In Paris, a mammoth stands in front of the entrance to the Natural History Museum. The huge hall of the museum is full of bones. Only imagination can give an idea of ​​the appearance of their owners who lived thousands and millions of years ago. And the mammoth stands at the entrance as if alive. It is made of plastic and is very similar to the elephants that still live in South Asia and Africa.

Dinosaurs are a very distant past. During their reign there was no man on earth, and perhaps that is why we pass by the bones of dinosaurs “with a cool look.” And mammoths disappeared recently. Human life in the Stone Age lived next to these giants.

Why, being a thriving, numerous animal species, did mammoths suddenly disappear? There are discussions about this, and this is partly why there is so much interest in mammoths.

Mammoths were distributed throughout almost all of Europe and Asia, from where they crossed to North America along the isthmus that at that time connected these two continents, on the site of the Bering Strait. Mammoths existed the longest in Siberia. European mammoths did not survive the ice age, while their Siberian brothers lived there even in the post-glacial period. Mammoths were steppe herbivorous animals and lived during the cooling period of our planet, when the polar waters were frozen, when the tongues of glaciers from the north reached the Central Russian Plain, when winters were little snow, dry, frosty, when woody vegetation survived only on the floodplains of rivers, and the northern border forests lay in the subtropics. Great open spaces! Mammoths were a product of this environment.

They were saved from the cold by their long (up to a meter on the belly!) red-brown coat and dense, warm undercoat. It is also believed that mammoths stored subcutaneous fat for the winter. The live weight of the mammoth reached 5 tons. Relatively small ears (in today's hairless elephants these are huge mugs - thermostats) did not waste heat.

The main feature of elephants is their tusks. In mammoths they were long - up to four meters and intricately curved, and a pair of tusks weighed 300 kilograms. Undoubtedly, they helped hairy elephants get food - they used them to shovel snow, push aside tree thickets, and chop ice to quench their thirst in winter. And yet the size of the tusks is clearly excessive. It is possible that in males it was also a sign of vitality, like in modern deer or elk. Female mammoths had relatively small tusks.

Like modern elephants, mammoths traveled seasonally. But everywhere they stayed mainly in the river floodplains. It was quieter, warmer, and easier to get food in. The trunk of mammoths performed the same functions as that of modern elephants. But if the African elephant often stretches its trunk upward, even rises on its hind legs to get a fruit or a tasty twig from a tree, then the mammoth “looked mainly down.” Based on the findings of mammoths in the permafrost, it was established that the ancient giants ate grasses and branches of bushes, which are still preserved on Earth.

In appearance, the mammoth is more similar to the Asian elephant and was clearly closely related to it. Life spans are the same as those of elephants: maturity is thirteen to fifteen years, life limit is eighty. Mammoth calves were born already hairy, capable of immediately moving. The behavior of mammoths is judged by analogy with elephants. Calm, strong, they could also succumb to panic. Females with offspring of different ages lived in a separate herd. The males kept to their own company. These herbivores were not aggressive, but they had sufficient strength to stand up for themselves.

Of course, mammoths did not live alone. Nearby were animals equally adapted to harsh conditions: woolly rhinoceroses, cave lions and bears, bison, musk oxen, horses, reindeer and red deer, foxes, wolves, arctic foxes, hares, gophers, mice. Along with the bones of mammoths, bones of saigas, camels, spotted hyenas, and wolverines are also found. Man had not yet reigned over these vast open spaces, but he already felt confident. Mammoth was the strongest in this community. Carnivorous predators could only attack small mammoths.

On the human side, excavations at ancient sites throughout Europe and Asia reveal huge quantities of mammoth bones. In the absence of wood, bones and tusks were used to build ancient dwellings. A major role in understanding the appearance of the mammoth was played by its numerous images made on the walls of caves and grottoes, as well as on the bones and tusks of mammoths by ancient artists. Unfortunately, significantly fewer color drawings and sculptures of these animals have survived to this day.

It should be noted that the most ancient artists depicted mammoths not only to satisfy artistic feelings or to decorate the caves in which they lived. The mammoth was the most desirable prey for prehistoric man, providing him with food. But was the hunting of hairy elephants by people the reason for their disappearance from the face of the Earth? From the current standpoint, when the activities of people who have filled the Earth threaten the existence of many species of animals, there is a temptation to blame our Neolithic ancestors: they say, they marked the beginning of a catastrophic process. But this accusation is hardly fair. Mammoth hunters caused no more damage to their huge contemporaries than they did to African elephants before the advent of the white man with a gun and a greedy desire for “ivory.” The skin and bones of the mammoth were used to build houses. When hunting large animals, in addition to trapping pits, spears with flint and bone tips were used.

Most scientists claim that mammoths were killed by a sharp climate change - dry, frosty winters with little snow gave way to mild winters with heavy snowfalls, which made it difficult to obtain pasture. Ice conditions aggravated this process. Unusual dampness could cause illness, and large floods in spring and summer turned pastures near rivers into impassable abysses, cut off migration routes, and created traps in which large groups of animals died. Everything happened not in a year or two, but rather quickly (millennia!). Mammoths could not adapt to changing conditions.

The rapid advance of forests into the meadow and tundra steppes completely changed the habitat. And the candle of the hairy elephants burned out. Along with mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, cave lions and bears, and bison became extinct. The remaining animals somehow adapted to the changed conditions.

Like no other animals, mammoths constantly remind us of their former existence across vast spaces. This happens because their bones are large and noticeable (you can’t pass by!), because there were many mammoths (millions!), and because during the period of climate change they often died not alone, but in whole groups. Mammoth bones are found everywhere, and the permafrost of the North has also preserved the soft tissues of animals. It is curious that in the time of Peter I they could not yet explain the finds of bones and tusks in Europe. They believed that these were the remains of elephants from the army of Alexander the Great.

Permafrost showed us the full appearance of the hairy aborigines of Eurasia. How did the “mammoth epic” begin? For the first time, the opportunity to see the “frozen mammoth” was noticed by the participants of the Second Kamchatka Expedition at the end of the 18th century. These possibilities have been confirmed. The bodies of giants, eaten by beasts and naked in the frozen ground, began to be found. For the first time, fragments of mammoth bones in Taimyr were found in 1842 by academician A.F. Middendorf, and in 1901, an almost complete corpse of a young mammoth was discovered on the Berezovka River in Yakutia. A stuffed animal was made from his skin with partially preserved fur (Zoological Museum in St. Petersburg), known throughout the world. In 1949, a perfectly preserved skeleton of a mammoth was discovered, which is now also located in the Zoological Museum of St. Petersburg.

In 1997, another mammoth skeleton was found in Taimyr, older than all previously found animals. Its age, according to scientists, is 23 thousand years! The found mammoth was given the name Zharkoff, and he was included in the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest mammoth found! The history of the find is as follows. An elderly reindeer herder Alexey Zharkov stumbled in the tundra on the bank of the Kyrsa-Yuryakh river over a stump or old bone sticking out of the snow. Grandfather Alexey is nearly seventy, his eyesight is not good, and he called his son Gavrila and son-in-law Gennady Popov to inspect the site of the find.

Young shepherds, noticing the tip of a mammoth tusk sticking out of the frozen clay, noticed the place and returned here in early September, when the soil had already thawed to a depth of about a meter. They dug up both tusks, turning them out of the alveoli of the skull, so that the skull, as it turned out later, was badly damaged. There is no point in blaming the shepherds for this - for the nomads of the tundra, only tusks are valuable, which can be sold or exchanged, or made into jewelry. The shepherds saw a lot of wool in the excavation, and the smell wasn’t quite right...

Gavrila and Gennady reported the discovery to the head of the local administration, Nikolai Fokin. He came up with the idea of ​​setting up a museum of mammoths and animals of the mammoth fauna in Khatanga, in the permafrost of one of the glaciers. In recent years, Khatanga has become a center of international extreme tourism. Numerous expeditions to the North Pole and the Taimyr tundra start from here. The opening of such a museum would attract even more tourists for the benefit of the village.

Taimyr paleontological finds of the last decade of the twentieth century fueled interest in Eastern Taimyr and Khatanga in the world scientific community. The scientific coordinator of the SERPOLEX/Mammuntus program, Dick Mohl, claims that his lectures on the mammoth attract full houses in Europe and America. Two films about mammoths from Khatanga have already been shown on the Discovery Channel with great success. And the number of people who came from abroad to see mammoths with their own eyes in 2000 alone exceeded two and a half thousand. Exotic lovers pay several thousand dollars for this pleasure. Scientific and exotic tourism is becoming large-scale and highly profitable. The “Mammoth Boom” has also become an effective method of combating poachers. Almost all reindeer herders already know that a whole mammoth tusk, not sawn into pieces, and even indicating the place of discovery, can be sold to a museum for much more. Now everyone can see: in Khatanga, in a huge glacier, there is a museum of a mammoth and animals of the mammoth fauna. Each tusk, each bone is numbered and is located on special shelves. And two incomplete mammoth skeletons are placed in niches and studied by specialists. More and more new points are appearing on the map of Taimyr - places of discovery of the remains of ancient animals.

The annual thawing of frozen soils brings new discoveries. Often an interesting object “appears” in a river or lake cliff for just a few months or even weeks, and then is blocked by a landslide or falls into the water. Therefore, paleontological finds require a quick response to the signal of their discovery, and qualified specialists must be involved. Otherwise, the find will thaw and be destroyed by heat, water and animals over the summer. In addition, poacher excavations pose a significant threat to paleontological monuments, which lead to their destruction or looting.

In total, more than fifty finds of mammoths of varying degrees of preservation were made in the northeast of Siberia. The most sensational was the 1977 discovery of a well-preserved baby mammoth by gold miners in the Magadan region. It was the somewhat mummified corpse of an eight-month-old creature that had lain in the permafrost for ten thousand years. Judging by the contents of the stomach and the condition of the teeth, the baby mammoth was still fed milk and could have died from exhaustion, falling behind its mother. For science, which deals only with the bones of ancient animals, this find was of exceptional value. It made it possible to finally determine the appearance of extinct animals, showed the structure of their internal organs, the structure of muscle and bone tissue cells. Zoologists, paleontologists, physiologists and geneticists have received an important message from the time of the “hairy elephant.”

The era of mammoths, according to paleontologists, reached its peak two hundred and fifty thousand years ago. Then there were waves of reduction in the number of these elephants. The candle went out ten thousand years ago. On the clock of humanity this is a considerable time, on the clock of the history of life it is just a moment.

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