the place where the Yarkov (mammoth) died," Buigues said. He said that the material would allow for scientists to learn more about the animal's living conditions.
"The expedition was only the first step in further explorations," he said.
