Waking the Baby Mammoth : National Geographic Channel

Waking the Baby Mammoth | National Geographic Channel

Update April 27th - This programme is due to air in the UK on Sunday May 3rd at 8 pm.

Back in July 2007 came news of a remarkable discovery made by a reindeer herder in the Arctic region of Yamalo-Nenetsk, who found what turned out to be the frozen remains of a baby woolly mammoth which had died some 40,000 years ago, a time when far to the south, both Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans were becoming Eurasian neighbours. Here's some detail from the original news story, as reported at National Geographic News...

The six-month-old female mammoth is the most well-preserved example yet found of the beasts, which lumbered across the Earth during the last Ice Age, 1.8 million to 11,500 years ago.

"It's a lovely little baby mammoth indeed, found in perfect condition," Alexei Tikhonov, deputy director of the Russian Academy of Science's Zoological Institute, told the Reuters news agency.

At 110 pounds (50 kilograms) and 51 inches long (130 centimeters long), the baby is the size of a large dog, Reuters reported.

Scientists are banking on the female—named "Lyuba" after the Russian hunter's wife—to reveal some of the genetic secrets of the prehistoric giants.

Since that discovery, a great deal of research has been conducted on the carcass, much of which is reviewed in a National Geographic Channel 2-hour documentary which is due to air in the US on Sunday April 26th, at 9 p.m. ET/PT., namely 'Waking The Baby Mammoth', and for which the linked page provides a wealth of resources, ranging from photos and videos, interactive features and a look at how the discovery of mammoths has not only influenced scientific thought, but played a role in creating folk-lore amongst indigenous populations living in proximity to some of these early discoveries.

First up, there's an Overview page, which describes how Lyuba lived for only a few months before meeting her untimely death, but whose remains survived 40,000 years to afford science an excellent opportunity to study a creature that has been extinct nigh on 10,000 years, although the very last mammoth are believed to have hung on to as late as 3,700 years ago on Wrangel Island.

There are also a few brief video teasers included, which between them touch on the orginal discovery, the impact it had on the local community, before heading off to the laboratory, where all the investigative research was conducted. Of great interest to the researchers was to try and find out not only how the specimen had survived, but the unusual circumstances surrounding the death of the mammal and the immediate post-mortem environment which allowed such a high degree of preservation. Although the mammoth was found in a frozen state, at the time of death the steppe environment was balmier than today, meaning it wasn't frozen at death, but became buried in such a way as to prevent decomposition of the carcass.

Also of note is an Interactive feature, which amongst other things, allows the viewer to take a virtual journey inside Lyuba, and finally there is a discussion of the history (scroll down) of mammoth finds over the past few hundred years, and how such discoveries eventually led scholars of the day to realize that animal extinction events had taken place in the past, which in turn came to shape our image of evolution. Interesting too to note how discoveries in historic times, and doubtless before, of gigantic bones found protruding from the ground sometimes gave rise to myths of giants, and other notions of creatures that lived underground and died on coming into contact with air. Here's a passage from Part III of that section...

In recent years, scientific advances—such as the development of DNA analysis and imaging technology—have allowed researchers to glean more and more knowledge from mammoth remains, rather than merely turning them over to taxidermists. In the case of Lyuba the woolly mammoth calf, for example, scientists at the Zoological Institute in St. Petersburg shipped the carcass to Tokyo’s Jikei University School of Medicine, where CT scans produced three-dimensional pictures of the mammoth’s intact heart, liver and other organs—the first time that the internal structure of an extinct animal had ever been observed.

The scans told researchers that Lyuba’s diet still consisted of mother’s milk, just like young elephants her age. They also showed a lack of skeletal injuries, and a significant amount of sediment in the baby female’s trunk and mouth. That suggests that Lyuba’s short life wasn’t ended by a predator. Instead, the calf probably took a wrong step on a riverbank and either choked on the mud or drowned. The oxygen-deprived environment helped preserve its carcass for thousands of years, until it could yield its secrets to us.

Amongst the early expressed intentions of the researchers was to glean genetic data from Lyuba, as well as peering into the nature of the climate 40,000 years ago by analysing tiny air samples believed to be trapped in the creature's lungs. As has been noted elsewhere, this discovery might well have come to us as a direct result of global warming causing the ice of Siberia to melt, and on that note I can't help but wonder whether somewhere in the frozen wastes there might lie the frozen body of an archaic human from that era. We have the renowned Ice Man from the southern Italian Alps, dated to a little more than 5,000 years, but as this mammoth discovery has shown us, it's faintly possible that other organic material from tens of thousands of years ago is somewhere else preserved - whether we will one day be able to gaze upon the frozen face of a Neanderthal, remains for now nothing more than a tantalizing improbability, but who knows?

For the time being, it appears this documentary is only showing in the US, but doubtless European viewers will get a chance to catch what looks to be a very interesting and well produced offering in the not too distant future.

see also :: msnbc.com January 2008 :: Mammoth Could Shed Light on Warming

image from National Geographic