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00:00:00October 1999. Against all odds, a 23-ton permafrost block with the remains of an extinct woolly
00:00:12mammoth frozen inside is lifted off the Siberian tundra and into history. Now, in an underground
00:00:22cavern in the shadow of the North Pole, men race against time to reveal the secrets of
00:00:27his life and death 20,000 years ago. On the tundra, the adventure continues as a French
00:00:37explorer mounts the most ambitious search ever for life from the Ice Age. In the time
00:00:55before the climate shifted, Siberia swelled with wildlife. The woolly mammoth was king
00:01:02of this domain until suddenly he vanished from the planet. Over millennia, clues to the mammoth's
00:01:11world were buried in rock and ice until the arrival of modern hunters. Now, science and
00:01:18technology create a bridge to the past as we search for answers in the land of the mammoth.
00:01:25More than 20,000 years ago, the Zharkov mammoth, named for the family who found him, met his fate.
00:01:50The cause of his death at the height of the Ice Age is a mystery. No one knows why the Zharkov
00:01:58mammoth and other large mammals vanished to extinction, but if he has traveled through
00:02:04time to offer science new clues, perhaps there are others like him. Finding them is a goal of
00:02:11this year's expedition. Two years ago, a helicopter flew deep into the Taimyr Peninsula
00:02:25of northern Siberia. There were reports that a frozen woolly mammoth carcass lay somewhere
00:02:30on the tundra. In a land with no roads, helicopters are the only way to get around.
00:02:38French explorer Bernard Ouig has logged many miles out here. He's been leading expeditions
00:02:46to the North Pole for a decade, but now he's on a different mission, a meeting with a family of
00:02:53dolgins, nomadic reindeer herders, who had discovered two perfectly preserved woolly mammoth tusks
00:02:59and maybe a carcass. Ground-penetrating radar confirmed that something organic was indeed
00:03:05locked in the permafrost. Steady back-breaking work slowly revealed exactly what Bernard had
00:03:12hoped for, the coarse hair of an extinct woolly mammoth. The Zharkov mammoth is a symbol,
00:03:25and to fly the block with the tusks will honor it for its final journey. But moving a mammoth-sized
00:03:32block of frozen earth would be more challenging than Bernard had expected.
00:03:40The huge payload proved almost too heavy for a helicopter to lift,
00:03:44and the attempt was nearly abandoned, until suddenly, success.
00:03:51After some couple of minutes, the blocks start to appear, and the tusks start to appear from
00:03:57the ground, and I think, wow, it's unbelievable. These people are able to do this.
00:04:05Finally, the block took to the air and floated toward its new home in the 21st century.
00:04:15Hatanga, an isolated town north of the Arctic Circle,
00:04:19has become the mammoth's new resting place.
00:04:22Moving the Zharkov to the site where it will be studied requires strategy and the largest vehicle
00:04:31in town. It has become critical to get the block inside a mammoth-sized freezer before
00:04:39the brief summer thaw begins to melt it. Though it's no longer locked in the tundra,
00:04:50installing this extinct animal in his new home may pose equally tough challenges for Bernard's team.
00:05:05This glacial cavern beneath Hatanga is one of many such caves dug during the Cold War.
00:05:13Today, reindeer meat and fish are stored in its network of tunnels,
00:05:17preserving food for local use.
00:05:27The men finally decide to pull the mammoth into the cave, using iron cable attached to heavy
00:05:32snow ploughs. The main difficulties was that it was dangerous for the people working there.
00:05:38We find strong cable, but we broke a lot of them, and it takes for us one day and a half to make
00:05:4535 meters from the outside of a cave to the inside. Foot by foot, the huge block is dragged
00:05:52deeper into the tunnels, which will serve as a cold laboratory for an international team of scientists.
00:06:00The block is sectioned into layers by renowned mammoth expert Dick Mole of the Netherlands,
00:06:05the project's scientific coordinator. American paleontologist Larry Agenbrod was also a part
00:06:13of last year's expedition. He, Dick and a small band of scientists will collect
00:06:18samples from the Zharkov mammoth for analysis by experts across the globe.
00:06:29During the 10 months since the block was pried from the tundra,
00:06:33almost no one has set eyes on it. The Siberian winter was too fierce for work to begin.
00:06:40But now, the rest of the scientific investigators are on the scene.
00:06:45Two experts from the American Museum of Natural History in New York
00:06:49are new additions to the mammoth team.
00:06:55It's just beautiful.
00:06:58Oh, no.
00:07:02You like it?
00:07:03That's gorgeous.
00:07:06Oh, my gosh.
00:07:08Wow, look at this.
00:07:12The first glimpse of the extinct woolly mammoth is a thrill,
00:07:15since only 11 carcasses have been recorded in Siberia over the past 200 years.
00:07:25Claire Fleming studies the small mammals that lived alongside the mammoth.
00:07:29Her colleague Ross McPhee is a museum curator of vertebrate zoology.
00:07:34This is hair?
00:07:35Yeah.
00:07:37Claire, you've got to see this.
00:07:38Coming.
00:07:41Here's the hair.
00:07:41And when you go on the top.
00:07:42Oh, my gosh.
00:07:43The little icicles on it.
00:07:45Here, pull on it.
00:07:46Just pull the ice off.
00:07:54Wow.
00:07:54It's so beautiful.
00:07:57So what did you think when you first saw the hair coming out?
00:08:00Well, the smell was the best.
00:08:01The smell was the best.
00:08:03The smell was the best, for example.
00:08:05And we had it all in the hair.
00:08:08Below three-foot-long strands of hair and thick wool,
00:08:12Dick Mull says the ancient mammoth smelled musky,
00:08:15so pungent that it's possible flesh lay just below the block's surface.
00:08:21This is encouraging news to Ross McPhee.
00:08:23Thank you so much.
00:08:24Dick, as you know, what Claire and I are doing is trying to get
00:08:27material of DNA from mammoth specimens all over the Tamir Peninsula.
00:08:32My hope is that if this animal has been in conditions like this,
00:08:37of solid freezing for most of the last 23,000 years,
00:08:41then we're going to do very well.
00:08:43This huge block of frozen mud is containing a lot of interesting information.
00:08:50We know that there is mammoth inside.
00:08:52How much, we do not know at this time.
00:08:54But we know already that a lot of microorganisms,
00:08:59plant remains, pollen, insects, algae, spores, and so on,
00:09:03which will provide us in the near future a lot of information
00:09:08on the environment in which this woolly mammoth was living 20,380 years ago.
00:09:15But before anyone can probe the block,
00:09:18Dick and expedition leader Bernard install a grid,
00:09:21dividing the block into 20 quadrants.
00:09:24Much like an archaeological dig,
00:09:26the location of all associated mammoth remains
00:09:29must be clearly documented to put them in context.
00:09:34Using the same unusual but effective technique he devised last year
00:09:38to expose the first mammoth hairs out on the tundra,
00:09:41Bernard has decided to melt the block a little at a time.
00:09:45There is a kind of paradox.
00:09:47We want to keep everything frozen,
00:09:49but at the same time we need to warm it up a little bit.
00:09:53We have the material in our hand.
00:09:56It's a very strange and interesting situation.
00:10:00Keeping the mammoths' remains in their frozen state
00:10:03will preserve valuable scientific evidence until it's ready for analysis.
00:10:11Even the surface of the carcass can reveal a lot about the mammoth's world.
00:10:16Hair may reveal nutritional patterns in his diet.
00:10:19Pollen and insects may carry information about vegetation
00:10:23and climate on the Ice Age mammoth's step.
00:10:27Pathogens discovered might indicate whether an ancient virus killed the mammoth.
00:10:32Skin and bones may provide strands of DNA
00:10:36which determine if it's even remotely possible to clone a mammoth one day.
00:10:44Tusks offer a record of the animal's life,
00:10:46the way tree rings reveal the history of a tree.
00:10:54You can see here the parts of the tusk circuits.
00:10:57When the Dolgans removed the tusks, parts of the skull were destroyed,
00:11:02but the jaw and molars were recovered intact.
00:11:05From the tusks, Dick and Larry already know the animal is an adult male.
00:11:11By counting the plates on the molars, they can tell his age.
00:11:14They can tell his age.
00:11:16He's 47.
00:11:24Dick compares the molar's wear to similar patterns in modern African elephants
00:11:29to get an approximate age.
00:11:36Discovering how the Zharkov mammoth lived is far more complex.
00:11:45The land of the woolly mammoth is one of the most inaccessible places on Earth.
00:11:50Much of it is unexplored.
00:11:53But even sporadic evidence gathered over decades points to one clear fact,
00:11:58that giants walked this country at the end of the last Ice Age.
00:12:15One summer day, 20,300 years ago, on what is now the Tymir Peninsula,
00:12:27the Zharkov mammoth is born.
00:12:31His family, like modern elephants, spend all day grazing
00:12:34and may number 30 animals strong.
00:12:40It's cold here all year round,
00:12:42but the tall grasses of the steppe land are plentiful enough to feed his herd
00:12:46and the Zharkov mammoth after he's weaned.
00:13:00Located in the farthest reaches of north-central Siberia,
00:13:03the Tymir Peninsula is a vast region,
00:13:06almost double the size of the state of California.
00:13:09Some experts believe there could be thousands of woolly mammoth carcasses
00:13:13trapped within the Tymir's solid permafrost,
00:13:16a frozen mixture of clay, silt and water.
00:13:20The nomadic dolgins often stumble across bones and tusks of the long-extinct mammoth,
00:13:25trading the ivory for items that are unavailable to them in this remote place.
00:13:39Pernard has enlisted the dolgin's help in his search for ice age mammals,
00:13:44which he'll collect for science.
00:14:09Pernard bought his supplies and machinery for Pleistocene fossils found by the dolgins.
00:14:18He'll display them in a new museum back in Hatonga.
00:14:40Analyzing the bones, tusks and carcasses that find their way out of the tundra
00:14:44during Siberia's brief summer has occupied Russian mammoth hunters for decades.
00:14:54Zoologist Alexey Tikhonov, a returning expedition member,
00:14:58is the scientific secretary of Russia's Mammoth Committee in St. Petersburg.
00:15:02He studied a rare and nearly intact mammoth calf named Masha he found in 1988.
00:15:32For the past three decades, Dick Moll and Larry Agenbrod have pursued ancient mammoths,
00:15:39and this animal has been the prize for their efforts.
00:15:47Despite the potential scientific value,
00:15:49cutting a section of the Zharkov's tusk for analysis is difficult for the scientists.
00:16:02Okay, we got at least three rings of the animal's life, and they look like they're
00:16:08thick rings, which just as a first approximation would say he had a pretty good year.
00:16:15These are the most beautiful tusks I've ever seen.
00:16:18An old animal in the strength of its life, a beautiful preservation, and we were just
00:16:26watching Larry taking out this window out of the tusk, and I feel a little bit pity with this animal.
00:16:32I feel like Dick, it's kind of a shame to actually have to cut a hole in it.
00:16:45This hole can be replaced, but the ivory will never be exactly the same again.
00:16:54By analyzing the rings of the Zharkov mammoth's tusk,
00:16:57scientists will determine how he lived in the final years of his life.
00:17:03Further clues will be required if they're to answer more compelling questions.
00:17:12How and why did the Zharkov mammoth die?
00:17:1950 million years ago, much of Africa was a vast tropical region.
00:17:39It was here, 10 million years after the last dinosaur went extinct,
00:17:44that the ancestors of both the mammoth and the modern elephant first emerged.
00:17:48They were called proboscideans for their extended trunk-like noses.
00:17:59The earliest of their order was small and amphibious.
00:18:02The pig-like moratherium had only a hint of a trunk and hippo-like tusks.
00:18:12Like whimsical players on Africa's evolutionary stage,
00:18:16the mammoth's ancestors experimented over millions of years,
00:18:20trying on tusks of every shape and design.
00:18:23Survival depended on ability to adapt.
00:18:46The earliest proboscideans with both trunks and tusks were the dinotheres,
00:18:51who arrived on the scene some 40 million years ago.
00:18:54Without bones, trunks can't fossilize,
00:18:58but scientists know from the keyhole-shaped opening high in the skull that they were there.
00:19:06Over the millennia, most of these animals would disappear,
00:19:09and the shovels, hooks, fangs, and spear-like appendages would evolve
00:19:14into elegant, curvy tusks for the surviving species, mammoths and elephants.
00:19:22African elephants would remain on the continent.
00:19:25In this tropical latitude, they developed large ears to facilitate heat loss.
00:19:31But as some animals migrated north and east to Europe and Asia,
00:19:36they adapted to changing climate and higher latitudes.
00:19:44The Asian elephant migrated to India, where it would develop smaller ears
00:19:48since the climate didn't require such an extreme ventilation system.
00:19:54Its cousin, the southern mammoth, pushed onward toward cool northern climes.
00:20:03Almost two and a half million years ago,
00:20:05the southern mammoth arrived in Europe, where it remained for another one and a half million years.
00:20:14Moving at a plodding pace of only three miles per year,
00:20:18the southern mammoth later migrated across the Bering land bridge to North America.
00:20:23It would eventually evolve into the Colombian mammoth.
00:20:28Then, 750,000 years ago, one of many waves of global cooling occurred.
00:20:35In Eurasia, mammoths grew longer hair and thicker skin.
00:20:39This was the steppe mammoth.
00:20:44It's ears shrank as it moved into more extreme climates,
00:20:47and its hair grew even more coarse and shaggy.
00:20:51The woolly mammoth was born.
00:20:57Continuing its slow trek into Siberia, where it faced no competition from elephants,
00:21:02it lived among other animals that had adapted to life on the dry, grassy steppe.
00:21:08Then, in the late 19th century,
00:21:11Then, only 100,000 years ago,
00:21:24While the Colombian mammoth, its larger and less hairy cousin, migrated as far south as Mexico,
00:21:30the woolly mammoth remained in the northern part of what is now the United States.
00:21:35Huge herds of mammoths roamed the entire northern hemisphere for thousands of years,
00:21:39until, mysteriously, they all vanished from the earth.
00:21:55Carefully revealing the remains in this block will open a new door to the land of the mammoth.
00:22:01In the world above, winter has shed its icy coat,
00:22:04giving the town of Otonga a cold winter climate.
00:22:08In the Colombian snowy mountains of the north,
00:22:10the sea ice is melting and the water is frozen.
00:22:14In the middle of the summer, the ice has melted and the water has frozen.
00:22:19In the middle of the north, the ice has melted and the water has frozen.
00:22:23In the middle of the east, the ice has melted and the water has frozen.
00:22:27Winter has shed its icy coat, giving the town of Atanga a brief respite from the Arctic chill.
00:22:33For only a few short weeks, the town basks in 24-hour sunlight before the winds of autumn
00:22:38descend once again on the polar north.
00:22:48It's the best time to explore mammoth country.
00:22:51Bernard has rounded up the crew of Russians who helped him wrestle the Zharkov mammoth
00:22:54from the tundra last year.
00:22:57To learn everything possible about the animal's environment, they'll hunt for remains of other
00:23:02ancient species.
00:23:06Destination, Cape Sablera, a remote lakeside outpost at the center of the Taimyr Peninsula.
00:23:18Usually a fisherman's camp, it's now a staging ground for mammoth hunters.
00:23:25Hard to reach except by helicopter, this might be the perfect place to find intact fauna
00:23:30from the late Pleistocene, a period that began roughly 100,000 years ago and ended 10,000
00:23:37years ago.
00:23:41The wildlife here is scarcer now, but some ice age animals can still thrive up here.
00:23:48Taimyr shared the mammoth's domain 20,000 years ago and still roam the northern Arctic
00:23:53regions today.
00:23:58The woolly muskox went extinct almost 3,000 years ago, but its descendants from North
00:24:03America are making a comeback here on the Taimyr.
00:24:08Among the smaller mammals, the Arctic fox still flourishes.
00:24:13From these survivors and others who failed to adapt to changing climatic conditions,
00:24:18the expedition hopes to learn more about the world of the woolly mammoth.
00:24:25From Cape Sablera, members of Bernard's team can fan out across the peninsula, covering
00:24:31large stretches of tundra by boat, helicopter, or on foot.
00:24:38Dick Mull maps out a plan with French expedition coordinator Christiane de Maliard to deploy
00:24:43brigades of searchers.
00:24:47They are intent on finding the remains of a rare woolly rhino, one of the huge species
00:24:52that existed side by side with the woolly mammoth.
00:24:55A few years ago they found a woolly rhino in that place, so it would be a nice place
00:25:00to enclose to Sablera to find good material.
00:25:04You know, we have so many brigades going out, and we tell the people that we are not
00:25:08only interested in the mammoths, so I think with a little bit of luck we will find one.
00:25:18Bernard's teams are highly skilled outdoorsmen and expert navigators of this harsh landscape,
00:25:23like his old friend Boris Lebedev.
00:25:27It's impossible to make exploration alone.
00:25:30You need a team, and the most fun for me is to prepare a team, to build a team, and
00:25:35after this to work all together.
00:25:37It's very important to trust everybody.
00:25:42Eleven brigades, each composed of two men, will be dropped at strategic points across
00:25:47400 miles of peninsula.
00:25:50This is the largest expedition of its kind to find and collect Ice Age remains in Siberia.
00:25:57These brigades can only collect remains in summer, because the tundra is not covered
00:26:04with snow, it's not frozen, the upper meter is melted, and they are able to find remains
00:26:09alongside the shores of the small lakes, but also alongside riverbanks.
00:26:15These men will know how and where to find them.
00:26:18If you are part of a brigade, you need to be very well experienced on the Taimen Peninsula.
00:26:26You need to be a hunter, you need to be a fisherman, you need to be self-supporting.
00:26:32But modern technology will also play a role here.
00:26:35The GPS, or Global Positioning System, will allow the brigades to identify locations of
00:26:41the discoveries and allow base camp to track the team's whereabouts.
00:26:46Their orders are simple and direct.
00:26:48Glück Auf!
00:26:49Glück Glück!
00:26:50Good luck, and don't return without the wool rhino.
00:26:54Okay?
00:27:15Because remains are normally found around bodies of water, search teams will be deployed
00:27:20along rivers in a wide radius.
00:27:23When they locate bones or other specimens, they will radio base camp, and Bernard and
00:27:29Dick will fly to check them out.
00:27:34Southeast of Cape Soblera, this Russian brigade explores an eroding riverbank, scouring the
00:27:40sand, gravel, and sediment for signs of ancient mammals.
00:27:44For 10 to 15 days, they'll cover every inch of ground here.
00:27:50Elsewhere, others look for signs of solar fluxion, places where the soil has cracked
00:27:55and split, because this is where the best remains are hidden.
00:27:59If we find a tip of a tusk, all the rest of the animal might be preserved in the deep
00:28:05freeze.
00:28:06This is the permafrost ice, which is frozen since at least 10,000 years.
00:28:13And the surrounding sediments are also frozen.
00:28:16This is frozen mud.
00:28:17And in the frozen mud, we are able to find the remains of ice age mammals.
00:28:22It's amazing to see just how little soil supports life on today's tundra, and to ponder
00:28:28what could lie below.
00:28:31Bernard hopes that as the crevices open this season, another extinct animal with bones,
00:28:37hair, and perhaps even flesh will make its presence known, like the Jarkov mammoth did.
00:28:48An odor draws Dick and Christian to the mouth of a cavern.
00:28:53Pretty strong smell, huh?
00:28:54The smell here is exactly the same as the Jarkov mammoth last year.
00:28:58We were using the hair dryers to defrost a part of the block, and there were the hair
00:29:04and the skin, and exactly the same strong smell.
00:29:12But I don't know if it is dangerous to go inside.
00:29:16It's really deep inside, you see.
00:29:18I think I will go.
00:29:20I will be really dirty, but...
00:29:22You want to go inside right now?
00:29:24Just to check.
00:29:26You are anxious to...
00:29:27Yeah, just to check.
00:29:28Okay, good.
00:29:29I will dive.
00:29:30Okay, I keep my fingers crossed for you.
00:29:35Be careful.
00:29:47You need a light?
00:29:48Oh no, I can't see well.
00:29:52No bones, nothing that I can't see.
00:30:00For years, water hoses were used to flush bones and other remains out of Siberia's permafrost.
00:30:07Even the baby mammoth Dima, the most complete carcass found in the 20th century, was exposed this way.
00:30:17But pollen, insects, and countless other clues to the mammoth's world were undoubtedly washed away,
00:30:23depriving science of valuable information.
00:30:27So Bernhard's team is trying something new.
00:30:33The method takes more time, but defrosting a carcass little by little
00:30:37will ensure that few Ice Age clues are overlooked.
00:30:41The easiest way to find the jug of mammoth or its remains, which are stored in this block,
00:30:47would be to use a water hose.
00:30:49You can clean everything probably in two or three days,
00:30:53but then we are wasting all the scientific information which is hidden in this block.
00:30:58This is our treasure, and the treasure is very important to understand the mammoth and its environment.
00:31:04You see here?
00:31:06This is from the time of the jug of mammoth, yeah?
00:31:09It's still green.
00:31:11It's a grass. It's not complete.
00:31:13Probably it was long grass.
00:31:15These are the roots.
00:31:17This might be the food of the mammoth.
00:31:20These first signs of ancient life are promising.
00:31:25But what about the future?
00:31:27As the work on the block continues, Bernhard discovers patches of thick hair,
00:31:31which he hopes will be attached to flesh below.
00:31:35Clinging to the roots and shafts are specks of life from the late Pleistocene.
00:31:40But what about the future?
00:31:42What about the future?
00:31:44The future is a mystery.
00:31:46It's a mystery.
00:31:48It's a mystery.
00:31:50It's a mystery.
00:31:52It's a mystery.
00:31:54It's a mystery.
00:31:56It's a mystery.
00:31:58It's a mystery.
00:32:00It's a mystery.
00:32:02To come to life from the late Pleistocene,
00:32:04microscopic grains of pollen nestled in the sediment
00:32:07that are being shipped to the Netherlands for analysis.
00:32:14The pollen plucked from the tangle of wool and wiry hair
00:32:18has provided some of the most concrete clues to date
00:32:21about the end of the Ice Age.
00:32:25In Amsterdam, paleobotanist Bas van Geel
00:32:27rinses the mammoth hair to isolate the pollen grains
00:32:30and other fossil plants for his studies.
00:32:41It's not the hair he's after,
00:32:43it's the sediment that will be filtered,
00:32:45centrifuged and concentrated.
00:32:49Eventually, the murky dregs will reveal
00:32:52a fascinating world no longer visible to the naked eye.
00:33:00Ancient grass, pollen, flowers and moss
00:33:03look fresh and well-preserved under the microscope.
00:33:07From these tiny samples of Pleistocene flora,
00:33:10Bas van Geel is putting together a picture
00:33:13of the Ice Age landscape.
00:33:16It was amazing to see
00:33:18that the dominant pollen was the pollen of grasses
00:33:22together with Artemisia,
00:33:24which means that even after a few minutes
00:33:27you could see that the environment was a steppe
00:33:30because in a tundra you find different pollen types.
00:33:33The cold, dry climate of the Mammoth Steppe
00:33:36during the late Pleistocene
00:33:38allowed plants and animals to thrive.
00:33:41An abundance of fast-growing, nutrient-rich grasses,
00:33:45shrubs and flowers provided a diverse diet.
00:33:50Enough food to support mammoths and other large grazers.
00:33:58Today's climate couldn't be more different.
00:34:01The hearty vegetation of the ancient steppe land
00:34:04has given way to wet, boggy tundra
00:34:06with poor soil and a shallow root system.
00:34:09Inhospitable turf for a mammoth,
00:34:12but sufficient for reindeer.
00:34:20Only 300 dolgans roam this vast, empty tundra.
00:34:24It's been their home for nearly 400 years.
00:34:30These nomads live without luxuries we take for granted.
00:34:37The dolgans are not afraid of technology.
00:34:39They have an incredible ability
00:34:41to make do with whatever they have at hand.
00:34:44That's how they manage to survive
00:34:46in such a hostile environment.
00:34:55Fishing the tundra's endless lakes
00:34:57is a way of life out here.
00:34:59But the water is frigid, even in summer,
00:35:02so most dolgans never learn how to swim.
00:35:05When their canoes overturn, they drown.
00:35:14The dolgans are the only species
00:35:16that can survive in the wild.
00:35:18They are the only species
00:35:20that can survive in the wild.
00:35:25The nomads move their camp several times a week,
00:35:29driving their herds of domesticated reindeer
00:35:32to thicker pastures.
00:35:34Winter or summer, the routine is the same.
00:35:37Hunt, fish, and graze.
00:35:40They know every inch of this country
00:35:42by landmarks invisible to the Western eye.
00:35:48Their mobile homes on skids, called balaks,
00:35:51are never unhitched from their sleds
00:35:53and hold everything the dolgans own.
00:36:05While en route, it's not unusual for dolgans
00:36:08to come across the remains
00:36:10of ancient animals protruding from the earth.
00:36:13The Zharkov mammoth was discovered
00:36:15in just this way back in 1997.
00:36:22Now, whenever a significant discovery
00:36:25is made on the Taimyr,
00:36:27Bernard Bouygues and his mammoth team
00:36:29are usually the first to hear about it.
00:36:42Because mammoths are extinct,
00:36:44dolgans can legally trade or sell the tusks they find.
00:36:48Unlike the ivory from endangered elephants.
00:36:51But Bernard has enlisted their help
00:36:53in saving bones, tusks, and, with luck,
00:36:56any carcasses that may be present
00:36:58for study by the project's scientists.
00:37:19It's a pity that it's broken,
00:37:21but it was broken a long time ago.
00:37:23Yeah?
00:37:24Yeah?
00:37:25They found it in river, not in lake.
00:37:28And, uh...
00:37:33In river also.
00:37:36Yeah.
00:37:37Ah, they cut off piece.
00:37:39You see?
00:37:40They cut off, you think?
00:37:42No.
00:37:43I think it's natural.
00:37:45Okay.
00:37:46Oh, yeah.
00:37:47Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:37:48No, because they found it just three weeks ago.
00:37:51I fly last year in this place,
00:37:53and they sell me a piece of tusk,
00:37:56and they said,
00:37:57uh, why you cut it?
00:37:59I'm interested only in information and complete.
00:38:02Where?
00:38:04In river?
00:38:09Ah, I see.
00:38:10The second one, this one is here.
00:38:14This man is telling me
00:38:16that the bones are somewhere in the river.
00:38:22These are nice specimens.
00:38:24Bernard will not be leaving empty-handed today.
00:38:36Finds from the Dolgens
00:38:37lay the foundation for research
00:38:39that will be conducted here in Hatanga
00:38:41and all over the world.
00:38:43The more tusks collected,
00:38:44the better the chance of understanding
00:38:47the life cycles of the mammoth.
00:38:53Once Dick has measured, weighed, and cataloged everything,
00:38:56samples will be sent to scientific experts
00:38:59in various fields for analysis.
00:39:02This is a complete fossil.
00:39:04It's a tusk of a woolly mammoth.
00:39:06But many people will say,
00:39:07oh, it's not a woolly mammoth.
00:39:09It's only a piece of ivory
00:39:10because we are missing this part.
00:39:12But look, the tusk is broken
00:39:15during the life of the mammoth,
00:39:17and it's polished again.
00:39:19And this is showing us
00:39:20that the woolly mammoth was using its tusk
00:39:23even when it was broken.
00:39:25And there's another specimen over here as well.
00:39:27Exactly the same.
00:39:29You see, it's polished again.
00:39:31Here we can see where the breakage was.
00:39:33Probably shortly, maybe a couple of months
00:39:35after this animal broke its tusk.
00:39:41Roar!
00:39:43Nearly 7 feet tall at the shoulder
00:39:46and weighing in at 5 tons,
00:39:49a woolly mammoth was a force to reckon with.
00:39:55A young boy,
00:39:57the Jarkot Mammoth's future father,
00:39:59brazenly challenges an older male.
00:40:02Like modern elephants,
00:40:04male mammoths probably sparred frequently
00:40:06to establish hierarchy based on size and strength.
00:40:16During mating season,
00:40:18the fights could turn serious,
00:40:20even deadly,
00:40:22as males competed for the right to mate.
00:40:29The older mammoth does his best
00:40:31to defend his territory.
00:40:35But he backs down,
00:40:37conceding that he's no match for the younger male.
00:40:41The victor may chase the older mammoth for miles,
00:40:44and the defeated bull
00:40:46will probably never challenge a younger male again.
00:40:52Cape Soblera Base Camp.
00:40:54In less than a month,
00:40:56snow will make it impossible to hunt for ice-age mammals here.
00:41:00The mammoth team will have to work efficiently.
00:41:05Paleontologist Larry Agenbrod
00:41:07has studied early man's interaction
00:41:09with the Colombian mammoth in North America.
00:41:12He hopes to find similar links to the woolly mammoth here.
00:41:17Claire Fleming, of the American Museum of Natural History,
00:41:21will look at small Pleistocene mammals
00:41:23to see what they can tell us about the life of the Jarkot Mammoth.
00:41:27And Ross McPhee,
00:41:29curator at the American Museum of Natural History,
00:41:32is investigating his hypothesis
00:41:34that disease may have killed the woolly mammoth.
00:41:37Or perhaps they'll find
00:41:39an entirely different reason for its extinction.
00:41:46Over breakfast, Bernard and the scientists
00:41:49discuss strategy for their search today
00:41:51on the far shores of Lake Taimyr.
00:41:53Bernard explains that, based on leads from locals,
00:41:57the expedition brigades are already combing
00:41:59a number of promising sites.
00:42:01There's somebody there
00:42:02who's going to give you the location, right?
00:42:04Unfortunately, now not,
00:42:06because the information is in Hatanga.
00:42:09And when I will fly back to pick up them,
00:42:13I will fly with the dolgan, where I found the tusk.
00:42:15It's far away, it's 200 kilometers from here.
00:42:18The other side of the lake.
00:42:20We'll bring here in this lake called Ahila.
00:42:24This is the place where he was fishing
00:42:26and he got some hair of the mammoth or an animal?
00:42:30Well, it will be the first remains with soft material.
00:42:43The expedition crew and scientists
00:42:46who helped raise the mammoth last year
00:42:48are now looking for a broad range of Ice Age fauna,
00:42:52the better to understand how and why they eventually disappear.
00:42:56But as with any new venture,
00:42:58the first step is always the hardest.
00:43:06More solitary species like the cave lion
00:43:09may be difficult to track,
00:43:11but others, like native horses,
00:43:13traveled all over the Taimyr Peninsula
00:43:16at the time of the Jakob mammoth.
00:43:21Horse, oh yeah.
00:43:23Too deep to be...
00:43:25The presence of horses in the upper latitudes
00:43:28of both North America and Eurasia is well documented.
00:43:32But the extinction pattern of certain species is enigmatic.
00:43:36This is the hoof of a Pleistocene,
00:43:39or an Ice Age horse,
00:43:41a horse which was living at the same time
00:43:44as the woolly mammoth was.
00:43:49The Przewalski horse may be related to its Ice Age cousin,
00:43:53which went extinct on the Taimyr Peninsula
00:43:56as recently as 3,000 years ago.
00:43:59In the absence of man,
00:44:01did sudden climatic changes alter the horse's habitat too quickly,
00:44:06or were there other reasons?
00:44:08The bones that surface in mammoth country may hold some answers.
00:44:17Today's muskox wasn't part of the mammoth fauna
00:44:20during the late Pleistocene.
00:44:22This North American species was reintroduced to Siberia
00:44:26from Canada and Alaska in the mid-1970s.
00:44:30Almost 3,000 years ago, for reasons unknown,
00:44:34the Ice Age woolly muskox became extinct on the Taimyr,
00:44:38just like the Jakob and other woolly mammoths.
00:44:42This is a woolly muskox, an old one.
00:44:45Oh, wow.
00:44:47A male one.
00:44:50You know, this is my day.
00:44:53I've never found such a beautiful specimen.
00:44:55That's a beauty, all right.
00:44:57Isn't it pretty?
00:44:59Oh, yeah.
00:45:01There's only a certain amount of time each year you can work here,
00:45:04but each year everything's new.
00:45:06The ice melting, the banks are slumping,
00:45:08and the beaches is working things over again.
00:45:11So I think this is kind of like dying and going to heaven
00:45:15for a Pleistocene paleontologist.
00:45:17We have the woolly mammoths, the Ice Age horse,
00:45:22the reindeer, and the muskox.
00:45:24Look over there, there's a polar fox.
00:45:27The polar fox is one of the smaller mammals
00:45:29that lived during the Pleistocene.
00:45:31Because smaller animals react faster to environmental change
00:45:35than megafauna like mammoths,
00:45:37Claire Fleming says they're useful in understanding the landscape.
00:45:42The others are off looking for woolly mammoths,
00:45:45but an equally important part of the picture is the small mammals
00:45:49that lived literally underfoot of the mammoths or the woolly rhinos.
00:45:54Small animals like rodents made up more than 50% of the mammoth fauna.
00:45:59Dating their remains can tell scientists
00:46:02exactly what the climate and vegetation were at any given period.
00:46:08Some of these animals survived to present day,
00:46:11and others went extinct just like the woolly mammoth.
00:46:16The Pleistocene Paleontologist Claire Fleming
00:46:23I'm looking for and finding very small rodent teeth,
00:46:27probably lemming, and I've also found some hair.
00:46:32Some are very recent, and some are most likely a lot older,
00:46:37at least Pleistocene.
00:46:45What have you got here?
00:46:46Here's a couple little mandibles with teeth.
00:46:49So actually they look just like an elephant
00:46:51because they've got the same rasping teeth.
00:46:53Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:46:54But Dick, check this one out.
00:46:56Yeah.
00:46:57This is a little teeny weeny humerus.
00:47:00It's very, very, very twisted.
00:47:02Yeah.
00:47:03So we do not have only the megafauna right now,
00:47:05but also the small mammals.
00:47:07This is much more what I'm used to,
00:47:09just the very small, minuscule work.
00:47:11So to find a huge ivory tusk, to me, is a little weird.
00:47:15This is wonderful because, you know,
00:47:17to have the small mammals, the big mammals,
00:47:19the mammoths, of course, is spectacular.
00:47:21But this will...
00:47:22But this tells us the climatic story.
00:47:24And tells us the environmental story.
00:47:26This gives us a chance for small carnivores
00:47:28that we wouldn't probably otherwise see.
00:47:30And other elements of the fauna, like birds.
00:47:32They will tell us what the avia fauna was
00:47:34at the time of the woolly mammoths.
00:47:36So good.
00:47:37Oh, this is great.
00:47:39What excites me particularly is the fact
00:47:41that we have a variety of animals.
00:47:44If we can test what they were eating,
00:47:46what their environment was, at a given time level,
00:47:50then we can begin to reconstruct
00:47:52how this place was in the mammoth times
00:47:55and how it has changed since.
00:47:57I think until we do that,
00:47:59we are making conjectures or preformed opinions,
00:48:02and it is my position to let the bones
00:48:05and the associated sediments tell me what they will.
00:48:08Before I try to tell exactly what happened here.
00:48:13Back at camp, brigades report in.
00:48:16Yeah, just around there.
00:48:17One of the men has been checking out a lead
00:48:20on the whereabouts of woolly rhino remains.
00:48:23But so far, not so much as a trace.
00:48:25This is interesting. We have to go back.
00:48:30With pointers from Vladimir,
00:48:31Dick hopes he'll have better luck the next time out.
00:48:39This is the best location.
00:48:41There are some indications
00:48:42that we might find a woolly rhino over here,
00:48:45and this is the purpose that we came back to this site.
00:48:48The woolly rhino is one of the rarest
00:48:51large mammal species on the planet.
00:48:56Only a few woolly rhino bones
00:48:58have ever turned up on the Taimyr.
00:49:00Unlike the mammoth, rhinos were solitary animals,
00:49:03and they were not allowed to move.
00:49:06I think Lara's found something.
00:49:08Huh?
00:49:09I think this is the only rhino material.
00:49:11If it is rhino.
00:49:12If it is rhino, but I don't know what else it would be
00:49:15to be this flat through here,
00:49:17and so pneumatic back this direction.
00:49:20To me, it looks a little bit big for a rhino,
00:49:23but what we should do, we should make a comparison.
00:49:25We'll compare.
00:49:26And when we compare, we will see who's right.
00:49:29But to me, it looks much bigger.
00:49:32For thousands of years,
00:49:33grazers like the giant deer and woolly rhino
00:49:36shared the steppe land with the woolly mammoth.
00:49:39But some scientists think the rhino's limited diet of grasses
00:49:43made it an unstable species in times of scarcity.
00:49:47Rhinos would vanish from Siberia just before mammoths did.
00:49:52An expedition helicopter has trouble spotting the scientists.
00:49:59We were looking for a woolly rhino,
00:50:01and it seems that this animal is so extremely rare
00:50:04in the mammoth steppe of the Italian peninsula
00:50:0720,000 years ago, that we were not successful today.
00:50:11But maybe the people of Siberia
00:50:13have a better idea of what it is.
00:50:16It's a rhino.
00:50:18It's a rhino.
00:50:21But maybe the people in the helicopter
00:50:23who are searching for us right now
00:50:25might be more successful than we have been.
00:50:29So far, none of the brigades
00:50:31has run across signs of the ancient animal.
00:50:34With winter closing in fast, the mammoth hunters push on.
00:50:42Like the wildlife of Africa's Serengeti today,
00:50:45the grazing animals of the mammoth steppe
00:50:48are often kept in check by predators.
00:50:51Cave lions and wolves are known to have lived here.
00:50:55Though they posed no threat to behemoths like the woolly mammoth,
00:50:59they were opportunists who competed
00:51:01with the area's plentiful scavengers for remains.
00:51:15Fossils of these predators are rare,
00:51:17but they're out here on the Taimyr.
00:51:23Two weeks into the expedition,
00:51:25there are still no signs of woolly rhino.
00:51:28But the teams have begun to radio Bernard
00:51:31with reports of remarkable Ice Age finds.
00:51:36Only one brigade has run into trouble.
00:51:39Shortly after being dropped on the tundra,
00:51:42their radio died and the GPS system failed.
00:51:45Without a link to the expedition,
00:51:47the men were forced to walk for days back to base camp.
00:51:55There are only three helicopters available in Hatanga,
00:51:5920-year-old Russian machines in constant demand
00:52:02and constant need of maintenance.
00:52:04It takes a few days for Bernard to hire one
00:52:07to begin collecting his brigades.
00:52:10This Russian team has had incredibly good fortune.
00:52:14They've located the tusks of three male and two female mammoths,
00:52:18as well as the skull of an ancient horse
00:52:21and dozens of mammoth bones and teeth.
00:52:24Already, it seems Bernard's strategy
00:52:27of sending multiple teams into the field is paying off.
00:52:31If the other brigades are only half as lucky,
00:52:34they'll turn up more ancient specimens than even he predicted.
00:52:45Vladimir Eisner and his son Dima,
00:52:48translators who were key members of last year's expedition,
00:52:52are delighted to see Bernard, and with good reason.
00:52:56They've located a dozen more woolly mammoth tusks
00:53:00for the expedition's growing collection.
00:53:03Bernard's main problem now may be finding room
00:53:06for all of these specimens in the helicopter.
00:53:09He's anxious to fly them back to the base camp,
00:53:12but he's not sure if he can do it.
00:53:15He's still trying to get a hold of the crew
00:53:18and the crew members to come and see if they can get a hold of the tusks.
00:53:24He's still trying to get a hold of the crew members
00:53:27and the crew members to come and see if they can get a hold of the tusks.
00:53:32He's anxious to fly them back to the Cape Sablera base camp as soon as possible
00:53:36so the scientists can begin their work.
00:53:39But there are a few last items of business here.
00:53:43Dima and Vladimir have made a major discovery.
00:53:47They've located a beautifully preserved woolly mammoth skull,
00:53:50a truly rare find.
00:53:53Wow! Super!
00:53:55Very interesting.
00:53:57Almost the same size as your jack-of-all-trades.
00:54:01Wow!
00:54:03No, no, it's very exciting.
00:54:05A short distance away, downhill from the skull,
00:54:08they find the lower jaw of the same animal.
00:54:11Oh, yeah, for sure it belongs to the same animal.
00:54:14For sure.
00:54:16They've come to the land of the mammoth,
00:54:18hoping to find clues to the jack-off's life and death.
00:54:22Who knows where these latest finds will lead?
00:54:31Let me roll it back.
00:54:33This is really a big old animal,
00:54:35and even though it's damaged back here,
00:54:37we still have a lot of information.
00:54:40The first thing I like to see is the teeth
00:54:42because that tells you something about the age of the animal.
00:54:45I also like the tusks, which are a special tooth,
00:54:49and for me, one of the big thrills
00:54:52is to feel the bevel at the end of the tusk
00:54:55because that's the closest I can come to the personality of the animal.
00:54:59How did it use its tusk? Like, how did we use our arms?
00:55:02If you have both tusks, you can get an idea
00:55:05whether it was a left tusk or a right tusk animal,
00:55:08like we're left-handed or right-handed because of the wear.
00:55:12So you look at the size and shape of the animal's bones,
00:55:18and you can make estimates to their height,
00:55:21even though the animal is represented by, say, only a humerus.
00:55:25There are calculations you can make to say
00:55:27how high did this animal stand at the shoulders?
00:55:30And we need lots and lots and lots of samples
00:55:33so that we can do statistics on them
00:55:35and then compare them to other populations.
00:55:38This is why we look for so many fossils.
00:55:41But even wide sampling of fossils can't tell scientists
00:55:45that much about a woolly mammoth's behavior.
00:55:48What is known about mating habits comes from the study of elephants.
00:55:54Fresh from battle,
00:55:56the victorious young bull approaches a female in heat.
00:56:00She will give birth to the Zhokhov mammoth.
00:56:15Females remain faithful to their partners
00:56:18throughout the two-year gestation period,
00:56:21rebuffing the advances of other males.
00:56:38It's summer in Siberia.
00:56:40The group of female mammoths led by the pregnant matriarch
00:56:44continues its trek toward fertile grasslands.
00:56:52The herd becomes fiercely loyal
00:56:54during the period surrounding birth, much like elephants.
00:57:00These adult females are probably related to the matriarch.
00:57:04If her calf were ever orphaned,
00:57:06it would be adopted by one of the other mammoths.
00:57:10The group of female mammoths,
00:57:12which is the largest group in Siberia,
00:57:15is the largest in the world.
00:57:18If her calf were ever orphaned,
00:57:20it would be adopted by one of the other mammoth cows.
00:57:23This instinctive loyalty ensures the stability of the herd
00:57:27and protects the vulnerable calves.
00:57:30Mammoth!
00:57:45The Zhokhov mammoth is born.
00:57:54Here on the Taimyr, near the end of the Ice Age,
00:57:58food is abundant, increasing his chances of survival.
00:58:02For many months to come,
00:58:04the baby Zhokhov will walk in the protective shadow of his mother.
00:58:16As more brigades return,
00:58:18Dikmol's fluent command of mammoth fauna is again put to the test.
00:58:29Another house.
00:58:31Did you see this one?
00:58:33There are gnawing marks everywhere.
00:58:36So what we need to find is the animal
00:58:39which was producing these gnawing marks.
00:58:42These tooth marks on ancient bones could be signs of past predation
00:58:47or the work of scavengers.
00:58:49In the Pleistocene epoch,
00:58:51reindeer and muskoxen wandered the northern continents.
00:58:55Their young were preyed upon by cave lions and other large cats,
00:58:59many of which are now extinct.
00:59:04Adult woolly mammoths were large and strong,
00:59:07like modern elephants,
00:59:09and could deal with the threat of nearly any predator.
00:59:12But carnivores could be lethal to the young Zhokhov mammoth
00:59:16if he wandered from the herd.
00:59:19Like elephants and other highly intelligent mammals,
00:59:22the Zhokhov mammoth's family recognized signs of danger
00:59:26and kept him within the safety of the herd.
00:59:45Another sign of life has surfaced from a mammal we know well.
00:59:49Man.
00:59:51We met the other brigade which was going out on the beach this afternoon.
00:59:55They found a stone tool.
00:59:57Well, there's no question.
00:59:59It's been flaked and shaped and so on.
01:00:02But the question is when, because what I know from literature
01:00:05is that the earliest occupation of man on the Tama Peninsula
01:00:09is only 6,020 years BP.
01:00:12Uh-huh.
01:00:14I'm excited that this was on the beach near here,
01:00:17but to try to give you a date on it would be next to impossible.
01:00:21Early humans may not have reached the Taimyr Peninsula
01:00:24at the time of the Zhokhov mammoth,
01:00:27and few experts believe that man alone
01:00:30was responsible for killing off mammoths in Siberia.
01:00:36No one knows why these and other ancient creatures
01:00:39across the globe vanished to extinction,
01:00:42though there are three accepted theories,
01:00:45climate, disease, and hunting by early man.
01:00:49Or maybe it was something else entirely.
01:00:54I like to compare the loss of the mammals to a murder mystery.
01:00:58You've got lots of victims.
01:01:00You have a possible perpetrator
01:01:03skulking about all the time in the form of humans.
01:01:06But what's missing are things like motive, method, things of that nature.
01:01:11It's not at all clear why humans would have wanted to hunt,
01:01:15for example, one of the arguments, on such a scale as to cause extinction,
01:01:19nor is it obvious why climate change, which is changing all the time,
01:01:23should have resulted in so many losses about 10,000 years ago,
01:01:27suggesting to me that there probably has to be some other explanation
01:01:31that we haven't thought of or haven't yet tested.
01:01:34Some of the most informative evidence of human interaction
01:01:37with the mammoth lies in central Ukraine,
01:01:4010,000 miles southwest of the Timir Peninsula.
01:01:49For 20 years, remnants of huts of mammoth bones and tusks
01:01:54have been surfacing in Mezhyrichi, 70 miles south of Kiev.
01:02:02Since the mid-1970s, Ukrainian paleontologists
01:02:06have been excavating these amazing bone and ivory structures
01:02:10from 10 feet underground.
01:02:13So far, they've found four, all in the same location
01:02:17and perhaps part of the same village.
01:02:21Dr. Nelly Kornietz is in charge of the dig.
01:02:25She has found ample evidence that man hunted the mammoth.
01:02:31The mammoth was of great interest to the people of the time,
01:02:35because it was their chief prey.
01:02:39It was an important source of food.
01:02:43If they hunted in the fall,
01:02:47they could store a great deal of food for the winter.
01:02:51Also, mammoth was a source of fat for them.
01:02:55As we know now from studying caribou-hunting eskimos,
01:02:59they cannot survive without fat.
01:03:03It was their source of energy.
01:03:07Women would use mammoth wool for knitting,
01:03:11and they would use mammoth hair for sewing.
01:03:15We found excellent needles, all different widths and lengths,
01:03:19and it shows that people of that time
01:03:23were greatly skilled in making clothes.
01:03:27Mammoth ivory was of great value to those people.
01:03:31The clothes were made from ivory,
01:03:35as well as art objects and decorations for their homes.
01:03:39That's why the mammoth was of great significance
01:03:43to the people of the late Pleistocene,
01:03:47and it was so important for them to hunt the mammoth.
01:03:51The remnants of these ancient European huts
01:03:55date back 15,000 to 19,000 years.
01:03:59They found an etching of a village
01:04:03crafted by one of our European ancestors.
01:04:07Dr. Kornietz believes these early hunters lived in teepees,
01:04:11but questions still exist over the function of the bone huts.
01:04:15Hunting smaller, less challenging animals
01:04:19might have been easier for early hunters
01:04:23than killing an irate mammoth,
01:04:27who could feed a village for several months.
01:04:33To bring down such a large animal
01:04:37was, by necessity, a group effort.
01:04:45By day, men would scout for prey,
01:04:49occasionally finding themselves in the path of a giant deer,
01:04:53or hunting an animal with a ten-foot rack of antlers.
01:05:03The night of the hunt.
01:05:07To survive in such isolation and sustain their community,
01:05:11villagers had to be skilled hunter-gatherers.
01:05:15Felling a mammoth tonight would go a long way
01:05:19for food, shelter, and fuel.
01:05:27No one knows for sure about the spiritual practices
01:05:31of these ancient people,
01:05:35but Dr. Kornietz believes that bone huts served a ritual purpose.
01:05:39Much like modern Siberian nomads,
01:05:43these hunters may have built huts
01:05:47for their prey.
01:05:53Though early man crafted spears with razor-sharp tips,
01:05:57it would take formidable strength to pierce thick mammoth hide,
01:06:01even at close range.
01:06:05Clever hunting strategy, rather than weapons,
01:06:09would have been the preferred way to bring down an animal
01:06:14We know from North American experts
01:06:18that one hunting method of the time
01:06:22was to catch an animal off-guard,
01:06:26corner it, and if possible,
01:06:30run it off the edge of an embankment.
01:06:43Always alert, a woolly mammoth, like a modern elephant,
01:06:47would likely charge rather than retreat.
01:06:51But sometimes bulk and intelligence were not enough
01:06:55to save a mammoth whose luck had run out.
01:07:02Even a relatively shallow drop would be enough
01:07:06to cripple a mammoth as its legs broke
01:07:11It's likely that the bones and tusks
01:07:15discovered over time in Ukraine
01:07:19came from animals that died of natural causes.
01:07:23There's no definitive proof that over-hunting
01:07:27was the reason for the woolly mammoth's demise.
01:07:31A more widely accepted theory
01:07:35is that a major change in hunting methods
01:07:39is that a major change in the Earth's climate
01:07:43caused massive extinctions in the northern hemisphere.
01:07:47The world's last ice age began about 100,000 years ago.
01:07:51Near the end of the Pleistocene,
01:07:55glacial conditions had spread over large regions
01:07:59of what is now Eurasia and North America.
01:08:03Around 10,000 years ago,
01:08:07the ice sheets melted and the ocean rose some 300 feet,
01:08:11flooding the northern part of Siberia.
01:08:15The southern forest expanded northward,
01:08:19taking over the mammoth's steppe.
01:08:23The mammoth's habitat was shrinking dramatically.
01:08:27Squeezed by forests on one side and water on the other,
01:08:31mammoths lost grazing area and they had no place to migrate.
01:08:35The quality of their food changed as well.
01:08:39Boggy terrain replaced dry, grassy steppe lands
01:08:43and mammoths had no time to adapt.
01:08:47Dick Moll thinks that climate change
01:08:51is, in large part, a realistic explanation
01:08:55for the loss of the Siberian mammoth.
01:08:59In my opinion, Ross, this is one of the main reasons
01:09:03for the loss of the Siberian mammoth.
01:09:07Well, this is fine, Dick,
01:09:11but I think we have to ask a couple of questions here.
01:09:15We know from recent evidence with ice cores
01:09:19taken from Greenland and from Antarctica,
01:09:23this record now goes back about 250,000 years,
01:09:27that temperature in particular has fluctuated widely.
01:09:31I completely agree that we have to have in mind
01:09:35the possibility that there were many causes of the extinction.
01:09:39So if humans were involved in any way with causing these extinctions
01:09:43by overhunting the animals, why don't we have better evidence?
01:09:47At this time, there is no evidence to support the extinction theory
01:09:51that focuses on disease as a possible culprit.
01:09:55Yet it's the theory that most intrigues Ross McPhee.
01:09:59By collecting samples from this mammoth and other specimens,
01:10:03he'll be looking for viruses.
01:10:07What I'm going to do is try to sample just as much as I can
01:10:11from this particular area.
01:10:15This is where we might expect to find pathogenic organisms.
01:10:19One possibility for the extinction of mammoths
01:10:23and maybe a lot of other ice age creatures
01:10:27that expanded across the face of the planet, eventually into northern Asia,
01:10:31were carrying diseases themselves, were carrying along animals
01:10:35that they domesticated, maybe like dogs, or just parasites
01:10:39and what have you that was in their cultural baggage,
01:10:43that all of this came along with them.
01:10:47And as the humans met up with species in new areas,
01:10:51it is possible, and there are in fact modern examples
01:10:55that can vary from their original host to a new host
01:10:59and cause absolutely humongous scale of mortality.
01:11:03So it can happen, and the only question now is
01:11:07can we show it as a relevant kind of hypothesis for the Pleistocene extinctions.
01:11:11Clues to what caused this massive ice age die-off
01:11:15may elude us for some time to come
01:11:19or may be contained in the frozen log.
01:11:25By early October, hatangas wrapped in a blanket of snow
01:11:29it will wear almost all year.
01:11:33Temperatures plunge to minus 15 degrees,
01:11:37and the city prepares for a polar night that will last for months.
01:11:41With the explorations of summer now behind him,
01:11:45Bernard returns to the creature awaiting him underground.
01:11:49This season's finds and scientific work
01:11:53may help him better understand the meaning of last year's discovery,
01:11:57but the reunion doesn't go exactly as planned.
01:12:01In the early hours of the next year,
01:12:05Bernhard returns to the creature awaiting him underground.
01:12:09But the reunion doesn't go exactly as planned.
01:12:27While he was away,
01:12:31someone has flooded his alcoves with frozen fish.
01:12:39But I don't want that some parasite
01:12:43or some virus on the fish,
01:12:47but some pollution come to the alcove.
01:12:51I need to collect some data on the...
01:13:01Unbelievable.
01:13:05Sometimes you think,
01:13:09I have checked all the problems I can have,
01:13:13and you try to think what can happen more,
01:13:17and you try to think about the worst.
01:13:21But you cannot imagine what really can happen,
01:13:25even if you try to find in your imagination.
01:13:29So it's a good experience.
01:13:33Bernhard is skeptical about the setback.
01:13:37He's confident that once the fish is moved to other storage,
01:13:41the science can begin again.
01:13:45The temperature here is kept at a bone-chilling 5 degrees,
01:13:49climate that suits the frozen block,
01:13:53but makes the work a bit uncomfortable for humans.
01:13:57Eight new hair dryers hasten the melting process,
01:14:01reconnecting with a lost world.
01:14:05As they melt the block inch by inch,
01:14:09Dick keeps careful records of the evidence
01:14:13emerging from each quadrant.
01:14:17Each man wonders what lies within
01:14:21and how the jacob mammoth remains will eventually surface.
01:14:25Too much heat causes sealing drips
01:14:29Bernhard would like to add more hair dryers
01:14:33to speed up the melting process, but it's too risky.
01:14:41By late autumn, the cave has been transformed.
01:14:45Tusks from all over the Tymere fill the alcoves,
01:14:49each from a different mammoth.
01:14:53Well then, here we are, 100 tusks.
01:14:57It's amazing.
01:15:01Paleontologist Daniel Fisher of the University of Michigan
01:15:05has studied mammoths for 20 years,
01:15:09searching for information buried in prehistoric ivory.
01:15:13By analyzing the circumstances of growth and life
01:15:17for animals like these, these mammoths in Siberia,
01:15:21we're going to understand much better what the environment was like
01:15:25and how mammoths' structures and compositions
01:15:29will give us that sort of information and allow us to say
01:15:33whether these animals were living under very stressful conditions
01:15:37or relatively benign conditions.
01:15:39Bernhard has encouraged him to take a more thorough sample
01:15:43from the jacob's tusks.
01:15:45I am excited about what we will find
01:15:48from looking at the jacob mammoth.
01:15:51It represents essentially a control sample,
01:15:54which is what it looked like before the end came.
01:16:02We've taken a core from the growing end of this tusk
01:16:05in order to look at the last phase of the animal's life.
01:16:08The time of death is represented here at the top,
01:16:12and down below that are the 8 or 10 years
01:16:15preceding the death of the animal.
01:16:17Preliminary findings from the tusk tell Dan
01:16:20that the jacob mammoth was in generally good health,
01:16:23living in his environment,
01:16:25and died in late winter or early spring.
01:16:28He may have died accidentally, since at 47 years old
01:16:32he was still 12 years shy of the average mammoth's lifespan.
01:16:39From the tests he ran in his Amsterdam lab,
01:16:42Bas van Geel has his own idea of what happened.
01:16:47We found the flowers of Artemisia,
01:16:51and some of these flowers are still closed.
01:16:54They're not really flowers, but were fossilized
01:16:57at the moment that the pollen was still inside,
01:17:00and the flower was closed, which means that's not normal.
01:17:04What it means is that the Artemisia's life cycle
01:17:07was interrupted before the height of summer.
01:17:10Bas thinks a mudstream may have covered the dead jacob mammoth,
01:17:14and the flowers trapped in the dirt were preserved beside him.
01:17:18If, near the end of the Ice Age,
01:17:21the temperatures on the Timere changed dramatically,
01:17:24as the climatic theory holds,
01:17:27rainfall could have caused massive mudstreams.
01:17:48The muddy flows could have buried the jacob mammoth's body,
01:17:52sealing out oxygen that causes decay.
01:17:56By the time winter's icy breath froze the earth,
01:18:00the carcass was entombed and would lie alone and undisturbed
01:18:04for well over 20,000 years.
01:18:09Did the jacob mammoth die of natural causes,
01:18:13or was it an accident?
01:18:16As work on the mammoth block continues,
01:18:19new evidence may lead to answers.
01:18:47The three suns,
01:18:50an optical effect that occurs in cold, clear skies of the high Arctic.
01:18:57It's October.
01:19:00Soon, when Hatonga becomes snowbound by winter storms,
01:19:03the scientists will be forced to abandon their research for another year.
01:19:17Bernard wants to work as much as he can in the cave before that day arrives.
01:19:23The satisfaction he experienced during the summer,
01:19:26as more bones and tusks were discovered,
01:19:29has been replaced by a pressing urgency to continue melting the mammoth block
01:19:33and revealing the secrets within.
01:19:39For me, it's very strange.
01:19:41I'm working on this, thinking what I will find under.
01:19:45I hope each time to find the skin, but it's more deep.
01:19:49On each step, I have a new question.
01:19:54And I'm sharing between two things,
01:19:58going fast, fast, fast to see more,
01:20:01and at the same time, taking care to not warm too much the hair.
01:20:16Up till now, only small fragments of ancient life
01:20:20have been sifted out of the permafrost.
01:20:23But below the steaming earth,
01:20:25less than four inches from the top of the block,
01:20:28Bernard finds a smooth white bone.
01:20:34By the time the scientists arrive at the cave,
01:20:37Bernard has almost fully exposed what is definitely a mammoth rib.
01:20:46This discovery ignites their interest,
01:20:50and a flurry of heating and scraping begins in earnest.
01:20:54Bones, hair, and even soft tissue begin to rise out of the sediment.
01:21:01No conditions.
01:21:11There are many plastic bags under the table over there.
01:21:15Because maybe the people who start to approach the Zharkov
01:21:19become a friend,
01:21:21I have not any more this sentiment that somebody will steal me something.
01:21:26One year ago, even when Dickmal started to work with a hairdryer,
01:21:30I was a little bit jealous. It's crazy.
01:21:33Now it's okay. I cannot do all of this by myself.
01:21:36So as much as people can be involved in, it's okay.
01:21:39I'm very comfortable now.
01:21:42A small shred of what looks like ancient muscle tissue
01:21:46captures everyone's attention.
01:21:49I think it's a muscle-like structure.
01:21:53Probably this is an underlayer of skin.
01:21:56Probably this is the muscles which are very close to bones.
01:22:03But it's not a cartilage.
01:22:05When I saw this, these beautiful ribs and this piece of skin,
01:22:09which is probably muscles,
01:22:11that's a little bit disappointing.
01:22:14We expect, and everybody in the world expects,
01:22:17much more of an almost complete carcass.
01:22:20We can't make any prediction on the basis
01:22:22just that we have a block of 22 tons
01:22:25and it could have anything in it.
01:22:27I'm very excited that we've turned up anything at all.
01:22:30I had no idea, no expectation
01:22:32that we would do as well as we already have done.
01:22:34This is just the first few centimeters
01:22:36and we're already turning up soft tissue and bone.
01:22:39My first contact with the Zharkov was a wonderful piece of air
01:22:44with a smell, with a color, and with everything.
01:22:47And now we have found some bones broken.
01:22:52And of course I'm glad that Ross, Alexei and Dick
01:22:56are happy about what we found.
01:23:00But for me I'm a little bit disappointed
01:23:03because I was expecting a mammoth like a toy.
01:23:09But now I think that what we have in the block
01:23:12is more important than a toy.
01:23:14We have something that will help us
01:23:16understand what happened 10,000 years ago.
01:23:27As temperatures plummet,
01:23:29the Hatanga River becomes choked with ice,
01:23:32another sign that the season of exploration is coming to a close.
01:23:41Thrilled by their first discoveries,
01:23:43the scientists are eager for more signs of life from the block,
01:23:47and time is running out.
01:23:50All right.
01:23:52So this is all one vertebra now, right?
01:23:54That's one, and there's one here.
01:23:56You can see this is the...
01:23:58It's a large one. I think it's a thoracic.
01:24:00Oh, it must be because there are attachments for ribs.
01:24:03That's great.
01:24:05What we see is this is a thoracic vertebra,
01:24:08and this is one, and there's one here as well.
01:24:12The scientists will leave here with new ideas,
01:24:15heaps of sediment, and scores of plastic vials and sacks,
01:24:19each a time capsule from the Ice Age.
01:24:22And, of course, there's the promise of next year.
01:24:26Now I see that we can excavate a lot of bones
01:24:30because we already found vertebraes and ribs,
01:24:34and some other bones can bring for us
01:24:39some muscles on the bones.
01:24:42So we will see.
01:24:44So far, four vertebrae and two ribs
01:24:48have made their way out of the permafrost,
01:24:51causing the scientists to re-evaluate how much mammoth is inside.
01:24:57Some of the Zharkov bones appear to lie in anatomical position.
01:25:02Others may have shifted over the millennia.
01:25:05Carefully thawing and preserving the remains hidden in this block
01:25:10could take years.
01:25:15Night falls on Hatonga.
01:25:18Another phase of scientific work is coming to a close.
01:25:24Willie Musk oxen, ancient horses, Willie mammoths,
01:25:28hundreds of precious Ice Age fossils
01:25:31lie on the shelves of this temporary storage shack.
01:25:37Dating their extinction might help explain how and why they disappeared.
01:25:44With the help of Alexey Tikhonov and Dick Moe,
01:25:47Ross McPhee is taking bone samples for radiocarbon dating,
01:25:51a technique that will allow him to pinpoint the exact year an animal died.
01:25:56Yeah, yeah.
01:25:59In science, it's often necessary to do what's called destructive sampling.
01:26:03We need to date representatives of these individual species
01:26:07in order to know when they lived on the Taimyr Peninsula.
01:26:10It's always a problem trying to date an extinction.
01:26:14What we can do is date as many as we can,
01:26:18and then we see what we have.
01:26:20And if it turns out that we get some very different dates
01:26:23than anybody else has gotten,
01:26:25then we have something very interesting going on,
01:26:28and that would convince us to go after that species a little bit more
01:26:32and try and get some more dates.
01:26:34Ross will take a huge sampling.
01:26:37Fossils from 50 different animals from the Taimyr Peninsula
01:26:40will be radiocarbon dated.
01:26:47If he can date any mammoths to the Holocene,
01:26:50a period which began 10,000 years ago and continues to the present,
01:26:54it will be very big news.
01:26:59One of the main aims of our project
01:27:02to find here also Holocene mammoths,
01:27:05probably which coexist with the humans 3,000 or 5,000 years ago.
01:27:11But when results come back,
01:27:13the findings on mammal extinction seem to match those of older studies in Siberia.
01:27:19On the Taimyr, the youngest mammoth fossils
01:27:22date at slightly more than 10,000 years old,
01:27:25almost, but not quite, a contemporary of man.
01:27:29But scientists remain hopeful
01:27:31that they'll ultimately find a Holocene mammoth here in a land
01:27:35where extinctions came late.
01:27:37Long after mammoths and other megafauna
01:27:40vanished from Europe and other parts of Asia,
01:27:43Willie Musk Oxen lived on the Taimyr,
01:27:46as recently as 3,000 years ago.
01:27:49The Musk Ox somehow went extinct,
01:27:52but his cousin now thrives here.
01:27:55Might it one day be possible to reintroduce the Willie mammoth?
01:27:59What we're going to do is to look at the DNA of the mammoths themselves
01:28:03and we'll have a very good idea of certain parts of the genetic information
01:28:09relating to mammoths and their biological background.
01:28:13Aside from the radiocarbon dating studies,
01:28:15samples are being taken in the hope of finding well-preserved DNA,
01:28:19samples that may help resurrect the species someday.
01:28:27At the Audubon Institute in New Orleans,
01:28:30experts are trying to save today's endangered species
01:28:33before they go extinct.
01:28:35Dr. Betsy Dresser is working on cloning endangered exotic cats.
01:28:40Perhaps her work will help bring us just one step closer
01:28:44to reviving an extinct Willie mammoth.
01:28:47Every so often the question comes up, you know,
01:28:50should extinct animals be cloned?
01:28:52Extinction was a natural state of affairs, if you will.
01:28:55But what's changed is that man has become the dominant species,
01:29:00and so we have accelerated that rate of extinction to such a high degree
01:29:06that it's just out of control.
01:29:09And unless we as a species do something to try to reverse that,
01:29:14we're probably going to be the only species someday left on this planet.
01:29:19This is what we call our frozen zoo.
01:29:21This is a way that I believe wildlife's going to be moved in the future.
01:29:24We can carry a herd of animals, if you will, in one of these small tanks.
01:29:29We freeze the reproductive cells of endangered species, embryos, sperm, eggs.
01:29:36What we have really is a genetic bank here
01:29:40that we're preserving as kind of a safety net for the future
01:29:43because we don't know what the technologies will be,
01:29:45but we do know that if the technology had been around
01:29:48when the Willie mammoth was alive, for example,
01:29:50we'd be able to bring them back because the cells have been properly frozen.
01:29:54For me as a scientist, I have a curiosity about animals
01:29:57that used to live on this earth,
01:29:59and I guess I would say that, sure, if the resources were there,
01:30:04oh my gosh, I would give anything to see a Willie mammoth.
01:30:08What you would need to create a Willie mammoth would be, first and foremost,
01:30:11you would need the genetic material from a Willie mammoth
01:30:14that was intact, that was good,
01:30:16that was something that you would be able to use to activate a cell to reproduce it
01:30:23so that, indeed, it could result in an embryo, a developing embryo.
01:30:29The mechanics, really, of cloning are to take an egg,
01:30:33and we have a small pipette that can actually suck or remove the nucleus in this egg
01:30:40that leaves space for another nucleus.
01:30:44So we take a skin sample, for example,
01:30:48we can take it from an earlobe, we can take it from anywhere on the body,
01:30:52and that skin sample contains sometimes thousands of cells,
01:30:57and each one of those cells has its own nucleus.
01:31:00We take that cell and put it then into the egg where the nucleus has been removed.
01:31:10I think the odds of finding intact DNA from the Willie mammoth are so very slim
01:31:17because we have found today, of course, in our work in cryobiology,
01:31:22when you free cells, there's many things you must do to prepare those cells to be frozen.
01:31:26Cells are made up of a lot of water.
01:31:29And, of course, when you freeze water,
01:31:32it freezes and causes almost like ice crystals that damage the cell membrane.
01:31:36So unless cells are properly frozen,
01:31:40in most all cases the cells are damaged, and thus the DNA is damaged.
01:31:45The DNA molecules, the building blocks of life,
01:31:49fall apart very quickly after an animal's death.
01:31:52And once they've fallen apart, there's not much you can do with them.
01:31:55It's like Humpty Dumpty.
01:31:57Once he's down there on the ground in pieces,
01:32:00there's no way of putting him back together again, that we know of.
01:32:03Now this doesn't mean that a decade from now I'll have to eat my words
01:32:07because some method is developed to find a way of stringing back the genes
01:32:12and the parts of genes into functioning chromosomes
01:32:15and allowing development to go forward so that you get a viable offspring.
01:32:18But as it looks right now, it's really beyond our capacity.
01:32:22You know, I've never been one to say never in life,
01:32:25but who knows what could happen with this.
01:32:29A hundred years from now, we may be doing a lot of things
01:32:32that we're not even thinking about now or dreaming about.
01:32:35Maybe somebody will bring back dinosaurs and woolly mammoths
01:32:38because that's possible in the future, but not today.
01:32:44On the tundra, miles from Hatonga,
01:32:47plans are taking shape for next season's expedition.
01:32:56This place is very well known in Hatonga.
01:32:59They have found four or five years ago the tusk and the head of the mammoth.
01:33:05And each year it was impossible to make an excavation
01:33:08because of the weather condition.
01:33:11Much has been learned from raising the Zharkov mammoth.
01:33:14Preserving it in its frozen state has opened new avenues for scientific work.
01:33:19It's an approach that will likely be applied to the study of other mammals.
01:33:25Now we have this dog, and he started to specialize in mammoth flesh.
01:33:30So now we can use this dog to try to find mammoths.
01:33:33No problem.
01:33:36Good boy.
01:33:38The young husky isn't the only one who'd like to get started on a dig this year.
01:33:43The bones and hair are too tempting for any of Bernard's team to resist.
01:33:48That can be something.
01:33:50Yeah. No?
01:33:53Yes.
01:33:55I think it's organic.
01:33:58It's not only organic. It belongs to the soft tissue.
01:34:01Of course, it's very hard to say, really, how many remains are here.
01:34:07The same with the ice block. It's very hard to say how many remains are inside the block.
01:34:12The main purpose of this program is to find more and more remains
01:34:17of places and animals on Taimyr Peninsula.
01:34:21And now we can see how it's the future of this program.
01:34:25It's very exciting to rebuild something that happened 10,000 or 20,000 years ago.
01:34:30And we have an opportunity here because time is going slowly.
01:34:35You can work only two months or three months a year
01:34:38because after this everything is frozen, it's dark.
01:34:41So the story I have in my mind, in my heart, is to travel back in time.
01:34:51The tundra, when everything is frozen, is a very good place to travel back in ancient time.
01:34:57This is, for me, a big fascination.
01:35:13Only a single day remains before the polar night descends on Hatonga
01:35:18and the expedition pulls out until spring.
01:35:21Dick Mull heads to the cave to pay a final visit this season to the Zharkov mammoth,
01:35:26the animal that has occupied his thoughts for the past few years.
01:35:39After weeks of work, he now knows from experience how painfully slow the process is,
01:35:45but he's determined to see it through.
01:35:51From studies so far, the most concrete clues to the mammoth's world
01:35:55have been gleaned from the least visible but most accessible source,
01:35:59pollen lodged in the animal's hair.
01:36:04Seven inches of sediment are gone from five sections of block.
01:36:09Now the work on the Zharkov mammoth will continue in laboratories across the world.
01:36:16In addition to the pollen, several ribs and vertebrae,
01:36:20the first sliver of soft tissue, and ancient blades of grass have been collected for study.
01:36:26Each day, the something inside the block becomes clearer.
01:36:34As the defrosting goes on, I have no doubt that some of my colleagues
01:36:38are going to be very interested in what we're going to do next.
01:36:42I have no doubt that some of my colleagues are going to find things to work on
01:36:47that they had no idea would turn out to be so important.
01:36:51We don't, at this point, know what we're going to find.
01:36:53Once again, things like disease, or at least the biological picture of the animal at death.
01:36:59Soft tissue may eventually provide science with yet another avenue
01:37:03into the intricate world of DNA reconstruction.
01:37:07Bas van Geel also hopes to look deeper into the block.
01:37:11The ideal sample of this mammoth site will, and that's what I hope,
01:37:16will come from the stomach of the animal.
01:37:19The parasites and other organic matter that fill the stomach
01:37:23should provide the most detailed clues about the mammoth's diet, health and environment.
01:37:31The animal's tusks have offered scientists like Dan Fisher
01:37:35the most thorough record of the mammoth's life to date.
01:37:39We've still just begun to do the studies on the Zhokhov mammoth,
01:37:43but from the work that we've done now,
01:37:46there were no signs of ill health in the tusk record of the last three years of life.
01:37:53So what have we learned about the death of the Zhokhov mammoth?
01:37:57He was probably traveling with others when he died,
01:38:00moving south to avoid the harsh Siberian winter,
01:38:04searching for food.
01:38:07When the herd approached a waterhole, the Zhokhov mammoth ran into trouble.
01:38:14Whether he became trapped, slipped and fell,
01:38:18or suffered from an earlier injury is unclear.
01:38:24But by the time his companions turned to see him, he was down.
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01:38:34Unable to help, they were final witnesses to his death.
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01:38:57Instinct drove them to move on,
01:39:00while the Zhokhov mammoth was slowly sealed in his icy tomb.
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01:39:14The inquiry into his life and death goes on, inspiring new exploration.
01:39:21Scientists and adventurers will mine this subterranean kingdom for its treasures
01:39:26for as long as it takes to solve the mystery of their disappearance.
01:39:32Here, at the edge of the Arctic, they'll continue to ask why,
01:39:38knowing the answers are out there, somewhere in the land of the mammoth.
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