The Proboscidea of the Past

[Spalea]

" Fifty thousand years ago, Siberia looked very different from how it does today. Instead of forest and scraggy tundra, the region was blanketed in lush grasslands and fertile soils, and herds of woolly mammoths roamed the open plains.

Then little by little, towards the end of the last Ice Age, their numbers started to diminish. No one really understands why. Some blame human hunting, some climate change, others a bit of both. What we do know is that they disappeared from Siberia 10,000 years ago, then from their final hiding place – a northerly island called Wrangel – just 3,700 years ago.
Now Siberia is a massive mammoth graveyard, and it’s estimated that the remains of hundreds of thousands of individual animals lie buried in the permafrost.
As our world warms, the permafrost is melting and the remains of these fallen giants are starting to surface. Occasionally, tusks can be spotted poking out of landlocked tundra, but more often than not, they are found in places where the permafrost erodes naturally, like river banks and coastlines.
In settlements that turned into ghost towns after the fall of communism, mammoth tusks have offered a lifeline to the region’s indigenous people, who are still legally allowed to collect them. "

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