Elsevier

Quaternary International

Volumes 142–143, January 2006, Pages 186-202
Quaternary International

Results of the CERPOLEX/Mammuthus Expeditions on the Taimyr Peninsula, Arctic Siberia, Russian Federation

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2005.03.016Get rights and content

Abstract

During a series of expeditions organized by CERPOLEX/Mammuthus to the Taimyr region in northern Siberia several mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) carcasses were discovered and subsequently excavated and studied. The oldest specimen is the Arilakh Mammoth (ca. 55,800 BP). Much younger are the Jarkov Mammoth (ca. 20,380 BP) and the Fishhook Mammoth (ca. 20,620 BP), and still much younger are well-preserved Holocene mammoth remains (<10,000 BP). Some paleobotanical data and descriptions of accompanying fauna provide insight into the ecology of the region during Late Pleistocene times. The faunal collapse at the end of the Pleistocene seems to be the result of increasing temperatures, greater humidity, increased snow cover, formation of insulating plant layers, later thawing of the soil, and a lower herbivore density amplifying the climatic effects.

Introduction

At the second International Mammoth Conference held in May 1999 in Rotterdam (The Netherlands) Buigues and Mol (1999) announced the discovery of the Jarkov Mammoth in the permafrost of the Taimyr Peninsula, Arctic Siberia. This male individual of the woolly mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius, died at an age of 47–49 AEY, on the Taimyr Peninsula, ca. 20,380 BP. In September/October 1999, introducing a new technique, the CERPOLEX/Mammuthus team excavated a huge block of frozen sediment that likely included the remains of the mammoth. On October 17th, this 23-ton block of permafrost was successfully airlifted by an MI 26 helicopter. It was placed in an ice cave system in Khatanga, ca. 250 km south of the locality (Bolshaya Balakhnya River) where the Jarkov Mammoth had been discovered in 1997. The goal of the team is to defrost the frozen block in the safety of the ice cave at a constant temperature of −11 to −15 °C, in order to collect as many data as possible from the sediment surrounding the remains. This event in 1999 was the start of the CERPOLEX/Mammuthus programme “Who or What Killed the Mammoths” to contribute to the unsolved questions on the extinctions of the Pleistocene megafauna around 10,000 BP.

Section snippets

The Pleistocene fauna of the Taimyr Peninsula

The Taimyr Peninsula in the far north of Siberia is one of the most interesting places where the rich Pleistocene Mammoth Fauna can be found. This fauna is well-known from many sites in the Northern Hemisphere (Europe, Asia and North America). It is generally known that the frozen ground is preserving remains of animals such as woolly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, steppe bison, reindeer, etc., in excellent condition. Sometimes, soft parts such as skin, fur and underfur, or internal organs are

The Jarkov Mammoth

In 1997 the Jarkov Mammoth was discovered by the Jarkov family. It was excavated by CERPOLEX/Mammuthus in 1998 and 1999 (Mol et al., 2001a, Mol et al., 2001b). Since that publication, new investigations took place, including defrosting of the block in the ice cave. We present the following results:

Taimyr megafauna investigations

Vereshchagin (1959) published a paper on the Late Pleistocene megafauna of the Taimyr Peninsula. He listed the following species and the percentages of recovered skeletal remains for these species: polar fox Vulpes lagopus (14.3%), hare Lepus timidus (3.9%), mammoth Elephas primigenius (11.7%), horse Equus caballus (27.2%), bison Bison priscus priscus (1.3%), Bison priscus subsp. indet. (3.9%), musk-ox Ovibos moschatus (14.3%), reindeer Rangifer tarandus (20.8%), narwhal Monodon monoceros

Rangifer tarandus

During the summer of 2001, dry weather conditions led to a rapid lowering of the water level of Lake Taimyr. In August of that year, on the northwestern shore of the lake and 3 km NE of Cape Sablera (74°31′N, 100°30′E), an almost complete Rangifer tarandus skeleton was discovered in silty sediments of the defrosted lake bottom. The find (CERPOLEX/Mammuthus collection number: 2002/471) represents the first fossil reindeer skeleton known so far from Taimyr, and probably from Arctic Siberia in

Methodological background

Preservation of DNA in mammoth carcasses or isolated bones has been a source of many developments in sequencing of ancient DNA for the last 10 yr (Greenwood, 2001). Independent studies have revealed that, notwithstanding that specimen age plays an obvious role in DNA preservation, three categories of other factors have to be taken into account: (1) taphonomy and fossilization, (2) preservation conditions through time, and (3) recent conservation. In the first category we include environmental

14C content of the Arilakh Mammoth (2002/473)

A piece of bone from the Arilakh Mammoth (2002/473; Fig. 22) was submitted to the Groningen Radiocarbon laboratory. We performed 4 measurements of the 14C content. First, bone marrow was sampled. The sample material underwent standard chemical pretreatment (Mook and Streurman, 1983), and was combusted into CO2. A few ml of this CO2 was first transformed into graphite and analyzed by the AMS facility (Van der Plicht et al., 2000), to relatively quickly obtain an initial date. This AMS analysis

Late Pleistocene vegetation and climate in Taimyr lowland and the interaction between vegetation and megafauna

Several continuous sedimentological records from lakes were studied in order to reconstruct the vegetation and climate of late Pleistocene (middle and late Weichselian) and Holocene lowland Taimyr (Hahne and Melles, 1997, Hahne and Melles, 1999; Niessen et al., 1999; Siegert et al., 1999; Kienast et al., 2001; Andreev, 2002, Andreev et al., 2003). These studies are of considerable value for understanding the environment of the Late Pleistocene fauna and the interrelation between fauna and

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