Frozen Fauna of the Mammoth Steppe: The Story of Blue Babe Read online

  The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 60637

  The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

  © 1990 by The University of Chicago

  All rights reserved. Published 1990

  Printed in the United States of America

  99 98 97 96 95 94 93 92 91 5432

  ISBN 978-0-226-15971-3 (e-book)

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Guthrie, R. Dale (Russell Dale), 1936–

  Frozen fauna of the mammoth steppe: the story of Blue Babe / R. Dale Guthrie.

  p. cm.

  Bibliography: p.

  Includes index.

  ISBN 0-226-31122-8 (alk. paper).—ISBN 0-226-31123-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  1. Bison priscus—Alaska—Fairbanks Region. 2. Paleontology—Alaska—Fairbanks Region. 3. Paleobiology. I. Title.

  QE882.U3G88 1990

  569′.73—dc20

  89-4896

  CIP

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

  FROZEN FAUNA OF THE MAMMOTH STEPPE

  The Story of Blue Babe

  R. DALE GUTHRIE

  The University of Chicago Press

  Chicago and London

  This book is dedicated to my closest comrades and colleagues in pursuit of the Arctic’s frozen fauna: Bjorn Kurtén, Eirik Granqvist, Andrei Sher, and N. K. Vereshchagin. Bjorn departed before I could thank him in this formal way. We have his books; we miss the man.

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Acknowledgments

  1. The Curse of the Frozen Mammoths

  2. Unearthing Blue Babe

  3. Reconstructing Blue Babe’s Death

  4. Reconstructing Blue Babe’s Appearance

  5. Tracking Down Blue Babe’s Missing Hump

  6. Steppe Bison Ethology

  7. Steppe Bison Ecology and Phylogeny

  8. The Mammoth Steppe

  9. Arguments and Controversies about the Mammoth Steppe

  10. Bison Hunting on the Mammoth Steppe

  11. Preparation and Exhibition of Blue Babe

  Appendix A

  Appendix B

  References

  Index

  PREFACE

  There are stories throughout the north woods about a giant of a man, Paul Bunyan, who roamed the forests and accomplished heroic feats with his outsized broadax. Paul’s companion was an immense blue ox he called Blue Babe. The unearthing in 1979 of a giant Pleistocene bovine carcass, coated with blue vivianite crystals, near Fairbanks, Alaska, recalled the image of Babe buried somewhere in the northern forests, and so from the first we called the mummy Blue Babe.

  Were the Bunyan tales a bit more credible, were we living in a time when stories told to children about giants were not so clearly fanciful, the discovery of Blue Babe would have been sure proof of Bunyan and his exploits. Occasional finds of frozen mummies probably substantiated beliefs held by earlier peoples: that a strange community of large creatures existed beneath the northern forests, living entirely underground except when they mistakenly surfaced along a stream bank, for that was where their bodies and bones were found emerging from the mud.

  The context of our modern explanations, the story we tell our children of woolly mammoths and great ice ages, is fairly recent. In fact we are still in the formative stages of developing our understanding about the Pleistocene animals, vegetation, landforms and climate that once occurred in the north. While Paul and Babe may be myths, there was a time when real giants did roam the earth. When people first developed the technology to move into the north, as ice of the last glaciation was retreating, they hunted such giants: woolly mammoths and rhinoceroses, and a big woolly bison like the one described here.

  We have solid evidence, however, that this bison lived before people colonized North America. Blue Babe walked the Fairbanks hills about 36,000 years ago. In Europe Neanderthal families were still lounging on bison robes beside their fires, eating bison that closely resembled Blue Babe.

  Although as a paleontologist I think and talk about things happening tens of thousands of years ago, it is hard for me to imagine the depth of time we measure by 36,000 years. If we were to walk through a geological time scale back to when Blue Babe lived, we would pass the peak of the Roman Empire at 2,000 years ago in the first few strides. At 3,000 years the first pottery occurs in the New World and Tutankhamen has been buried for two hundred years. At 6,000 years ago there are no real urban centers, only tribal villages. Around 9,000 years ago the first domestic plants and livestock occur; prior to that, people all over the world were hunters and gatherers. At 11,000 years ago we find that Pleistocene species of large mammals, like ground sloths and mammoths, still lived in North America. At 13,000 years ago large ice masses remained from the last glaciation. At 18,000 years the world was locked in the midst of a full glacial climate; Hudson Bay was the center of a giant ice mass, over a mile thick, which extended south to central Illinois. Land that is now the American Great Lakes warped downward under the enormous weight of continental ice. This tremendous ice mass flowed imperceptibly southward, grinding the landscape into a flat plane as far south as Missouri. The earth’s crust under those areas is still slowly rebounding upward, recovering from its heavy glacial load.

  The vegetation of the north was quite different at this time. There were no north woods; trees could not grow in the cold, dry glacial climate. London to Moscow to Irkutsk, Irkutsk to Fairbanks, and Fairbanks to Whitehorse was a windswept, arid, treeless landscape, a grassy collar over halfway around the globe. This landscape was not inhabited by people; they could live only to the south in the woodland borders of the French Perigord and the Russian Plain where there was wood for fuel and warm south-facing slopes even in winter. The most obvious inhabitants of this northern no-man’s-land were cold-hardy species: horses, reindeer, mammoths, and bison, which did not depend on woody plants for food or shelter but could survive out in the open, eating grasses and grasslike plants.

  By 25,000 years we are closer to a major warming episode in the middle of the glacial, and at 30,000 in our backward-running time scale, trees again return to the north. By 36,000 years the climate is a little more moist and no so extreme as during the full glacial. There is our bison, walking up a creek bottom early one winter morning when the low sun just clips the ridge crests with pink-gold light. Here begin the first steps in a series of unique events that eventually bring this Pleistocene bull bison and his story to us 36,000 years later.

  An early lithograph, made from a sketch by T. Woodward, of the “ice cliffs” of Kotzebue Sound, Alaska, where fossil bones of the mammoth fauna commonly occur and where frozen mummies have also been found. The misconception that mummies occur in clear ice is shown in this drawing. The cliffs of Kotzebue Sound are indeed frozen, but they consist of frozen silt penetrated by ice veins and wedges. Unlike those shown here the real cliffs do not look like buried glaciers. Mummies occur in the frozen silt. (Courtesy of the Anchorage Museum of History and Art.)

  Because Blue Babe was buried and deep-frozen, his carcass is like a book thrown through time—bypassing the first colonists in North America, the first urbanities, and early agriculturists—a book unknown to early Romans or to Charles Darwin. But this story unfolds erratically. We view it from torn fragments teased bit by bit from muddy hair and patches of skin, woven from apparent digressions including Montana bison, African lions, and Iberian cave artists—the story of a real Blue Babe.
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  Prior to this study I worked with bones of hundreds of Alaskan steppe bison who, in life, were neither more nor less important than Blue Babe. In much the same way, the thousands of boys who lived at the time of young Tutankhamen may have also had uniquely interesting lives. The bodies of Blue Babe and Tutankhamen are special because they come with a story—stories decipherable from strange marks and once-exquisite robes.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Walter Roman and his family, who operate the mine where Blue Babe was found, are at the top of my list of acknowledgments. Thanks also are due to Dan Eagan, then president of the Alaska Gold Company, which owns the mine property. Their interest and cooperation enabled us to salvage enough information to get the whole Blue Babe story. Their generous donation of Blue Babe to the University of Alaska Museum lets us all enjoy him.

  My most grateful thanks goes to Mary Lee, my wife, who was a colleague on the excavation. She also played such a large role as editor of the manuscript that her voice is as much a part of the book as mine is. My son, Owen, also was collared into being a field assistant. John Bligh, then director of the Institute of Arctic Biology, realized the importance of this mummy when it was still a ball of stinking mud, and he provided critical support when it was most needed.

  David Norton’s initial suggestion that I write the report on Blue Babe in book form and his enthusiastic support of the project has meant a lot. Tina Picolo, the departmental secretary, has labored through the rewrites and additions with her usual pleasantness. Many people have added to the book: museum and institute staff, students, and proofreaders. The National Science Foundation provided a small grant to pay for two part-time student assistants for one semester. Petrie Viljoen graciously allowed me to accompany him in his studies of lions near Savuti, Botswana.

  Traveling to the opposite end of the earth in hopes of learning something about 36,000-year-old Alaskan lions may seem like a long shot, but the firsthand exposure gave me insights that books simply cannot supply. Likewise, the opportunity to meet and study with Soviet colleagues during an earlier trip was essential to the quality of my work with Blue Babe. These and so many other occasions provided by the University of Alaska sabbatical system have truly borne fruit for me. I am especially grateful to the Institute of Arctic Biology, which was the chief sponsor of the Blue Babe project, as it is of the rest of my Alaskan research.

  1

  THE CURSE OF THE FROZEN MAMMOTHS

  Woolly mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, steppe bison, and other mummies found in the frozen soil of the far north have fascinated us in both fiction and fact. Yet much about these animals—the environment in which they lived, and how they died and were preserved—is unknown or controversial.

  In the summer of 1979, the frozen mummy of a steppe bison was unearthed at a placer gold mine just north of Fairbanks, Alaska. As the local specialist in Pleistocene mammals, I was asked to visit the site, and so began my involvement with the remains of the animal I came to call Blue Babe. This book is the story of Blue Babe and others of his kind. It is also an account of how we can look at the remains of an animal such as Blue Babe and reconstruct his history and his life, and a good deal of the world in which he lived and died. In this sense, this book is also a detective story, one that begins with the first studies of frozen mummies more than a hundred years ago.

  Floaters or Sinkers

  Modern views of the origin and history of the earth and the evolution of life itself had their origins in the first six decades of the nineteenth century, and naturalists in Europe were stimulated to develop new ideas and hypotheses in part by reports of the giant woolly mammoth carcasses found frozen in the ground in northeastern Asia. Parts of woolly mammoth and rhinoceros mummies were actually sent to Paris and London to satisfy the curiosity of naturalists and the public, which had become increasingly fascinated by the reports and finds of explorers and travelers who brought back tales and specimens of exotic plants and animals from around the globe.

  The great geologist Charles Lyell supported the “floater” theory, arguing that the woolly mammoths and rhinoceroses, so much like the elephants and rhinos recently discovered in Africa, had lived in warmer climates in central Asia, had died in floods, and had subsequently been carried far northward in floodwaters (the major rivers in northern Asia really do flow north), where they had been frozen and buried. Georges Cuvier, the famous French anatomist, wrote a lengthy challenge to this idea in 1825. He observed that these animals were adapted to cold, with long, dense pelage and thick subcutaneous fat, and that they differed from living elephants and rhinos. Cuvier proposed that they were natives of the country where they were found. Hedenstrom (1830) joined Cuvier and showed that the carcasses of lower-latitude flood victims would have been destroyed long before they reached northern latitudes, and that the frozen carcasses and bones showed no signs of alluvial transport.

  The Arctic explorer Middendorff (1848) continued to argue for river transport from milder, southern climates. An attempt at reconciliation was made by Howorth (1887), who proposed that these mammoths had lived in the north in a very warm climate that existed prior to the biblical flood and that they had been buried by silt when the waters receded. Since warmer climates did not return after the deluge, we find the presence of proscidians incongruent with northern cold. Lapparent still (1906) embraced Howorth’s compromise in his famous Traité de géologie; however, in later editions of his book, 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.

  These controversies indirectly helped fund a number of successful expeditions commissioned by the Russian Academy of Sciences and an American Museum of Natural History expedition that was funded by J. Pierpont Morgan. After that later expedition, Quackenbush (1909) concluded that the partial mammoth mummy from Eschscholtz Bay, Alaska, was so deteriorated as to exclude “sudden fall in temperature” theories and that the mammoth had not been retransported after burial. The Russian and American expeditions obtained enough evidence to show that mammoths had indeed lived in the same areas in which their remains were found and that the former climate was as cold as now.

  Once the issue was settled to the satisfaction of all, or nearly all, the next question was how the mummies had been buried. There were two main views. One was that the animals had fallen into a glacier crevasse or similar hole, often snow covered, but sometimes mud walled. Geikie (1881), in his major work on Pleistocene geology, championed the theory of Schrenk and Nehring that these creatures had been buried in snowstorms. The alternate view argued for some kind of entrapment in mud. These debates still continue.

  Brandt (1866) was an adherent of the mud trap theory, as was Tolmachoff (1929) much later. Vollosovich (1909) also supported this idea and backed it with numerous anecdotes. He himself had been caught in such a mud trap and extricated only with the help of his guides. Vollosovich proposed that a trapped mammoth would effectively obstruct a small drainage, damming up mud and creating its own depositional environment.

  There were many adherents to the snow-covered crevasse theory or some version of it, but the most influential of all was Digby (1926), who wrote a popular book titled The Mammoth and Mammoth Hunting in North East Siberia. Nevertheless, data from people who had seen these carcasses excavated indicated that the mammoths had been buried in mud rather than ice, although ice lenses were present around their carcasses. As I show, there are several interpretations for these ice lenses, and they form the basis of present-day theories about frozen mummies.

  The Berezovka Mammoth

  Until a few years ago, the Berezovka mammoth, excavated by Herz at the turn of the century, was the centerpiece of information about frozen mammoths. Unfortunately, this mummy was found before the days of rapid transportation, when it took a year for word to trickle back from Siberia to the Russian capital, Petrograd, and for an expedition to reach the site. In the winter of 1900, a cossack dealer in ivory mammoth tusks, named Y
avlovski, bought a number of tusks from a Lamut tribesman on the Kolyma River. The tribesman, named Tarbykin, said he had chopped a pair of ivory tusks from one of the hairy beasts (Digby 1926). Yavlovski reported the statement to a local police official named Horn, who forwarded word to the governor general at Yakutsk, who in turn telegraphed the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Petrograd. This relay took several months, and it was not until May 1901 that an expedition set out to investigate Tarbykin’s find. The expedition was led by Otto F. Herz (sometimes spelled Hertz), a zoologist on the Academy staff. He was accompanied by a geologist, M. D. P. Sevastianov, and a zoological preparator, M. E. V. Pfitzenmayer. It took them all summer to reach the site, where, hundreds of miles from the nearest source of supplies, they immediately began work on the mammoth. It was late September, and soon snow and frost began to hamper their work. They had to construct a log and canvas structure heated by a stove so that thawing and excavation could continue. According to the Lamut tribesmen, the head of the mammoth had been exposed two years before and many soft parts were already missing.

  The mammoth was surprisingly well preserved but had undergone decomposition (fig. 1.1). In addition to its skin parts, some internal tissues such as the tongue were also well preserved (fig. 1.2). The mammoth even had food between its teeth, including flowers distinguished as buttercups. Herz described many other strange phenomena. In the early 1900s, the characteristics of Arctic frozen ground were strange to Europeans. Ice wedge features were wondrous things—“massive walls of ice,” interpreted as underlying glaciers. Arctic explorers such as Kotzebue, Beechy, Stehanson, and Nelson (in Quackenbush 1909) had strange interpretations of this ice. They might indeed, for the origins of ice wedges are not intuitively obvious. These large ground ice formations were responsible for Herz’s idea that the mammoth must have fallen into a snow-covered glacial crevasse, an idea that still survives. However, some of the ice lenses included parts of the mammoth, and much of its hair was embedded in ice.