A decades-long study of voles on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard is offering insights into a longstanding puzzle of Arctic ecology---effectively, what drives the well-established population cycles of small Arctic mammals, such as voles and lemmings.

When Predators Matter! Study of Voles on Arctic Island Advances Knowledge of Small-Mammal Population Dynamics

The 20,000-year-old remains of a mammoth bear signs of human hunting and butchery. Part of the mammoth skeleton found by the Russian researchers. Pavlov. Russian paleontologists were stunned by the discovery of an almost complete mammoth skeleton on Kotelny Island, located in the Arctic close to the Siberian coast, which had thousands of cut marks on it. These marks, as well as stone objects embedded within some of the fossils, indicate that the ancient beast might have been slain and butchered by human hunters. The extraordinary mammoth skeleton came to the attention of Russian researchers completely by accident. In 2019, Innokenty Pavlov, a field worker and taxidermist, was on an expedition in the north of Kotelny Island —  part of the New Siberian Islands in the eastern Arctic and home to a major Russian military base — to dig up the carcass of another known mammoth in the area. However, the melting snow flooded the site of the carcass, making excavations impossible. But as luck had it, they were informed by local fishermen that there was another mammoth site, just 10 kilometers away. Indeed, the site proved to be genuine, and it is here that Pavlov, along with researchers led by Albert Protopopov, head of the Department for Study of Mammoth Fauna, Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Yakutia, found the intriguing mammoth bones. Three lumbar vertebrae belonging to the “Pavlov mammoth”. Credit: I.S. Pavlov. Immediately, the researchers noticed marks on the bones and began to wonder whether these were evidence of human hunting. All of the bones from the almost complete skeleton bore marks on them, although that doesn’t necessarily mean they were made by human cutting tools. Scavengers biting the carcass, as well as natural processes such as the shifting of sediments and geological pressure may also explain the cut marks. Get more science news like this...
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Speaking to Gizmodo , Olga Potapova, a paleontologist with The Mammoth Site in South Dakota and an associate researcher with the Academy of Sciences of Yakutia and the Russian Academy of Sciences, makes a case that these marks were anthropogenic. She says that the fossils have a large number of long and very thin cuts clustered in a parallel fashion. Cuts made by natural processes look more like random scratches. Researchers also found embedded stone objects in the tusk, as well as a bone object lodged into the scapula (shoulder bone). These may have been the remnants of a weapon made from bone, Potapova says. The mammoth scapula with a bone object embedded inside it. Credit:Innokentiy Pavlov. The skull of the mammoth was broken in a similar fashion to the skulls of 32 mammoths from a site in the Russian Plain known as the “Yudinovo” site. Previously, researchers concluded that the mammoth skulls were fractured by human hunters who consumed the animals’ brains for food. But in the absence of adjacent human artifacts or some other kind of direct evidence of human intervention, the contention that the Kotelny mammoth was butchered by human hands is still speculative. To learn more, the researchers hope to return to the island soon, where they hope to uncover evidence of Paleolithic hunters at the site.

Mammoth remains possibly butchered by human hunters found on Arctic Island near Siberia

Jeanne Timmons
A snowmobile is parked next to a building at the Russian northern military base on Kotelny island. Photo: Maxime Popov / AFP (Getty Images)
Kotelny Island sits high up in the Arctic, off the coast of Northern Siberia. It’s cold and barren now, mostly absent of humans. But over 20,000 years ago, this island was home to huge megafauna. Melting permafrost is exposing evidence of this past life, including three large woolly mammoth skeletons discovered there in 2019. Advertisement
One of those skeletons, named the Pavlov mammoth after the man who found it, appears to have been butchered by ancient hunters. We can imagine them, huddled around an enormous carcass, cutting through tangles of fur and thick skin towards the sinew. We might even hear the grunts of their efforts—it’s no easy task—and see their breath in the bitter cold. What was once a substantial woolly mammoth had fallen. Traces on the mammoth’s bones indicate scavenging from both predators and rodents, numerous breaks, circular cuts along a tusk, and embedded objects within some of the bones, most notably in the shoulder. The intriguing question is: Did humans leave these marks? Advertisement
Olga Potapova, a paleontologist with The Mammoth Site in South Dakota and an associate researcher with the Pleistocene Park Foundation, Academy of Sciences of Sakha (Yakutia) and Russian Academy of Sciences, presented details of this research during a virtual poster session at the recent annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontologists. Paleontologists, paleogeneticists, an archaeologist, and others teamed up to get a better understanding of this particular fossil. The team made several field trips to the frigid island in recent years, led the project’s scientific advisor Albert Protopropov, head of the Department for Study of Mammoth Fauna, Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia). On one of these trips, Innokenty Pavlov discovered the mammoth skeleton and recognized the marks on its bones as possible human hunting marks. Pavlov, according to Potapova, is “a talented field worker, taxidermist and artist/sculptor,” and he led the field work. G/O Media may get a commission
The Pavlov mammoth thoracic and neck vertebrae, ribs, and cranium, laid out after being excavated. Photo: I.S. Pavlov
This remote island currently supports a Russian military base, the source of transport for the scientists who travel there. Protopopov, in an email translated from Russian to English by Potapova, described the Kotelny Island as “covered by Arctic deserts. Summer lasts only one and a half months, and in summer there is often snow. The usual temperature is 5 degrees C at the end of July (the warmest period). There are no mosquitoes here; it’s very cold for them to live here.” Polar bears and walruses, however, are numerous. Advertisement
Protopopov described the unintended discovery of the Pavlov mammoth. “Our expedition team went to dig up the carcass of the Golden mammoth [another known mammoth in the area] in the north of Kotelny Island in the spring of May 2019,” he wrote, “but due to the early melting of the snow, the place where the carcass lay was already under the water and could not be excavated. The failure of the expedition was saved due to help of local fishermen, who showed us a place 10 kilometers from the carcass of the Golden Mammoth, where they once saw the bones of a mammoth. A group led by Innokenty Pavlov went there and found dozens of mammoth bones.”
Much of the skeleton was recovered, and all of the bones have marks on them. These marks provide invaluable clues. They do not, however, immediately point to human interaction. Consider natural processes that occur over thousands of years when anything is buried: the shifting of sediments, geological pressure that can cause damage to the bones, not to mention scavenging from other animals and possible trampling by other megafauna at any point in the decaying process. Deciphering these marks has been an important aspect of this research and one that these scientists hope to continue with other experts in the field. Advertisement
The mammoth scapula (shoulder bone) with embedded bone object. Image: Innokentiy Pavlov (Department of Study of the Mammoth Fauna, Academy of Sciences of Sakha Republic, Yakutsk, Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), Russian Federation). Potapova is no stranger to working with remarkable specimens found in Siberia. Some of them include the Yuka Mammoth , the Yukagir Bison , and the Yukagir Horse , incredibly well-preserved natural mummies from the Pleistocene. Advertisement
“Unlike other isolated fossil bones found in this particular region and in Northeast Siberia in general,” she explained in an email, “almost every bone of the Pavlov mammoth had tens and hundreds of cut marks and very little indication of [scavenger] gnawing. Many scratches, indeed, will be hard to classify. However, unlike random scratches in many directions caused by sediments and animals’ trampling (and sometimes wear), the large number of long and very thin cuts clustered in parallel fashion are typically recognized by archeologists as being of human origin.”
It’s the location of many of these cut marks that offers insight. Marks around specific bones reflect possible skinning and the removal of fleshy areas that may have been of interest for human consumption. Advertisement
“For example,” she continued, “the clusters of parallel cut marks around the nasal opening (upper maxillary bones) indicate purposeful de-fleshing in this area. [T]his particular skull area supports the base of the trunk, and it is logical to suggest that these cuts reflected the human activity of separating the meaty and boneless trunk from the head.”
A number of cut marks are also seen along a section of the cranium, suggesting either defleshing of the bone in that area or disarticulating the jawbone from the skull. Advertisement
Photo: I.S. Pavlov
The high number of cut marks led Kathryn Krasinski, assistant professor of anthropology at Adelphi University, to question the skills of those particular human hunters. Advertisement
“When butchering something,” she said in a video chat with Gizmodo, “you actively avoid hitting the bone, because it dulls your tools, so you expect few cut marks on bone.”
She’s not entirely convinced the marks indicate human hunting and is eager to read more once the paper is published. Krasinski and her colleagues studied various ways in which cracks and marks can be made on the bones of proboscideans—a term that encompasses mammoths, elephants, mastodons, and others—using the remains of elephants from Zimbabwe that had died naturally, as well as those that had been culled decades ago. But it’s rare to be able to study post-mortem effects on today’s elephants, as these animals are ecologically threatened. Interpreting marks on proboscidean fossils is highly subjective, making claims about human hunting somewhat controversial. Advertisement
Although not discovered with a wealth of human artifacts around it, material in and around the bones offer intriguing evidence that there is more to this mammoth than meets the eye. Embedded stone objects remain in the tusk, and an embedded bone object is lodged in the scapula (shoulder), after which the bone healed, which may be the remnants of a weapon made from bone. “What is most exciting to me about the Pavlov mammoth, yet needs verification, was the apparent lithic embedded in a tusk fragment,” Krasinski said, referring to the embedded stone fragment. “While ivory processing was common in the Paleolithic, it is equally plausible this could have occurred millennia after the mammoth died, as ivory from the far north preserves well. That is to say, the death of the mammoth need not be synchronous with the processing of the faunal remains. We have many examples of this kind of scavenging, particularly across Beringia and into Alaska, where people were picking up fossil ivory hundreds and even thousands of years after the death of the animal. In fact, this still happens today.”
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Scientists have yet to find any remains of ancient people on Kotelny Island. This mammoth research provides the first evidence that humans lived that far north. Chris Widga, paleontologist at the Center of Excellence in Paleontology at East Tennessee State University and someone who has spent a great deal of his career studying proboscideans, is encouraged by the information provided by the researchers. Advertisement
“Looking at the authors,” Widga wrote in an email to Gizmodo, “these are people who primarily work on the European and Russian/Siberian record. As such, they are very familiar with the Paleolithic record of mammoth hunting.”
“The modified bone images are fuzzy, but if their descriptions hold out, this is definitely a strong candidate for a human-butchered mammoth,” he said. “There are flakes embedded in bones, chop marks, and circular cuts on the tusk. These are things that we see in other mammoths, as well as elephants that have been butchered in experimental archaeology projects.”
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Potapova maintains that the cut marks appear deliberate and that these traces are in very specific locations on the bones and are often parallel to each other. The breaks on the bone, much like the marks, do not suggest the random effects of geological pressures. Rather, they seem strategic. “According to our study of the Pavlov mammoth skull,” Potapova wrote in an email, “its damage was quite different from these random-broken bones.”
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Of particular note, she said, is the example learned from a site in the Russian Plain referred to as the “Yudinovo” site, where evidence of mammoth hunting by humans is well documented. The broken skulls of 32 mammoths suggest humans valued the mammoth brain as food. The Pavlov mammoth skull has similar breakage. Areas where the tusks are connected to the skull are also broken, indicating tusk removal. The scientists turned to their colleagues at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Sweden for ancient DNA analysis of the shoulder bone and the bone object embedded within it. They were able to pull almost 8 million reads of mitochondrial DNA from the scapula and a little over that same amount for the embedded object. Those numbers might seem enormous, but Marianne Dehasque, PhD candidate and aspiring paleogeneticist, explained that something like a well-preserved mammoth might offer over 600 million reads. Advertisement
“What we do here [at the Centre for Palaeogenetics] in Stockholm is we basically [place] all the DNA that we have on a sequencing instrument, and then we look at what appears there. This is called ‘shotgun sequencing.’ You just sequence everything. We also use this approach to generate high-quality genomes,” she said in a video chat. “And in that respect, less than 10 million [reads] is actually not that much.”
But they don’t need much, she explained, to determine basics about the animal. With a little ancient DNA, they can determine the sex. The Pavlov mammoth, they learned, was male. Advertisement
While the number of mitochondrial DNA reads seemed large, the percentage of endogenous material—DNA that originates from the animal or object in question—seemed shockingly sparse. The poster lists a mere 6% of endogenous material from the scapula; 3% from the embedded object. “When we try to extract DNA and sequence it, we will see that some part of the DNA will be of the organism of interest, but a large part of the DNA that we retrieve will often be bacterial contamination. But sometimes they’re also caused by people handling it,” Dehasque explained and then laughed. “I’m pretty sure there’s a little bit of my DNA in there, for example.”
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Ancient DNA could not prove that the scapula and embedded object were from different individuals, which would offer more conclusive evidence that the embedded object was foreign material introduced into this mammoth. In other words, more proof that this mammoth was hunted. “There’s a ton of research to do here,” Krasinski noted, “and I’m glad that people are working on questions of bone taphonomy, because if we’re really going to understand mammoth extinction and human interactions with these big creatures, we need to continue studying all of the mammoth collections we can. This poster is an excellent contribution in that direction.”
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Widga mirrors that enthusiasm. “I’m really looking forward to a full report on this mammoth,” he wrote. “This is clearly a detailed, complex, interdisciplinary project with lots of moving parts. A poster just doesn’t do it justice. This is yet another site that is bringing the question of ‘how did people hunt and butcher mammoths?’ into better focus. This question is harder to answer than it would seem—and in the last few years, as we have discovered some really good northern mammoth butchery sites , we have made a lot of progress on the issue.”
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If ancient humans did hunt woolly mammoths and other animals on this island, what else can we learn about that ancient ecosystem and those that lived there? “We view [the Arctic] region as holding clues to the earliest human population in Western Beringia, with direct ties to that of the North American population,” Potapova wrote. “I personally also hope that this find and our research will deepen people’s perception of the Arctic during the Last Glacial Maximum. Due to a drop in sea levels, [land] expanded far north, forming a massive Arctic plain in Western Beringia covered by grasslands. Attracted by its high numbers of megafauna, this region provided a habitat for the Paleolithic human population that was well adapted to the extreme climate and capable of successfully hunting the woolly mammoths. We speculate that during the Last Glacial maximum, Kotelny Island was host to the human population that may have been the Native American founder population, whose origin remains unknown.”
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The island is largely inaccessible most of the year under normal circumstances, and certainly more so during a global pandemic, but the team intends to return regularly as soon as they can. They hope to uncover further evidence of Paleolithic hunters, from the remains of the animals they felled to the camps themselves. The relatively few researchers who have access to this area, and thus the comparatively few discoveries that have been made so far in an area that “froze during the time of mammoths about 15,000 years ago,” per Protopopov, almost ensures exciting future revelations. Share This Story

Scientists Find Mammoth Seemingly Butchered by Humans on Arctic Island

Sputnik International
https://sputniknews.com/europe/202001271078146481-provocative-criticism-pours-over-us-plans-to-use-norwegian-airbase-on-arctic-island/
Jan Mayen is a strategic polar island that lies in the middle of the passage between Norway and Greenland. Among other things, the passage is used by Russian nuclear submarines to enter the open Atlantic. This week, Norwegian Defence Minister Frank Bakke-Jensen will appear before Parliament to answer questions over reported plans to permit US planes to use the airstip on the polar island of Jan Mayen. One of the reasons floated by national broadcaster NRK is that the Norwegian Armed Forces are unable to fully service Jan Mayen, due to its ongoing mission in Mali. Audun Lysbakken, the head of the Socialists Left party a member of the Parliament's foreign and defence committee, has asked the defence minister to confirm whether Norway has invited the US Air Force to use the island for landing. In his letter, Lysbakken also asked the Defence Ministry what assessments have been made about the US use of the landing strip in relation to Norway's relationship with Russia . Several scholars and politicians have criticised the plans as ill-conceived and predicted they will draw Norway into a superpower rivalry. “It is quite likely that Russia will see it as Norway paving the way for an increased US presence and then react negatively. It will most likely help increase the security policy tensions in the north”, senior researcher Julie Wilhelmsen at the Norwegian Foreign Policy Institute (NUPI) said. Defence College professor Tormod Heier suggested that Norway is being “drawn into a major power rivalry because we cannot manage to stay in our own homes with our own forces”. “When Norwegian authorities choose the United States, they must reckon with Russia interpreting it as an almost provocative act. It will stimulate more Russian exercise activity further west and closer to the Norwegian territorial border in the Norwegian Sea”, Heier told NRK. According to him, flights from Sweden or Denmark would have been a better solution. The decision, he argued, also reflects major weaknesses in the Norwegian Armed Forces. “This shows that Norway is so weak purely militarily that we no longer have the capacity to supply our own crews, whether they are civilian or military”, he stressed. Andreas Østhagen, senior researcher at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute, argued that US military use of Jan Mayen is a token of increased American interest in the Arctic . “It must be seen in the context of the US's increased interest and commitment to the Arctic and the Arctic during the Trump administration, where this fits nicely into a number of symbolic and real political actions being taken”, Østhagen said. “If you want to avoid provoking Russia, this may not be the smartest thing to do”, Østhagen said. Reds party leader Bjørnar Moxnes called for a parliamentary hearing on the matter. “It is inexcusable to let an unpredictable superpower like the United States to take over military tasks in Norway, which the Norwegian Armed Forces can do just fine. This is especially true in the Northern Territories where this is doomed to increase tensions with Russia”, Moxnes said.

'Provocative': Criticism Pours Over US Plans to Use Norwegian Airbase on Arctic Island

Sputnik International
©                    AP Photo / Felipe Dana
https://sputniknews.com/world/201911301077445887-denmark-puts-greenland-at-top-of-its-security-concerns-following-us-bid-to-buy-arctic-island/
US President Donald Trump surprised Denmark this August by suggesting that Washington could buy the semi-autonomous and subsidised territory from the kingdom. The latter, however, firmly declined POTUS' offer. The latest risk assessment report by Denmark's Defence Intelligence Service has showed a drastic change in the country's security priorities, with the kingdom's Greenland territory considered to be at greater risk than anything else, putting the defence of the region above measures to counter terrorism and cybercrime. The shift in stance was partly linked to a recent move by the US president , who offered the country a hefty sum in exchange for the island, which is rich in significant deposits of valuable, but hard to access, resources, the BBC reported, citing the risk assessment document. Denmark responded negatively to the offer. ©                    AP Photo / Felipe Dana
In this photo taken late Friday, Aug. 16, 2019, homes are illuminated after the sunset in Tasiilaq, Greenland. But this is not the only reason that Greenland was put at the top of the Danish risk list. The Intelligence Service argues that the "power game" in the Arctic region, where the island is located, has intensified in recent years. Russia, Canada, Denmark, and the US are at odds in the area, presenting their various and conflicting claims to the Arctic territories to the UN. The US is ostensibly trying to prevent Russia's expansion in the Arctic and is mulling building military bases there to prevent this. Moscow, in turn, is not planning on stopping its exploration missions in the region, where resource deposits, including fossil fuels, are becoming increasingly available with the ice slowly retreating and drilling technologies advancing. ©                    REUTERS / NASA
Reports surfaced in August 2019, saying that Trump had mulled buying Greenland 's territory from the Danish government on several occasions, with his aide Larry Kudlow later confirming the rumours , noting that POTUS knows a thing or two about buying real estate. The news was not well received in Denmark, with the Danish government vehemently dismissing the notion as "absurd". Trump, in turn, postponed his visit to the country and the planned meeting with its Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, citing the refusal to discuss the island's sale as the reason for the sudden move. ...

Denmark Puts Greenland at Top of Its Security Concerns Following US Bid to Buy Arctic Island

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