#1542 The Quest for the Wooly Mammoth

I had the chance to talk with Ed Watts of the University of California, San Diego. The author of Mortal Republic, which is really a remarkable book about the last days of the Roman Republic. He's somebody that I've interviewed before for governing. But now, with the new, expanded vision of the Jefferson, Hour will be kind of moving out from just the life and times of Jefferson into a much broader brush, wider lens, a set of lenses. And this interview was really what I most want to do in the world. So here's this man Grant's Azula, who's doing remarkable things up in the Yukon. I had never heard of him, but I had heard of these mammoth finds, particularly in Siberia. In fact, 18 or so years ago, on the Jefferson, our Tracy Panzarella era, we interviewed an American paleontologist who had helped to unearth a complete mammoth in ice in Siberia.

That was an extraordinary interview. And so now, when I saw the news that this baby mummified mammoth had been found at the Yukon. I contacted Grant's Azula's communications people and they were a little concerned. Because there's a lot of important work to be done with the Indigenous people of that region. Even after they're turning me down and said, I'm just so interested in this. Because Jefferson was fascinated by the mammoth. And I mentioned that in his 250 word vocabulary list that he sent up the river with. With Meriwether Lewis. That mammoth was one of the words he wanted to find out. The Nez perce word for mammoth, and the Chinook word for mammoth, and the Lakota word for mammoth, and the Mandan word for mammoth, and so on. I don't think that Lewis had much success on that front. But it shows you something first about Jefferson's deep, childlike curiosity and stubbornness, by the way. But it also tells you something about the a little we knew in the enlightenment.

Jefferson really doubted the idea of extinction. So imagine what has changed in the way we see history, geology, the chain of being, creation, the beginnings of the world, evolution, extinction since the time of Thomas Jefferson. I wrote a couple of letters, actually, to Dr. Zulu's staff, and then finally they said he's kind of interested in talking about this. Especially with the Jefferson angle, thanks to Zoom technology, which has revolutionized my life.

I can tell you that we had this great interview. I could see him, he held up some a green 3D model of a mastodon tooth, he held up the jaw of a wolf. There he was, you know, as if he was in the next room.

We had this incredible conversation. All that we're going to be doing in the next years is based in Jefferson, America's Renaissance man, curious in almost every direction, fascinated about the possible futures for the American Republic. So it'll, it's grounded and founded in Jefferson. But I want to explore so many extraordinary themes with you. And to introduce you to some of the most interesting people in the world who are working in what might be called a Jeffersonian world.

For me, it's just like the best kind of continuing education. I'm learning an extraordinary amount. And I'm so thankful to Dr. Azula for being willing to sit down with me in this interview. That's where we're headed. I hope you like it.

We need your help in all sorts of ways. David Swenson is on a prolonged break. He'll be coming back to do the Joe Ellis shows and we'll just follow this as it as it proceeds. But meanwhile, we have lots of guests, my daughter is doing some of the guest hosting, and, of course, Lindsay Jervinsky is a frequent guest on this program. And David DeCandre is coming on soon to talk about the the discovery of the Endurance, the ship of Shackleton that was discovered in 2023. I believe in Antarctica, but we always turn to David DeCandre on these enlightenment questions.

So please tell everyone you know, send us your suggestions, your comments, your thoughts, your criticisms. teach us, but keep listening, please. And I think we're heading into an extraordinary new era of the Thomas Jefferson. Our thanks.

Hello everyone and welcome to the special edition of Listening to America. The Thomas Jefferson our I'm Clay Jenkinson Today. Jefferson and the Woolly Mammoth. Jefferson was absolutely fascinated, like a nine-year-old, with mastodons and mammoths, and coerced his friends to dig bones at big bone lick. Kentucky and elsewhere had the great honor today of interviewing Grant Zuzula, now widely known as the Yukon Paleontologist, extraordinary man with great insights about the mammoth fascination in the era of Thomas Jefferson. So let's get started.

Thanks for doing this. So you're kind of universally now known as the Yukon Paleontologist, which is a pretty great moniker. And what I was reading about your work. Of course, I'm thrilled and delighted by what you get to do. But I was also a little bit. I had a little moment when I when I realized that a lot of this sort of rescue paleontology. As these placer poses are breaking down whole walls of the permafrost. These are just the conditions under which you have to work.

It's the conditions we have to work.

You know, that relationship with gold miners goes back right to the gold rush of 1898. You know, I just, you know, those amazing photos of these old-timers with mammoth tusks and stuff. But yeah, so it really takes. There's a real kind of nuance to the relationship. Because Yukon has legislation that protects archaeological sites and fossil sites, paleontological sites, and we also have land claims with Indigenous people, with Indigenous community. So both, both of those. So there's a couple different legislative kind of angles.

And then we kind of work, you know, practically, practically work in this sort of area, between working with First Nations and working with the gold mining community. And from our perspective, just trying to do the best we can to recover this material so it doesn't get lost. Because in a short summer in the Yukon, you know, these gold miners are, they're going hard for four or five months. And you know, night and day, because it doesn't get dark, right? They have, you know, often night shifts. And we've really put a lot of our effort into building those relationships with the gold miners. And, you know, letting them know about how important this is. Not just for science and the Yukon, but globally, and there's a global interest in these kind of things.

And so we have fairly good buy-in with the gold mining community, for so, for for. They're required. When, when they were uncover this material, they generally put it aside. You know, if they see something spectacular, they give us a call. But our program, we have a few few of us in the summer will kind of spend the summer driving around the gold fields and an old in a big truck and visiting and showing up at these mines. And you really never know what you're what to expect when you get there, that sometimes it's really spectacular, other days. Or, oh, just a bunch more bison, just much, much more horse, you know, but for mammoth. But every once in a while you get some pretty amazing stuff. And and I think, you know, I really think there's something to this that a lot of the cold miners, right?

You know, they're kind of like, you know, rough-and-tumble type people, they like to go hunting, you know, they like animals, big animals. So I think there's a sort of connection of these big big bones and big antlers and big tusks. And so I think they're quite fascinated by it. And we're often, you know, for example, the gold mining, it, there's a lot of environmental things about it, right? You know? They're blasting hillsides of permafrost away so often. The results of the paleontological research are kind of their best news stories, right?

We're good PR for them because, you know, they get a lot of pressure from various environmental groups and other things like that. So, you know, when they are able to contribute to these scientific projects, it shows, well, they're actually being responsible in some way to get this straight.

It's something that we have today still, but also first nation communities here. Their clan system is divided amongst kind of wolf clan or crow clan. So the, you know, that notion of having this relationships with the an animal like wolf really kind of captured their interest in this. Being 50 is that wolf was 57,000 years old? That really kind of got the wheels churning, I think, in a lot of the First Nations minds in terms of the relationship to paleontology. And then, when Noon Joe God was found, the summer, that was a real pinnacle.

I think it's a total game-changer for what we're gonna be doing in the future.

But here's what Jefferson wondered, And this is what I want to ask you. Do Indigenous people have some sort of a cultural memory or some sort of echo of the mastodon and the mammoth? They do?

So the Smithsonian sent an expedition up there, they collected some pretty incredible stuff. That's at the Smithsonian, the Old Crow people. They're really kind of the the water, the rivers are very important to them.

So they spent, they spent a lot of time traveling on the rivers. The thing that always gets me is that first nation people are hunters, they're the trappers, so their knowledge of skeletal anatomy is incredible. They know a femur.

They know a humerus. You have to realize that. They're going up and down the rivers. And they see a femur bone that's three feet long, they know right away. Oh, I know, that's a leg bone of a big animal, and it's not a.

I know what a moose looks like, it's something ten times the size of a moose. So there those stories are really embedded, these stories about these ancient monsters are really embedded in the community. There's also there's a really good story that was told.

Really, the godfather of Canadian Ice Age paleontology named Dick Harrington Richard Harrington from the National Museum. And I think it was in 1967, one of his first trips to Old Crow. He was told about this monster that had broken out of the frozen bank and along a place called the Whitestone River, which is near Old Crow. And one of the elders said You know, this monster came out of the bank and it's there. So anyways, a few days later, he boated up the river and, sure enough, exactly where it was supposed to be. There was a partial skeleton of a mammoth, and it's known as the Whitestone mammoth. But, and the story to him was, there's this notion that these animals were kind of frozen in the ground. If we have concepts of things being alive or dead, and my understanding, the story is that this, these animals, we're kind of in a. In a sort of a purgatory. Almost not not alive, not quite dead, but in a frozen state. And then, you know, emerged from the ground in that sort of way.

So that that story has always been something that's really, really interesting, but a story that I recently be learned about that I didn't realize. And I'll send you a link to this book. It's called Casca Tales, It's kind of a just a small, like a children's book. It's got incredible stories told by an elder from Watson Lake about mammoths. And there's actually a word in there on a casca, which are the people of eastern Yukon along the Mackenzie Mountains?

Essentially, they have these stories in this book about, like Shamans, meeting mammoths out in the out in the woods. And then be out of fear for the community. Sort of freezing them back in the hillside. And then there's some other stories about these mammoth chasing and sort of harassing communities. A lot of scientists would go, huh? Those are nice stories.

Those are kind of interesting stories, right? They may not have any scientific value, but I really think they do. And and here's why, you know. And I think this all kind of came full circle to me just in the last couple of years with this discovery that we published a few years ago about late surviving mammoths and horses in the Yukon. So, by extracting fragments of DNA from the permafrost soil, it was learned that there was probably small pockets of mammoths still living in the Yukon up until five or six thousand years ago.

So that's not long ago, you know, in the sort of big picture, that's not very long ago. We know that some like amongst Indigenous people, North America, some oral histories, they go back thousands of years in there. And these stories have been passed on. And especially dramatic stories. I'm sure dramatic mammoths would have been dramatic stories five thousand years ago.

You know where people are situated today, you know, kind of typical communities of First Nations. There was. People were in those in those places at that time, almost certainly were running into these animals, right? And they may have been small populations, kind of left over from the end of the ice Age, kind of residual populations. But I'm sure they left their mark on people in terms of the storytelling and just those encounters. Because remember the people that entered North America from Eurasia, you know, they were Upper Paleolithic, you know, for all intents and purposes, you know, mammoth hunters, right? They were megafauna hunters. And and and so you know that that cultural knowledge of those animals was certainly there, that it certainly passed on for thousands years.

So I, I find that stuff really fascinating, and I would love to be able to explore some of that more. But yeah, I'm, I'm, you know, I, I'm convinced that there were. Some of these stories have a lot of legitimacy, they can tell us a lot about, you know, the history of mammoths. We need to take a short break.

Welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson our I'm Clay Jenkins and talking with Dr. Grant's Azula. I can tell you one thing Jefferson would give anything to be part of this conversation. I want to ask him now about the implications of this sort of discovery for the future of paleontology. On the one hand, a hunter, maybe a thousand years ago, or two thousand years ago, goes out and finds a giant bone.

They know their bones, so they realize it's a femur or it's a tooth or whatever. A kind of imaginative reconstruction of what that creature must have been. And then stories growing up around that, like, what was this monster? and and who stopped it? and how it was it a threat to our people, and so on. That sounds very plausible to me, but you're saying that maybe Jefferson was right. That there might have been actual memory of actual encounters with live mammoths that may be somewhat garbled over time, but that this is something that you cannot rule out.

But we also, I think a lot of ice age paleontologists live in a bit of envy of dinosaur paleontologists, because, you know, there's this dramatic end to the dinosaurs. Was an asteroid wiping everything out? And then it's just like Terra Nova, you know, it's the clean slate, everything happens after that. I think a lot of people who work in the ice age kind of had been hoping that there was some cataclysmic sort of end to the ice age animals. So I think now, as data sets are starting to be built up, showing the timing of some of these extinctions.

There was a recent paper published about horses in in Mexico. Extending well beyond the Ice age as well, that these small, isolated pockets of mammoths and horses, and other ice age animals that would have carried on after the ice age. You know, I think as more work gets done, we're going to start to discover more about some later surviving animals. And and that definitely puts some of those animals in the time frame of, you know, human memory kind of deal. Yeah, yeah, I think, I think, or I think the the Ice Age extinction question is still well out there. Yeah, I think we're gonna learn a lot more.

She's now a Supreme Court justice in Canada. So when did you become fascinated by megafauna, to be honest with you?

Cataloging artifacts, stone tools and things like that, but there was all these, you know, megafauna collections around. So as an undergraduate student, I was taking courses in archaeology. I have a undergraduate degree in archaeology. But at University of Alberta at the time, there's a real focus in Northern studies. So the and especially the Yukon.

There's a real connection to the Yukon, and and one of the connections the Yukon was some of the work at. At places like Old Crow. A site called Bluefish Caves, which is one of these really early archaeological sites in North America. And I was always just fascinated by this notion that those was a continent almost like this Eden Garden of Eden, with all these animals in this untouched ecosystem. And then all of a sudden these first people walked into this, and I just that whole idea really fascinated me. As a kid, I did a lot of archaeology and then I soon found myself becoming more interested in the place rather than the people. And just trying to understand what that environment people would have interacted with, what it would have looked like, what were the plants were there?

So I got into this actually via plants. I. I did paleoecology, I was studying ancient plant remains, palinology, and and then I somehow ended up on a trajectory. Working out in the Klondike Goldfields, I was doing paleoecology work. And then I was invited to come up to Dawson City to come. There was a conference and there was a field trip to one of these gold mines, and you know, I just couldn't, couldn't believe it.

First summer in the Yukon, it was an old crow in 1999. I will never forget getting out of the helicopter and just walking along the riverbank for the first time in picking up a mammoth tooth. And it sort of validated all these stories and all these professors that said, like that, this was actually real. You could actually just walk along the riverbank and pick up mammoth. Just sitting there, just watched up, just sitting there, just sitting there, waiting for someone to pick up.

But then I ended up doing my P.h.D. work on Arctic ground squirrels of the Ice Age. Because we we out in these gold mines and the permafrost. We started to find all these little preserved nests of Arctic ground squirrels. That were, you know, the remains of ground squirrels who collected nests and seeds. You know, that was an incredible way to understand the ecosystem. So from there, I ended up getting a job with Yukon Government and it just sort of I. I kind of, you know, I'm not very. I kind of think about the big picture a lot, like how these things work to the connectivity of these things. And, you know, ended up getting into megafauna that way.

Just, you know, you start with the, you know, these things are all connected, the people, the plants, the land, and then the animals and the climate. It's, you know, they're all, it's all. It all works together.

So I really kind of enjoy working and sort of an inter kind of interdisciplinary kind of way with with people who do different things and trying to put the whole story together.

So talk a little bit about the difference between fossilized remains and mummified remains.

How much is out there? The mummified remains are incredibly rare, especially in North America. It seems like in Siberia they find something mummified every every year. It's really true.

How often they find them? I never, ever thought I would see a real mummified woolly mammoth. It's not something I ever thought I'd see. Come out of the Yukon. You know, you can learn a lot scientifically about these mummified animals, you can discover, learn about how they died and why, and all these kind of things. But I think, for me, what what they really do is that they just they really bring it to life.

They bring the ice age to life so you can show someone a mammoth tusk or tooth, or a bone. Oh yeah, that's, that's nice, it's cool you show them the whole animal. Of something that's extinct, something that's been extinct for thousands of years, something that lived tens of thousands years ago. And it just brings the whole picture together.

It's a it's, you know, a real privilege, I think, because getting a chance to interact with this. You know, something like a mummified mammoth and be up and close, and to touch it and to look at me. I is something very few people have that, an opportunity to do in their life, and it changes you. I think it really changed a chain. It deeply impacted me and every and everyone that I know that's been around. You know, Nunchuk, Ah, and any other mummified animal. It just, it's really visceral, it's really, yeah, it's, it's pretty, it's pretty spectacular.

It's miraculous, it really is, because it makes you. It makes you wonder how much more of that kind of stuff is under the ground, right? And and it's Siberia. They're so often found, kind of serendipitously, you know, not unlike the gold mining situation. But, you know, for example, when Luba was found in 2007, she was found in 2007, there was a whole kind of odd series of events of her being found. And then the the reindeer herder taking it back to the community, and it got chewed on by some dogs.

And like, I've heard stories of people that work in Siberia. And they say, like, sometimes when mummified animals get found, like the dogs, get at them right away. And that's really unfortunate. Because, you know. But for for example, with New Joke, Guy was remarkable because there was a geologist on site that day to be able to describe, you know, to do it properly. So we're gonna, Yeah, it's yeah, it's remarkable, it's like there isn't a single word to describe how how remarkable it is.

I think, yeah.

Well, I think. Ninja Gauss found around 11 a.

M. And by about 10 p...m. she was back in a freezer. So there was no worry about like there was no kind of degradation at all.

So the consistency and and this is where it's a little bit different than a lot of materials that have been found in Siberia. Where, for example, one of the more recent mummies of woolly mammoth, there was actually free-flowing blood that came out of the animal. It was so. The conditions of the permafrost and some of those sites in Siberia are quite different than than our permafrost. So what seems to happen like with with the Sure the wolf pup? It's a slow process of a freeze drying. So basically, all the free moisture in the in the body tissues are, you know, slowly come out of the out of the animal.

So the consistency of her tissues, like her skin, is like an old dried shoot, you know? Or beef jerky, if you will, you know, it's really it's. it's very dry, so that's, there's very little moisture in it. So once, like with sure, we. Once she was slow, once she was found, she was kept in a freezer.

There was a conservator that did some work to slowly dry her out and to slowly saw her. And once they're saw and kept dry, they're very, very stable. So we have the wolf pup on display. There's no kind of real climate controls, because it's it's she's dried out.

She's a dried-out mummy, so there's really no concern. One of the things about Yukon is that we have very little relative humidity and the moisture in the air, so the air is really dry anyways. So as long as she's kept in stable temperature, kind of stable moisture regime, she's very stable, there's.

No, there's not a lot of worry. It doesn't need to be kept in some sort of frozen tomb or something like that in your imagination or in your dreams.

You know, mammoths and the common animals, mammoth horses and bison, those are like 95 of what we find out there. But to find something like a.

Mummified giant beaver and all to me, I think that might be the holy grail. Like to find a giant beaver.

That's the woolly rhinoceros, and it's been. The woolly rhinos are very common in Siberia, there's even been mummified woolly rhino carcasses found. In my mind, I still think that they may have crossed the Bering Land Bridge and entered into North America. Maybe even small populations of them, because they're found right up to the Chukotka, the eastern edge of the Russian far east. It's kind of like a little bit of a needle in the haystack for some of these species, and when that needle gets found, it can really provide some really amazing information.

So if we found a woolly rhino, that would be pretty awesome.

Welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson hour. I'm Clay Jenkinson talking with Dr. Grant Sazula about mammoth findings in the Yukon. Absolutely extraordinary. So I take you now back to our interview. Let me ask a question about where we are with computing. So when someone like Charles Wilson Peale finds a number of mastodon bones or mammoth bones, then they need a certain number. To be able to figure out what it looked like. And they were often wrong, but they would piece it out and so on.

Now, if you have these two hyena teeth. Are we sophisticated enough that we can use algorithms and grow the shape of that thing, or do we need more than that?

They had no, they had no conceptual way of this. So what the dinosaur is to our time? the mammoth and the mastodon were to Jefferson's time. These gigantic, fascinating, now-gone creatures that fill us with wonder and make us imagine a world that is not anything like the world that we see.

You know, we can talk about climate change, but these fossils are the the evidence of those changes in recent Earth history, right? And I think that's where it provides such a compelling kind of story narrative.

They're kind of they look superficially very similar, but where you see the difference is is in their teeth, because the teeth really reflected different evolutionary history. And I always use the example up here because people are familiar with these animals. A mastodon is like a moose, it's a browser, it eats shrubs.

It eats branches from trees, you know, leaves on deciduous trees, spruce trees, you know. Just like a moose does, it browses in the boreal forest. It's a forest dwelling ancient elephant, whereas mammoths are like the ultimate cows. They're just grazers, they're grazing on grass. They eat hundreds of kilograms of grass a day.

So you can really see the difference reflected in their teeth, and those teeth reflect their evolutionary difference. So you know that the it's really mastodons being browsers in a forest type environment.

The first mammoths probably crossed the land bridge into North America. Maybe 1 1.

5 million years ago. So what's neat about that is that we have these pictures of the Ice age. Always, always dominated by the image of the mammoth, right? But actually, for most of the ice age in North America, there was no mammoth. There was, you know, the ice age starts about two and a half million years ago.

If you looked around the ice age two and a half million years ago, in both places in North America, you'd see horses, you'd see camels, you wouldn't see any bison, and you wouldn't see any mammoth. Mammoth sweep into North America about one and a half one million years ago. And then they're just become this, you know, iconic animals of North American.

Explain how that must have worked, Jeez.

A lot of people think that mammoth hunting would have been a very dangerous activity. They were obviously harvesting mammoths, but maybe they were scavenging mammoth carcasses that were killed by, say, a lion or scimitar cat or something like that. Because if you look at these earliest archaeological sites of Paleo Indian sites, there's not a lot of evidence for actual mammoth hunting. There's more evidence in Eurasia during earlier parts of the human story. But it's kind of a bit of a myth that they were all hunting these mammoths, you know? Because I think we kind of like the idea of big guys spears hunting mammoths. But the early people in North America had a pretty diverse diet, you know, they were hunting and trapping a whole variety of animals.

It wasn't just mammoths, so I love the idea of these mammoth bone dwelling houses. Obviously people were either scavenging or hunting them in big numbers because they were building houses.

Tikajik, in the northwest territories of the young man, sent me a photograph of this incredible bison skull and a bunch of other stuff. That had come out of the permafrost slide, because, you know, the melting, the melting, the permafrost, and there was mummified skin, there was whole limb, bones of muscles attached intestinal things. Knows about 15,000 years old. So those kind of little, those permafrost melting slide events, those landslide events are happening quite a bit more now, and the opportunity to expose more fossils is definitely there. So especially on places like the Arctic Coast, in Siberia, you know, along the Arctic coastlines, where, you know, we're seeing a lot of coastal recession and that's all receding.

Yeah, no, I totally understand. Archaeological sites and paleontological objects are probably they're best protected in the ground. They've been in there in the ground for thousands of years. And it's really once they get exposed, as when the chain of events of needing to deal with it happens. So, you know, I wouldn't, I wouldn't, you know, yeah, yeah.

So having them stored in a proper facility, protected, and yeah, for future researchers is hugely important. Because we know, you know, these kind of cataclysmic events of permafrost, lost, or or what natural disasters are just gonna get more in the future. So.

Is it a you know what? And he had this sort of contest with Voltaire about what all this meant. Suddenly he hears about mastodon teeth at 11,000 feet, and it just blew, it just blew his mind.

It's either when it's cold, it's cold and dry and there's no trees, but when it's warm, like today, we got trees. And then we get these southern animals moving into the north. I really, that's a really interesting connection, because we're having southern animals move northward again today as a response to climate change and global warming. So we're getting odd animals moving back, moving into the Yukon today. So yeah, the the Megalonyx mastodon association of previous interglacials warm periods is really neat.

You can, yeah, that's that. The 3D scan of that is available on that site. I said it must have been so amazing to be a person who is interested in these things. At that time. Because everything was new and everything was, you know, the ceiling was totally open and you could. You explained it exactly right, because, you know.

And so he had this, the short, you know, how do you figure all of the history of geology and flora and fauna creation in the 60,000 year time, which was a radical extension?

Or, you know, we're just stardust and we all get to our, we all just get recycled.

What websites or how can people follow what you're doing? We have our Facebook account.

That is so if you follow the Yukon Yukon Beringia Center on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter. I don't do Twitter and stuff personally, but our museum updates things that we do all the time.

It's extraordinarily important.

Thank you for listening. Please tune in again next week for another thought-provoking, historically accurate program through the eyes of Thomas Jefferson.