Mammoth — Riddle of the Ice Age

by Jonathan Sarfati

First published in:
Creation Ex Nihilo 22(2):10–15
March – May 2000

News recently flashed around the world of what many scientists hoped to be a nearly whole mammoth, found in permafrost in the Taymyr Peninsula in northern Siberia. Once again fascinated, people asked: ‘What exactly are mammoths?’, ‘Where did they come from?’, ‘When did they live?’, ‘Why did they become extinct?’ and ‘Can they be cloned?’.

What is a mammoth?

Evidently a variety of elephant, mammoths belong to the mammalian order Proboscidea. Mammoths (genus Mammuthus) had the usual elephantine features of a trunk and tusks. Mammoths had a large shoulder hump and a sloping back; small ears and tail; very complex teeth; a small trunk with a distinctive tip with two finger-like projections; huge, spirally curved tusks up to 3.5 m (11.5 feet) long; and spiral locks of dark hair covering a silky underfur. Some were huge — the Columbian mammoth measured up to 4+ meters (14 feet) high at the shoulders — about the same size as the largest living elephants. But the woolly mammoth was smaller, and there were dwarf mammoths only two meters (six feet) tall.

Where did they come from?

The answer to such questions about the past comes from the Word of one who was there — the Creator. He revealed in Genesis that He created land animals and people on Day Six of Creation Week (Genesis 1:24–27). This passage teaches that God made distinct kinds of animals, which would breed ‘after their kind’.

Created Kinds

Each of these kinds could split into a number of varieties, when small populations containing a fraction of the original pre-existing genetic information became isolated. Copying errors (mutations) which reduce information can produce other varieties. This is not evolution in the particles-to-people sense, because that requires new genes with new information.

So what are the ‘kinds’? There are often problems matching the created kinds to man-made classification systems, often relying on shape and size, even though the system was founded by the Swedish creationist biologist Carl Linnaeus. From God’s Word we infer that reproduction defines ‘kinds’. Thus if two creatures can interbreed, they belong to the same kind. Many scientists define a species as a group of individuals which can freely interbreed and produce fertile offspring. Thus the biblical kinds would have originally been species.

But the kind may be broader than a modern-day species. Because the different modern varieties may have different fractions of the original gene pool, the offspring from crossing different varieties (hybrids) may be sterile, or not survive. Thus each created kind may have been the ancestor of several present-day species. But as long as two creatures can hybridize with true fertilization, the two creatures are the same kind. Also, if two creatures can hybridize with the same third creature, they are all members of the same kind. To illustrate the problems with the man-made system, sometimes members of different ‘species’, and even higher groupings, can produce fertile offspring.¹³ This means that they are really the same species that has several varieties, hence a polytypic (many types) species.

Applying this to elephants, the African elephant (Loxodonta africana) and Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) can mate and produce offspring, albeit short-lived. Thus they belong to the same created kind, possibly even the same species, even though the man-made system calls them separate ‘species’ and even different ‘genera’ (plural of genus). Mammoths are considered to be closer to Asian elephants than African elephants are. So if the mammoth lived today, it could very likely cross-breed with an Asian elephant. Therefore the entire order Proboscidea probably comprises only one created kind.

The Encyclopedia Britannica provides unwitting support for the biblical framework. In a table of fossil placental mammals, the proboscideans (and all other orders) are preceded by dotted lines, indicating no actual fossils of their alleged evolutionary ancestors. And it says: ‘The order Proboscidea has evolved from unknown ancestors that were not much larger than pigs.’ Of course, if the ancestors are ‘unknown’, we can’t know what size they were, or even that they ever existed!

The rise and fall of the mammoth

The Flood

After their creation, God cursed the elephant kind along with the ‘whole creation’ (Romans 8:20–22) when Adam sinned. About 1,600 years later, God sent a global Flood to extinguish man and all land (vertebrate) animals, apart from the representatives of each kind that Noah took on the ocean-liner-sized Ark (Genesis 6–8). It’s possible that Noah took only one pair of proboscideans on board.

However, the elephant kind could have already split into the varieties (‘genera’) like the mammoths, mastodons, and African and Asian elephants. John Woodmorappe has shown that the Ark was easily large enough to have taken pairs of each genus of land vertebrate animal, and that this would provide enough genetic variation to give rise to today’s varieties. Fully-grown elephants (age 25) were not needed; rather, it would be enough to take juveniles just old enough to breed by the end of the Flood (age 8–9 for females; 11–12 males).

The Flood did not leave too many fossils of large mammals, partly because they tended to bloat and float, and be destroyed by scavengers. Many fossils of large mammals that we do find were probably produced by local post-Flood catastrophes. A particular type of catastrophe involved the mammoths …

The Ice Age

There is strong evidence that, following the Flood, for a time ice and snow covered much of Canada and northern USA, northwestern Eurasia, Greenland and Antarctica. Evolutionists believe there were many ice ages, but it’s more likely they were advance/retreat cycles within a single Ice Age.

Evolutionists find the cause of the Ice Age a mystery. Obviously the climate would need to be colder. But global cooling by itself is not enough, because then there would be less evaporation, so less snow. How is it possible to have both a cold climate and lots of evaporation?

The creationist meteorologist Michael Oard proposed that the Ice Age [possibly referred to in Job 37:10 and 38:22 was an aftermath of Noah’s Flood. When ‘all the fountains of the great deep’ broke up, much hot water and lava would have poured directly into the oceans.

This would have warmed the oceans, increasing evaporation. At the same time, much volcanic ash in the air after the Flood would have blocked out much sunlight, cooling the land.

So the Flood would have produced the necessary combination of lots of evaporation from the warmed oceans and cool continental climate from the volcanic ash ‘sunblock’. This would have resulted in increased snowfall over the continents. With the snow falling faster than it melted, ice sheets would have built up.

The end of the Ice Age

This ice buildup would probably have lasted several centuries. Eventually, the seas gradually cooled, so evaporation would decrease, therefore the snow supply for the continents would also decrease. And as the ash settled out of the atmosphere, it would allow sunlight through. So the ice sheets began to melt. Sometimes the melting would have been rapid enough for the rivers that drained these ice sheets to flood. These catastrophes would have happened about 700 years after the Flood.

Mammoths and the Ice Age

In areas worst affected by the Ice Age, natural selection would have eliminated creatures lacking genes for survival in the cold. It would favour creatures with existing genes for long fur for insulation; and small ears, tails and trunks (to prevent heat loss from large surface areas). Again, this is not evolution, because it generates no new genetic information. Indeed, modern elephants never develop thick hair even when exposed to below-freezing temperatures at night for months, simply because the genetic information is lacking.

Elephants can breed quickly enough that the population could double four times per century, so the population could have easily exceeded a million in the centuries of the Ice Age. However, most mammoths have left no trace: there are fewer than 50 known woolly mammoth carcasses, only about a half-dozen of which were complete. But an estimated 50,000 tusks have been found. Man hunted mammoths extensively, and even recorded this in cave paintings. Fierce predators like the Smilodon (sabre-toothed tiger) also took their toll.

Mammoths in ice?

Some have claimed that the well-preserved frozen mammoths must have been snap-frozen to about -97°C (-175°F). However, this is not so. Most frozen mammoths show signs of scavenging and decay. Many years in the ice caused the flesh to dry out (just like a stew left in a freezer for years), resulting in a mummy.

Some frozen mammoths had partially digested stomach contents. But this doesn’t prove a supercold snap freeze — a mammoth with stomach contents was found in mid-western USA, where the ground was not even frozen. It’s possible that the elephant’s digestive system itself explains the stomach contents being only partially digested. Its large stomach is mainly a storage area, with only a little breakdown of the vegetation by enzymes. Most digestion occurs in the huge cecum and large intestine with the help of microbes fermenting the food.

An evolutionist suggests that they ‘died suddenly by drowning or asphyxiation following burial in mud flows, caved-in river banks, or collapsed gully walls’. Oard suggests flooding caused by ice melting at the close of the Ice Age could have caused such local catastrophes, and a quick drop in temperature (but not a snap-freeze) explains the freezing.

The location of the mammoths makes it unlikely they were formed during Noah’s Flood. They are always found in frozen ‘muck’ in Alaska and ‘yedomas’ in Siberia, near the surface throughout the mid and high latitudes, mostly in river valleys, and occasionally in ice wedges. Despite the myths, most mammoths are not encased in ice.

[Note: after this article was written, Mike Oard proposed that the mammoths were killed and buried by gigantic dust storms, because the yedomas and muck are loess, or wind-blown silt. See ‘Mr Ice Age’ solves woolly mammoth mystery, and his detailed review of mammoth extinction in CEN Technical Journal 14(3):24–34, 2000.]

The Zoological Museum in St Petersburg, Russia, holds some remarkably complete mammoth carcasses from Siberia, including the Adams or Lena mammoth, now a skeleton three meters (10 feet) high at the scapula (shoulder-blade); the Berezovka (or Beryozovka) mammoth which was not fully-grown at about 2.6 m (8+ feet) shoulder height; the Taymyr mammoth; and the 6–12-month-old Magadan mammoth calf nicknamed ‘Dima’.

Could we clone a mammoth?

There were high hopes with the latest mammoth found in Taymyr that enough of its hereditary material — DNA — could be found to clone a mammoth. The proposal was to extract the DNA from the nucleus of an intact cell, and implant it into the egg cell (stripped of its own nucleus) of an Asian elephant.

However, a recent New Scientist article bluntly stated ‘Forget about cloning mammoths.’ The DNA of this mammoth is so fragmented that the longest sequence has only 100 base pairs (‘letters’). New Scientist said: ‘But they are far from the billions of base pairs needed for cloning.“It’s like a two-year-old trying to put together a battleship from two billion pieces of metal,” says Greenwood [of the American Museum of Natural History in New York].’ Incidentally, the extreme instability of DNA is actually a huge problem for theories of the origin of life from a primordial soup.

A clone would be a full mammoth, but another idea is to extract sperm and fertilize the egg of an Asian elephant and produce a hybrid. But this also requires intact DNA, so it won’t work either.

Have any mammoths survived today?

There have been stories that mammoths were seen in the Eastern Ural mountains and Vladivostok in Russia, as recently as 1918. While these are not now verifiable, there is conclusive video and photographic proof that some genes for characteristic mammoth features have survived, in some elephants in Nepal.

Conclusion

Although the media use mammoths as evolutionary propaganda, they can be properly explained by a biblical world-view. Mammoths are a variety of the elephant kind, created on Day 6. The elephant kind was preserved from extinction by being on board Noah’s Ark. But many of the descendants of the Ark animals, including the mammoths, died in catastrophes at the end of the Ice Age, some 4,000 years ago. Some of their frozen carcasses are preserved, but their genetic material is not intact. Some mammoth genes have lived on in Nepalese elephants.