Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: mammoths
From: sbishop@desire.wright.edu
Date: 12 Apr 92 19:30:37 EST
Organization: Wright State University 


Since Ted Holden has repeatedly insisted that the mammoth whose remains
were found in Siberia in 1901 was preserved by some great catastrophy as
described in Velokovsky's books, I decided to research the topic.  I found
several books on the subject, including the original book written by one
of the scientists who actually examined, preserved and transported the
mammoth remains from Siberia.  

Preservation of the mammoth remains was somewhat different than has been 
imagined by the uninformed.  The mammoths were 'mummified', a process that
is quite easily done in a cold environment.  Guthrie compares it to the
process that packaged meat undergoes in a freezer.  

The following is from Frozen Fauna of the Mammoth Steppe by Guthrie:

"The word *mummy* has long been used to describe carcasses preserved in
northern permafrost.  Some have objected to this usage on the basis that
preservation by freezing is unlike 'real' mummification of an embalmed or
dried corpse.  However, frozen carcasses, like Dima and Blue Babe, (two
well preserved carcasses described in his book, Dima is a baby mammoth,
Blue Babe is a bison) are indeed desiccated and fully deserve to be called
mummies." (Guthrie)

"Underground frost mummification should not be confused with freeze-drying,
which occurs when a body is frozen and moisture is removed bu sublimatioin,
a process accelerated by a partial vacuum. .......  I have often freeze-dried
items, sometimes inadvertantly, during our long Alaskan winters, where the
temperature seldom rises above freezing for eight months of the year." 
(Guthrie)

"However, the desiccation of fossil mummies is quite different than freeze-
drying.  Moisture contained in a buried carcase is not released to the 
atmosphere bue is crystallized in place, in ice lenses around the mummy.
This process is more comparable to tightly wrapped food left too long in
a freezer.  When a stew is first frozen, it swells to a somewhat larger
size, bulging the sealed plastic container.  The longer it stays in the
freezer, month after month, the more the moisture begins to separate, forming
ice crystals inside the container.  The stew itself shrinks and desiccates.
Year follows year, and the stew becomes more and more desiccated, as ice
segregates from it.  Eventually, the stew has become a shriveled, dehydrated
block; unlike freeze-drying in which the object theoretically retains its
original form, the stew is shrunken in size and surrounded by a network of
clear ice crystals.  Soft tissue becomes mummified and shrunken down, looking
like a desiccated mummy dried in the sun.  These two processes of cold
mummification and freeze-drying were not distinctly understood by people
unfamiliar with long winters and the back corners of deep freezers" (Guthrie)

The picture in the Sutcliffe book shows the front leg of the Beresovka
mammoth.  The muscles are dried straps over the bones, quite as Guthrie
describes, looking very mummified.

As for instant freezing, as claimed by Ted Holden, there is no evidence of 
that.  The Berezovka mammoth shows evidence of having been buried in a 
landslide, the cold mud acting as preservative and the underlying permafrost
completing the process by freezing the carcass.  

E. W. Pfizenmayer was one of the scientists who actually recovered and studied 
the Berezovka mammoth.  I was able to obtain his book, _Siberian Man and 
Mammoth_ through interlibrary loan.  It's quite interesting, the mammoth
story is only a part of his book, he also commented at length on people
who were living in Siberia at the time of the scientists' journey to get
to the site of the mammoth.


Pfizenmayer says about the mammoth, "Baron E. von Toll, the well-known 
geological exploere of Arctic Siberia, who perished while leading the Russian
expedition in 1903, had covered in 1890 most of the sites of previous finds
of mammoth and rhinoceros bodies in carrying out his professional 
investigations.  In doin so he had extablished that the mammoth found by 
Adams in 1799 buried at the mouth of the Lena in a crevace of a cliff from
200 to 260 feet high, and sent by him to St. Petersberg, had been frozen
in a bank of diluvial ice on the slope of the river.  This ice bank was
not (as Adams believed and stated in his description of the site of the 
find) the remains of the old drift-ice whose crevices had been filled with
mud.   The fissures in the bank of diluvial ice on the Lena, which was far
biger than ours, had, according to Toll's findings, gradually filled with 
earth from the top downwards, and its upper surface covered with alluvial
soil to such an extent that a fair number of the tunda plants were able to
take root on it.
Toll concluded that this particular Siberian ice was in no case recent, but
was the remains of diluvial inland ice, which once covered the whole world,
and then was gradually overlaid with earth, surviving to this day in the 
Arctic regions in ice-banks of varying extent.
Our investigations confirmed his opinion.  The proved that the animal had
ben preserved in the same way as Adams's mammoth, according to Toll, had
been.  In both cases the bodies had been enbedded in fissures of the diluvial
inland ice.  Then when the temperature fell the mud disappeared and the ice
in which they were fast frozen had kept them, complete with their soft parts,
in a state a preservation through the ages.
Before I arrived at the site, Herz had partially dug away the hill of earth 
round the body, and so both the forefeet and the hind feet were exposed.
Thse lay under the body so that it rested on them.  When one looked at the
body one had the impression that it must have suddenly fallen into an 
unexpected fissure in the ice, which it probably came across in its 
wanderings, and which may have been covered with a layer of plant-bearing
mould.  After its fall the unlucky animal must have tried to get out of its
hopeless position, for the right forefoot was doubled up and the left 
stretched forward as if it had struggled to rise.  But its strength had
apparently not been up to it, for when we dug it out still farther we
found that in its fall it had not only broken several bones, but had been
almost completely buried by the falls of earth which tumbled in on it,
so that it had suffocated.
It's death must have occurred very quickly after its fall, for we found
half-chewed food still in its mouth, between the back teeth and on its
tongue, which was in good preservation.  The food consisted of leaves and
grasses, some of the later carrying seeds.  We could tell from these that
the mammoth must have come to its miserable end in the autumn." (Pfizenmayer)


"Lapparent attributes the extinction of the mammoth to a gradual increase
in cold and a decrease in the supply of food, rather than to a cataclysmic
flood." (Guthrie)
...Quackenbush (1909) concluded that the partial mammoth mummy from 
Eschscholtz Bay, Alaska, was so deteriorated as to exclude "sudden fall in
temperature" theories...."  (Guthrie)

I am still doing research on Mammoth diet and climate at the time of the
burial of the Berezovka mammoth.  Types of data being studied, stomach and
mouth contents of the said mammoth, stomach contents of other mammoths found.
Lake bottom sediment cores, showing pollen and vegetation over the last
10,000 years.  Comments by Guthrie on how the climatic changes of the ice
age affected the ratio of edible vegetation from then to present.  Estimation
of snow depths on the Mammoth Slope are also being covered and have a large
bearing on extinction of the mammoth and other large Ice Age mammals.

I wish to challenge Ted Holden to retract his statements about mammoths.
Since he is so insistent that Velokovsky is right, even though his info
is fourth or fifth hand, does he insist that Pfizenmayer is also lying?

Sue

Guthrie, R. Dale. _Frozen Fauna of the Mammoth Steppe_, 1990, University of
Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill.

Pfizenmayer, E. W., _Siberian Man and Mammoth_, 1939. Blackie and Son, London

Sutcliffe, Anthony J., _On the Track of Ice Age Mammals_, Harvard University
Press, Cambridge, Mass.