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As a substitute for coveted elephant ivory, mammoth tusks can sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. A rush is underway to dig them out of the frozen earth in Siberia and sell them, mostly to China. The hunt is making millionaires of some men living in this impoverished region — but it’s also illegal.

Photographer Amos Chapple followed a group of tusk hunters in Siberia on assignment for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. He recalled his three-week journey with NPR’s Ailsa Chang.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Interview Highlights

On seeing his first tusk

I saw just one beautiful example of a tusk that came out of the ground right in front of me — it was still, like, cold to the touch when it came out. It weighed about [135 pounds] and it was curled. You know, mammoth tusks are very distinctive, because they’re very curly. … They corkscrew a little bit. And you can still smell the animal in them as well.

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On how these tusks are excavated

The reason that Siberia is such a mecca for mammoth tusk hunting is because of the permafrost. So there were mammoths everywhere, and they died and their bones sank into the earth, but in most places they rotted because the soil is warm. But once they lock into the permafrost they can just be there almost indefinitely — the bones just don’t decay inside that permafrost.

So you need to carve away that permafrost. And the method that they’ve developed is to get firefighting pumps, and they pull water out of a nearby river, and then they blast away. …

Once they see the end of a tusk, they’ll just give it a little wiggle, and then blast it some more, give it another wiggle, and eventually it’ll come out. It’s like extracting a tooth.

Tusk hunting causes erosion along the edges of the hill.

Amos Chapple/RFE/RL

On what the excavation does to the environment

They would pull water out from the rivers, they’d blast it into the hillside, and those hillsides would effectively melt back into the river. And so the rivers were completely full of silt. It should be one of the most pristine places on Earth, and these guys didn’t even bother taking fishing rods, because the fish were gone.

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On the “pretty miserable” hunting conditions

The mosquitoes: that was what made life really, really horrible. … I remember one day I was trying to cross one of these streams when I fell in, and I sat on the bank and I took off one of my gumboots and tried to squeegee out my sock. And the moment I did that, all these black mosquitoes descended on my white, white feet and the contrast was just so superb. …

I took a couple of pictures and then I put my socks back on, and then I limped and whimpered my way towards the river — and I remember thinking I would pay hundreds of dollars right now to be able to plunge my feet into icy, cold water.

One day, about 11,000 years ago, a lone bull mastodon plodded through the shallows of a lake in what today is Michigan. Some time later, three females and a gamboling calf passed the same way. Luckily for paleontologists, clay-rich mud filled the animals’ footprints, preserving the tracks and giving scientists insights into the mastodons’ social structure. The long-extinct creatures likely lived in matriarchal herds, while mature males roamed singly, much like their modern-day relatives: elephants.

Today, elephant numbers have dwindled, as has their range. They’re now considered vulnerable in Africa and endangered in Asia. But during the Pleistocene epoch, between 2.6 million and 11,700 years ago, elephants and their diverse relatives stomped across an impressive swath of the globe, from the Arctic to South America. Even back then, elephants were the most plentiful, diverse and widely distributed of this group, the Proboscidea. It also included mammoths, mastodons, and less well-known members such as stegodons and gomphotheres. Their trunks and tusks make them all recognizable cousins.

Thanks to fossils, preserved tracks, recent finds of proboscideans frozen in permafrost, and new technologies used to probe these ancient lineages, researchers are learning more about the lives and deaths of proboscideans, says Daniel Fisher, a paleontologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Dick Mol and colleagues’ find of the bones of the Yukagir Mammoth in Siberia inspired the creation of this replica of the extinct animal, tusks, hair and all. (Credit: Remie Bakker, Manimal Works, Rotterdam)

Fisher studies fossil tusks because they grew throughout the animal’s life, preserving a record of nutrient intake and habits. “They essentially carry diaries of their lives around with them,” says Fisher. His team finely analyzes the layers of dentin in fossilized tusks. These layers provide data on individual months, or even weeks or days, in a proboscidean’s lifetime.

Fisher expects his analyses will answer the ultimate question: What happened to these creatures? At the end of the Pleistocene, most proboscideans, along with many other large mammals, disappeared from the Earth. It wasn’t a sudden event, notes Dimila Mothé, a postdoctoral fellow in the mammalogy lab at the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro; new fossil finds show that species in some parts of the world held on for several thousand years, or in some cases tens of thousands of years, longer. Still, by modern times, the once-diverse proboscideans — which numbered a dozen or so during the Pleistocene — had dwindled down to just two or three species, depending on how you count.

Two main explanations for the massive creatures’ departure have long been debated. One is that changes to the climate resulted in an environment — warmer, perhaps drier, or with more seasonal changes — that most proboscideans could not tolerate. The other is that humans hunted the animals to extinction.

It’s a question with resonance for the future as well as the past. The current decline in elephant numbers may not be a new extinction event, but simply the tail end of the ongoing extinction of all proboscideans, suggests Mothé. Understanding the plight of the Pleistocene proboscideans could help scientists predict or avert the fate of their modern descendants.

Here are some of the latest insights into daily lives and eventual disappearance of the prehistoric proboscidean:

1. Mammoth Diets Included Some, Well, Interesting Things

In 2007, reindeer herders in Siberia discovered the frozen carcass of a female mammoth calf. Named Lyuba, for the wife of the herder who reported the find, the calf had suffocated in a pool of mud about 40,000 years ago. The mud preserved not only her body, but the contents of her gut, too.

She had consumed milk, no surprise for a one-month-old calf (her age was apparent from the layers of dentin in her teeth.) Her stomach also contained chewed-up plant remains — yet she wasn’t mature enough to have done the chewing herself.

And there was something else in the intestine: fungi that typically grow in poop. For Fisher and the other paleontologists, the conclusion was clear: Lyuba had noshed on mammoth feces that included both fungi and undigested plant matter.

Discovered in 2007 in Russia’s Arctic Yamal Peninsula, Lyuba died roughly 40,000 years ago, only a month old. Her skin and organs were well preserved, and studies of the contents of her stomach and intestine have led to new understandings of mammoth diets. (Credit: Matt Howry/Wikimedia Commons)

Discovered in 2007 in Russia’s Arctic Yamal Peninsula, Lyuba died roughly 40,000 years ago, only a month old. Her skin and organs were well preserved, and studies of the contents of her stomach and intestine have led to new understandings of mammoth diets. (Credit: Matt Howry/Wikimedia Commons)

Modern elephants do this too. Babies obtain the microbes they need for digestion from Mom’s waste. Adults also eat feces, a practice scientists call coprophagy. Because of the way their digestive systems are set up, coprophagy helps the animals extract additional nutrients from their food.

The scientists found other oddities in Lyuba’s digestive tract: mammal hair and a vole bone. What were those items doing in the gut of an herbivore? Perhaps, as the springtime weather melted snow and revealed the vole’s stored hay, the hungry mammoth mother gobbled up the animal along with the hay by accident, Fisher speculates. But eating rodents could also have been a way for mammoths to gain extra nutrients at the end of the winter.

2. Woolly Mammoths Roamed a Land That Was Cold but Not So Snowy.

Of course, the main dish for a proboscidean was vegetables, and the kinds of plants they ate can tell scientists something about where the animals lived. Clues can be found in the carbon in the animals’ fossilized tusks and teeth. Different kinds of plants contain different ratios of carbon isotopes, which are reflected in tooth fossils and allow scientists like Fisher to glean information on diets. From those same ratios, he can even infer when the animals were living off their own fat stores during wintertime.

Another piece of evidence comes from tooth wear. Grasses contain mineral particles called phytoliths, which leave scratches on the teeth. Bushes and trees, containing fewer phytoliths, create a different pattern. The scratches in fossilized teeth reflect the diet of a creature in its final weeks or days.

“We call it the ‘last supper’ effect,” says Gina Semprebon, a paleoecologist at Bay Path University in Longmeadow, Massachusetts.

Ancient mammoths and mastodons incorporated records of their entire lives in their teeth and tusks. In a tooth, layers of dentin are laid down over the animal’s lifetime. Carbon isotope ratios in the dentin layers can tell researchers about the kinds of plants and amounts eaten. Scratch patterns on the enamel also yield information about what the animals ate.

Ancient mammoths and mastodons incorporated records of their entire lives in their teeth and tusks. In a tooth, layers of dentin are laid down over the animal’s lifetime. Carbon isotope ratios in the dentin layers can tell researchers about the kinds of plants and amounts eaten. Scratch patterns on the enamel also yield information about what the animals ate.

“What really impresses me about the proboscideans is the flexibility in their diet,” she adds. They could eat grasses or shrubs at different locales and times in their lives; at least one lineage switched its preference as it evolved. Or two species in the same area could split the options, with one focusing on bushes and one on grasslands. “That’s how you survive, long-term, in evolution,” says Semprebon.

The findings can get more specific than just grasses versus shrubs, though. Dick Mol, a mammoth researcher at the Rotterdam Museum of Natural History in the Netherlands, once obtained the frozen intestine of what is called the Yukagir mammoth, discovered in Siberia’s Yakutia region in 2002. He took it back to the Netherlands, thawed it, and to his surprise, found it was full of undigested food and dung.

Mol immediately phoned Bas van Geel, a paleoecologist at the University of Amsterdam. Van Geel arrived at Mol’s home half an hour later; subsequently, he analyzed the gut contents by microscopy, chemistry and DNA sequencing.

The researchers found dung-inhabiting fungi, supporting the coprophagy theory. They also found plant remains and pollen from grasses and sedges, as well as herbs, mosses and dwarf willow twigs. The plants were of types adapted to frigid, dry conditions and open spaces — an environment that researchers envision as the “mammoth steppe.”

“The woolly mammoth was living on a cold and dry, almost treeless, mammoth steppe environment,” says Mol. With little snow, the mammoths would have been able to dine on freeze-dried plants throughout the winter, suggests van Geel.

University of Michigan’s Dan Fisher and his team oversaw the excavation of a mammoth skull and tusks found on a soybean farm near Chelsea, Michigan in 2015. Nicknamed the Bristle mammoth, after farmer James Bristle, the fossils were from an adult male that died more than 10,000 years ago. (Credit: Daryl Marshke/Univ. of Michigan Photography)

University of Michigan’s Dan Fisher and his team oversaw the excavation of a mammoth skull and tusks found on a soybean farm near Chelsea, Michigan in 2015. Nicknamed the Bristle mammoth, after farmer James Bristle, the fossils were from an adult male that died more than 10,000 years ago. (Credit: Daryl Marshke/Univ. of Michigan Photography)

3. Woolly Mammoths had Cold in Their DNA.

Elephants live in warm climes such as desert or savannah. How did their ancient relatives, the woolly mammoths, survive that chilly steppe? In 2015, scientists reported the genome sequences of three Asian elephants and two woolly mammoths. Comparing the DNA of the ancient and modern creatures, a team led by Stephan Schuster, a genomicist at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, identified differences in hundreds of genes.

These genetic differences, Schuster and his colleagues reason, gave mammoths adaptations like thick fur and smaller ears, the better to conserve body warmth. Other distinctive mammoth genes likely played a role in the animals’ fat storage, temperature sensitivity, blood sugar regulation and weight. The scientists think that these adaptations would also have helped the animals thrive in cold. Even genes associated with circadian rhythms differed, which might reflect an adaptation to cope with the midnight sun of arctic summers and the dark days of northern winters.

A woolly mammoth trunk found in Siberia in 2010 also suggests adaptation to the cold. The trunk skin contains a hoodlike expansion, which might have served as a sort of “fur mitten” that the mammoth could tuck its frost-nipped trunk tip into.

4. You Do Not Want to Mess With the Musth

Modern-day male elephants, about once a year, enter a phase called “musth” when their thoughts turn to mating and their testosterone levels skyrocket to as much as 60 times normal. For weeks or even months, they become aggressive, and testosterone-rich liquid dribbles from glands next to their eyes.

Did Pleistocene proboscideans do the same? While paleontologists can’t be sure, the evidence indicates that they did. Using CT scans and other techniques to examine the dentin layers from tusks, Fisher has shown that mature male proboscideans regularly fasted, as modern elephants do during musth.

By slicing and finely analyzing fossil tusks, researchers can learn what ancient mammoths, mastodons and other proboscideans ate or where they lived during each year of their lives. Finer layers can allow scientists to parse weeks or even days at a time.

By slicing and finely analyzing fossil tusks, researchers can learn what ancient mammoths, mastodons and other proboscideans ate or where they lived during each year of their lives. Finer layers can allow scientists to parse weeks or even days at a time.

Researchers have also observed evidence of a gland like the one in modern elephants in several frozen specimens from Siberia. And some fossils have preserved evidence of the male-on-male violence that typically happens during musth. For example, the Crawford mammoths found in Nebraska are two adult males who locked their tusks around each other’s heads and died, likely of dehydration and starvation, while still hooked together.

The likelihood of musth is another piece of evidence, along with the Michigan footprints, suggesting that early proboscideans maintained a social structure similar to elephants today, with matriarchal herds and solitary adult males.

Fisher sees records of female reproductive status in tusks, too. This, presumably, reflects the slower or faster growth rate of the tusk in times of poor or rich food supply. But in adult females, Fisher sees a regular, multiyear pattern. The thickness of annual layers drops for about 2.5 years, then rises for 1.5, making a four-year cycle. He thinks this reflects a nearly two-year pregnancy, similar to the gestation period of modern elephants, when calcium and phosphorus are diverted from teeth and tusks to the growing fetus. That, he suspects, would be followed by the time the mother spent nursing her calf, which could also divert minerals from teeth and tusks.

5. New Evidence From Mammoth and Mastodon Fossils Hints at Humans as Prime Suspects in the Animals’ Disappearance. But the Jury is Still Out

In those calving cycles and other tusk patterns, Fisher seeks the explanation for the extinction of most mastodons, mammoths and their relatives. Based on his new analyses of dentin layers and radioactive isotopes in tusks, never done before at so fine a resolution, he’s concluded that human hunters are to blame. Here’s his reasoning, with respect to calving rates:

If climate change made it hard for mammoths to find food and survive, then they would have had fewer calves, with longer intervals between births. Studies of their tusks should reflect nutritional deficiencies.

But what Fisher sees in the tusks is mammoths enjoying solid nutrition, fast growth and regular, frequent reproduction, particularly as the Pleistocene drew to a close. That’s the pattern he’d predict if hunters were picking off herd members, because there would have been more food around for those still living.

In Dan Fisher’s lab, a fossilized tusk is painstakingly put together from hundreds of fragments. (Credit: Daryl Marshke/Univ. of Michigan Photography)

In Dan Fisher’s lab, a fossilized tusk is painstakingly put together from hundreds of fragments. (Credit: Daryl Marshke/Univ. of Michigan Photography)

“It doesn’t matter whether you look at growth rates, you look at age of maturation, first calving or calving intervals, they all change in the direction predicted by the hunting hypothesis,” says Fisher. However, he cautions that he’s looked at only several dozen tusks so far, and he would like to have ten times as many data points to build his case.

Most other scientists think climate change played a more important role. “The demise of the mammoth steppe was dramatic,” says Mol. Analysis of pollen in lake sediments reflects a major climate change about 13,000 years ago, with the dry steppe and grasslands turning to wet tundra and forests, says van Geel. Plus, he adds, the wet winters would have meant more snow, and the animals might have struggled to find food under accumulated drifts.

Schuster also supports the idea that climate was the major factor. It would have been hard for large proboscideans to move on the soggy ground, he says. Plus, his DNA analyses indicate that one group of mammoths died out before people ever entered its range. “We are totally off the hook for that extinction,” he says.

Schuster also thinks that going after an animal as large as a mammoth would be a risky proposition for a band of early humans. Mol, too, doesn’t dispute that people may have killed mammoths, but doubts we killed them all.

Of course, the answer needn’t be black or white. Both Mol and Van Geel suspect that multiple factors were at play, including not only climate and hunting, but also illness, inbreeding and isolation as populations dwindled.

Certainly, it’s likely that more than one factor doomed the Pleistocene proboscideans, agrees Fisher, but he still argues that the hunting was a stronger factor than climate change.

What does that mean for the elephants — the only remaining proboscideans?

Poaching and Habitat Loss: Clear Threats to Elephants

According to the organizers of World Elephant Day, elephant populations have dropped by 62 percent in the last ten years. There are about 400,000 African elephants left, and fewer than 40,000 Asian elephants. In this case, it’s clear what is killing the elephants: poaching driven by humankind’s desire for ivory. Habitat loss due to human activity is also a factor.

But this time, humans are paying attention. Thanks to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, ivory trade has been banned officially since 1990. Elephant lovers are using trackers and other technology to find elephants and protect them from poachers. Bay Path’s Semprebon, for one, hopes that as people become aware of the remarkable history of proboscideans, they’ll be more eager to save the last ones.

lancing into the 50-metre-deep hole the two tusk hunters smiled. Together, they heaved out a caramel-coloured mammoth tusk from the soil where it had been frozen for at least 10,000 years. Their dog, too, seemed to be interested in the find. “Because it’s been locked in the ice for that long it still smelled of the meat, it still smelled of the animal,” says Amos Chapple, who spent three weeks photographing mammoth tusk hunters at work in the Siberian region of Yakutia.

The tusk hunters cleaned their find with dry grass and quickly wrapped it in cling film to keep it moist and preserve valuable weight that would push up its price when it came to selling it. Then the precious cargo, along with two other tusks, went on a winding five hour speedboat journey down a river in northeastern Siberia. The 65kg relic was later sold for $34,000 (£26,800) to a Chinese dealer waiting in the tusk hunters’ village, earning them a total of around $100,000 (£77,000) in just eight days. Everything they left behind – mammoth skulls and bones – was consumed by the elements.

The frozen land of Siberia is rapidly thawing. Parts of it are warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. The permafrost – soil that remains frozen year-round – is protected by a surface layer of dirt and sediment that thaws in summer and refreezes in winter. But in 2018, some parts of this layer did not freeze at all, leaving the permafrost exposed to even warmer temperatures than usual. For decades, residents of this frozen land, where temperatures regularly dip below minus 30 degrees Celsius, would often stumble upon the remnants of woolly mammoths that died out 10,000 years ago. But as the ground thaws, Siberia is revealing its ancient treasure hoard faster than ever. Now, fuelled by Chinese demand for ivory, tusk hunters are racing to retrieve so-called “ice ivory” from the Siberian permafrost.

An estimated 80 per cent of Siberian mammoth tusks end up in mainland China, via Hong Kong, where they are carved and turned into elaborate sculptures and trinkets. Russia exported 72 tonnes of mammoth tusk in 2017 but exports have dropped off as a growing underground trade in tusks appears to be eating into the official trade. While collectors can obtain licences, they increasingly complain of pressure from the authorities who confiscate their finds and demand high tariffs. To avoid losing business, many are sidestepping existing regulations and selling their tusks quickly but for less money to Chinese dealers who come to buy them directly. Some see the legal mammoth trade as a relief valve that gives consumers an alternative to elephant ivory. But is the shadowy trade in the extinct species putting even more pressure on one of the world’s most endangered animals?

Amos Chapple / Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty

Mammoth hunting is an enticing profession for the daring or desperate residents of Yakutia. All of the tusk hunters Chapple encountered in the isolated camp were local to the area, but each one had a different motivation that brought them to search beneath the permafrost. One was a self-made millionaire through the mammoth tusk trade, some had full-time jobs during the rest of the year, and others broke into the business more recently after watching viral videos that made the excavations look like a quick win. Everybody knows the drill: pick a spot and blast away. “A lot of these guys are in quite desperate situations,” says Chapple. Many take out bank loans to finance the petrol needed for the pumps. “If they can just get one of these tusks, it can change their lives.”

Some use powerful firefighter pumps to melt away the ice and bore deep underground. Others burrow labyrinthine caverns under the ground and navigate below the dripping mud with huge chunks of ice hanging over them. “All it takes is a roof collapse and they’re entombed forever,” says Chapple, who photographed the “mammoth hunt” for Radio Free Europe, a US government-funded broadcaster in Eastern Europe. It’s dangerous but lucrative work where a lucky few could strike it rich. For most collectors in this impoverished region, though, an entire season of backbreaking labour in the mud will end up losing them money.

Along this 120km stretch of river, the only movement interrupting the excavations are occasional patrol boats with environmental protection officers accompanied by police looking for hunters who don’t have a licence to sell their finds legally. If word gets out that a boat is approaching, “they throw camouflage netting over the equipment and melt away far into the forest like Chechen guerrillas,” says Chapple.

Although the trade is still not fully regulated, searching for and selling mammoth tusks is completely legal in Russia as long as collectors obtain a licence. Alexei – a licensed dealer who asked to be identified by a pseudonym – has been exporting mammoth tusks for seven years. In the past two years, his business has been struggling as the black market really started taking off. With Russian authorities slowing down the legal trade, his Chinese customers are starting to turn to smugglers for their supply of mammoth ivory instead. “We suffer big losses,” he says. “Almost two tonnes of legally mined material were taken from me for inspection. A year-and-a-half has passed and the tusks are still being examined.”

Confiscating ivory from licensed collectors and dragging out checks for years may be an attempt to better control the trade, says Alexei, but it risks achieving quite the opposite. “It kills the legal market in Yakutia and pushes people to do illegal business.” Due to the nature of the business, it is difficult to estimate how many tusks are exported illegally, but Alexei believes it could be as much as 50 per cent today, compared with 20 per cent in 2016. These underhand deals not only make it impossible for authorities to keep the trade in check, there is one other beneficiary that misses out on the ancient treasures: science.

Since the 1990s, the Academy of Sciences of the Sakha (Yakutia) Republic (ASSR) has received many rare specimens from licensed ivory collectors that it could not otherwise afford, including carcasses of woolly mammoth, woolly rhino and cave lion cubs. Where collectors might have left the skulls and bones of prehistoric megafauna scattered around excavation sites in the past, they now know their value and hand them over to scientists for free. “We have an agreement with these guys,” says Valerii Plotnikov, a senior researcher at the ASSR. A collector remains the owner and receives a cut of the profits when the specimens are exhibited abroad.

Last year, a Yakutia resident unearthed a severed wolf head estimated to be around 40,000 years old. With a full head of hair, fangs, tongue and even brain tissue largely intact, Plotnikov’s team could use DNA analysis and CT scanners – a tool that uses x-rays to create a 360-degree image of internal organs and tissues – to study this ancient predator and compare the genetic information to that of modern wolves.

As an adviser to the Russian Ministry of Culture, Plotnikov takes photos and measurements of the mammoth tusks the collectors bring into Yakutsk in order to estimate their age, size and weight – and determine their cultural value. This allows collectors and dealers to request a licence to export the tusks from Moscow to China. It’s a months-long process that has now become even more complex. Three months ago airport police in Yakutsk confiscated several tonnes of tusks from a licensed collector and are still holding them. The slow checks end up losing collectors money. As a result, many start selling their goods on the black market, and the long-established trading companies that used to buy tusks in bulk and sell them on to China are now being undercut by illegal traffickers. “If the whole business becomes illegal, scientists will not have a chance to take measurements of these tusks,” says Plotnikov. “It’s terrible, but what can we do?”

Amos Chapple / Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty

Lucy Vigne is a very different kind of ivory hunter. Determined to combat ivory smuggling and elephant poaching, Vigne has spent years investigating the global ivory trade with her late colleague Esmond Martin. When the pair last visited the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, they primarily came across mammoth ivory in specialty shops. In 2011, the independent researchers counted and photographed 6,541 items in 30 outlets – some of them with posters in the windows advertising their mammoth wares. Because of the brown outer layer, large cracks and stains, the mammoth ivory available for purchase was mostly carved into sculptures and figures, some priced at £7,800, rather than mass produced into jewellery and chopsticks as was the case with elephant tusks.

Mammoth ivory has steadily gained popularity since the early 2000s but, when China banned the import and sales of elephant ivory in 2017 to solve the poaching crisis, ivory carvers and vendors started switching to the ancient material en masse. “The carvers in China are some of the best in the world and have great expertise in carving all sorts of materials, so they are willingly adapting to it,” says Vigne.

Vigne, who was raised in England and now lives in Kenya, returned to the port city in late 2018 to find the number of mammoth ivory items for sale had soared. Guangzhou is just two hours away from Hong Kong so bringing in mammoth tusks in bulk is simple and profitable. With a wealthier population interested in luxury goods, buyers in Guangzhou – a city famous for both its ivory carving factories and shops – seem to have accepted the elephants’ long-extinct ancestors as an authentic substitute. While Russian “ice ivory” was sold as an exclusive collector’s good in the past, smaller items such as pendants, bangles and beaded bracelets have become affordable substitutes for the mass market. A small pendant, for instance, can sell for as little as 250 yuan (£27) in the market areas for jade stones, jewellery and antiques. Retailers in the new shopping centres and airport gift shops charge several times that price.

When elephant ivory was legally and widely available in mainland China, some vendors struggled to persuade consumers into buying mammoth items and ended up closing their outlets due to low sales. Those specialising in mammoth ivory and catering to a wealthier clientele were already doing better when Vigne and Martin visited in 2011. With lower imports and rising prices, these specialist vendors believed, the limited commodity would eventually become a profitable investment.

For the average buyer, Vigne says, the fact that their ivory trinket started life attached to a woolly mammoth doesn’t make it any less attractive. With an estimated ten million mammoths still buried in Siberia’s permafrost, the ancient animal outnumbers the 350,000 African elephants by far. Chinese consumers will happily buy mammoth ivory as long as it resembles the white ivory they are used to. Traditional ivory carving goes back to the 14th century and, historically, was the preserve of emperors, scholars and the upper-class. Today, ivory is still a status symbol for the new middle class, often cherished for its aesthetic. “Although people aspire to own ‘ivory’, in reality, many would be unable to distinguish between elephant and mammoth ivory or even ivory substitutes,” says a spokesperson from TRAFFIC, a wildlife trade monitoring group working in the region.

But the strong similarities between the two makes telling the difference between legal mammoth ivory and illegal elephant ivory difficult. When mammoth tusks are traded in their entirety, they are relatively easy to identify because, unlike those of elephants, they have a brown, outer peel and tend to be larger and twisted. To identify the origin of a piece of tusk or carved sculpture, dealers and vendors have to resort to a photocopier or scanner and take a photo of the stacked chevron-like pattern visible in a cross-section of ivory. Closest to the root of the tusk, which is essentially an elongated tooth, it’s easy to discern these intersecting lines. If the angle these lines meet at is less than 90 degrees, the tusk belongs to a mammoth. If it is over 90 degrees, it is that of an elephant. It is not a fool-proof system, though, especially if the pieces are small, painted and carved upon.

“It’s easier to mix smaller items of elephant and mammoth ivory. That does happen, either accidentally or because a vendor is not experienced since they used to be sold in the same shops,” says Vigne. When scouring the market areas and shops of southern China before the ban, she would ask to see both mammoth and elephant ivory in shops. “If one is looking at several on a counter, it’s very difficult for the shopkeeper to remember which pendant came from where because they can look identical,” says Vigne.

While elephant ivory was banned from mainland China in 2017, it will be available in Hong Kong until 2021. This left a four year window to potentially smuggle ivory purchased legally in Hong Kong into southern China. It is not clear how much mammoth ivory ends up in mainland China every year, but customs data shows that on average 36 tonnes of raw tusks and unworked tusk pieces are brought into Hong Kong every year as there is no import tax. Of that, 29 tonnes of mammoth tusks are re-exported to mainland China.

Recent investigations by TRAFFIC suggest that a few shops in China, Hong Kong and even the US have labelled elephant ivory as “mammoth” or “bone”. Since law enforcement officials are unable to check every single item sold in a store, vendors might sell elephant ivory illegally, under the guise of it being mammoth ivory. The state of New York prohibits the domestic sale of elephant ivory since 2014 and mammoth ivory since 2016 and convicted a Manhattan-based antiques vendor in 2017 of intentionally mislabelling elephant as mammoth ivory during the transition period. Mammoth ivory is also banned in India. There is no comprehensive assessment that demonstrates how widespread the practice is in China and where on the trade route the laundering may be happening, because mammoth comes from Russia and elephant from Africa. “What we’ve got to remember is that raw [elephant] tusks are being smuggled off the African continent hidden in large shipments by criminal networks,” says Vigne. “They’re not laundering elephant ivory. It would look rather odd if tusks came out of Africa and are labelled as mammoth ivory.” Those wanting to crack down on the illegal elephant ivory trade and potential mammoth laundering will have to map out the marketplace first.

Amos Chapple / Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty

Mammoth ivory has been touted as an “ethical” alternative for the continuing illegal ivory trade that is threatening an entire living species with extinction, but at what cost? Earlier this year, economists from Texas A&M University and the University of Calgary investigated how the supply of unearthed mammoth ivory affected the poaching of wild elephants between 2010 and 2012. They estimated that the 80 tonnes of mammoth ivory that were exported from Russia in an average year reduced poaching from 55,000 elephants per year to 34,000.

Conservationists and campaigners, on the other hand, see the mammoth ivory trade as a way of sustaining a criminal industry and fear it could provide a loophole for intentional mislabelling and laundering. In August, delegates taking part in CITES, the world’s biggest conference on wildlife trade, debated whether woolly mammoths should become the first extinct species to be listed as endangered in an attempt to regulate the trade and clamp down on ivory smuggling. As the trade in mammoth ivory is almost unregulated and undocumented today, the rationale behind the proposal put forward by Israel was to remove any loopholes that could facilitate mislabelling and laundering of illegal elephant ivory. With all the complexities trade regulations entail, would a total ban on mammoth ivory stop the trade altogether?

Douglas MacMillan, a University of Kent professor focusing on the economics of conservation, isn’t convinced. “A mammoth ivory ban would drive prices for elephant ivory higher and therefore increase the incentive to poach them,” he says, adding that demand and prices for elephant ivory have been falling rapidly in China in the last five years – as a result, many ivory carving factories had shut down by the time the ban on elephant ivory came into force in 2017.

And it appears that demand for ivory might be dwindling anyway. In September, a WWF-funded survey of 2,000 people in China found that 73 per cent of respondents would not buy ivory, compared to 57 per cent in 2017 before the domestic ban on elephant ivory went into effect. Respondents cited concerns about the extinction of elephants and the cruelty related to ivory trade. Most consumers are aware that elephant ivory is illegal, which seems to have rubbed off onto mammoth ivory. “Most ordinary people do not understand the difference between a mammoth and an elephant, and since the ban on elephant ivory, they simply are afraid to buy anything,” says Russian dealer Alexei.

Israel ended up withdrawing its motion to regulate the trade in long-extinct woolly mammoths, pending further research into the extent of laundering and mislabelling. But there are still major question marks around what stockpiles exist, where manufacturing and sales takes place and how laundering of elephant ivory could be prevented. With a supply chain stretching out across three continents, if not more, the true scale of the mammoth ivory trade will remain in the dark unless traders and governments are willing to publicly release their export and import figures. Until then, any possible solutions will have to be put on ice.

Elk are the second largest members of the deer family. Adult male elk, referred to as bulls, attain their largest size at 7 years old. Once fully grown, a bull elk averages 5 feet tall at the shoulders and can weigh between 700 and 1100 pounds. Female elk, known as cows, weigh between 500 and 600 pounds, and stand an average of 4.5 feet at shoulder height. Only bulls have antlers.

Antlers
Antlers play a very important role in mate selection. Antlers, unlike the horns of bison, are shed every spring and a new set is grown. Antler growth is in preparation for the mating season, which primarily occurs in September and October. Large antlers advertise dominance and the ability to defend against predators and other bulls. Therefore, female elk will generally select a dominant bull with large antlers. Antlers can weigh up to 40 pounds per set. Velvet, which covers antlers during the growth phase, carries blood to the growing bone tissue. During the summer months, antlers can grow up to one inch per day, making it the fastest growing bone known.

The blood flow to the antlers stops in August, when the antlers have reached their full size. At this point, the velvet covering dries and falls off or is rubbed off on trees or shrubs.

Teeth
Teeth in elk are similar to other deer except for the presence of upper canine teeth. An elk’s canine teeth, made of ivory, are unique and were highly prized by both Native Americans and European settlers. The “ivories” (also called tusks, whistlers, or buglers) were primarily used as decorative beads, pendants, and necklaces, and were very valuable due to their rarity. The elk’s molars and incisors provide the best indication of the animal’s age.

Mating
The gestation period of elk is approximately 8.5 months, with calves born from late May through early July. Cows separate from the herd and go into hiding during calving. Calves are hidden during the first few weeks following birth until they are able to run from predators. A cow usually gives birth to a single calf, but on rare occasions there will be twins. At birth a calf weighs about 35 pounds.

Elk form herds which offer protection against predators. Cows and calves live in groups, but are generally only accompanied by bull elk during the mating season, or “rut.” The rut occurs in autumn.

Elk begin “bugling”—their signature mating call—in early autumn. This is typically a good time to see and hear elk. (A recording of a bugling elk) The rut is characterized by harems, which are groups of cows and calves, controlled by a dominant bull. During other seasons, males can be found alone or in small bachelor groups.

Habitat
Elk can live in a variety of habitats, including forests, meadows, and mountains. Their diet includes grasses, tree leaves, twigs, and shrubs. Bark, pine needles, and tree lichens are also eaten in smaller quantities. Elk eat an average of 3 pounds of food per day for every 100 pounds of body weight; therefore, a bull elk weighing 800 pounds would eat about 24 pounds of forage each day.  Elk thrived in North America until the first Europeans began settling the area. Prior to their arrival, an estimated 10 million elk ranged across the United States. European settlers hunted elk to provide food for their families and because they feared the elk would compete with livestock. Also, market demands for elk products such as hides, antlers, and “ivories” encourage the harvest of elk.

Elk habitat was lost as thousands of acres were cleared for farms and developing towns. As a result of over-harvest and habitat destruction, elk populations began to decline, reaching a low of
90,000 by 1900.

By the 20th century, two of the six subspecies, including the Eastern elk which lived throughout the eastern United States, were extinct. Fortunately, Americans concerned with the survival of the elk called for regulated hunting seasons and initiated elk recovery programs.

For Your Safety
Elk appear relatively docile, but they can be unpredictable and dangerous.  Do not approach or attempt to provoke them. Large animals should be respected at all times, especially bulls and cows with calves. Also, for your safety and for the elk’s safety, DO NOT FEED the animals.

Offering human food to elk (or any wild animal) is harmful in two ways:

1. It conditions the animals to view people as a food source, leading to the possibility of property damage and human injury; and
2. Human food is not healthy for the animals.

Regularly referred to as whistlers or buglers, the eyeteeth of elk are actually vestigial tusks—a throwback to their ancient ancestors. Cervids of old would use these tusks to battle during the rut and defend themselves against predators, but as evolution selected for bigger antlers, those canines started to recede.

In modern-day elk, the ivories have shrunk to be thumb tip-sized nubs. They’re found in bulls and cows, and form in calves at about a year of age. Hunters often credit the ivories for elk’s musical sounds, but that’s just an old wives’ tale.

Fashionable sportsmen never leave the ivories behind, regularly turning them into rings, necklaces, hatbands, pendants, watches, cufflinks, belt buckles, tie tacks, and more. Or, if you’re like me and lack the confidence to pull off an ivory earring or bolo tie, they reside in a display case next to fossils, arrowheads, and other natural wonders.

If you’re also like me, your ivories sat in a backpack for a year and had dried flesh welded onto them. Cleaning them up seemed like a daunting task, but all I needed was a few household items to reveal those buttery cream colors underneath and make the ivories display-case ready.

To start, simmer the ivories in a pot of water for a few hours. Don’t let the water come to a boil, as you’re just trying to loosen the tissue on the canines. After that, you’ll be able to scrape away the flesh with your fingernails.

Next, create a hydrogen peroxide and baking soda cocktail to whiten the ivories. Since my ivories sat uncleaned for a year, I soaked them in the mix for 24 hours. However, if your ivories are fresh out the skull, you can probably have them looking polished in just a couple hours.

Once they’ve had their hydrogen peroxide baptism, they’ll be ready to show off, whether that means rocking them in a hatband or hanging one from your rear view mirror.

How many ivories are in an Elk’s mouth?  An elk has only 2 ivories, situated forward in its upper jaw, an elk has no upper front teeth.  The ivories are where the canine teeth are and are left over from their ancient ancestors who had tusks where the ivory teeth are today.  Modern elk, when threatened, will snarl and expose their ivories, which was probably more impressive when they were elongated tusks.  Elk have other teeth, but they are made of enamel and resemble the teeth of other herbivores.  Elk and walrus are the only animals in North America that have ivory tusks.

​Why are elk ivories so expensive? Since an elk only produces 2 ivories, they are not easy to come by, they are also not easy or fun to clean.  When the elk is young (1-4 years), the ivories are hollow.  Often when the hollow ivories are removed, the teeth are damaged and broken.  Because they are hollow they are not as valuable as more mature elk teeth and the hollow root is filled with a sac of blood that turns dark and discolors the tooth if not removed during cleaning.  When the elk is mature (4-7) years the tooth is solid and most prime, and the bull elk tooth develops two points on the root.  After 7 years they start to wear down the ivory down due to grinding, which makes the ivory less valuable.  So not only do you get just 2 teeth out of an elk, depending on the age, the tooth may not be that valuable.  Therefore, GOOD teeth can be very expensive and more of a valuable commodity.  Adding to their scarcity, the ivories are kept as trophies by the hunter and are used by jewelry makers to make rings, necklace charms, etc. prized by non native people for their rarity and trophy value.  Primarily the jeweler is concerned with the appearance of the coloring and rings on the bottom of the crown.  Some native people call this the “moccasin” as it resembles the sole of a moccasin in color and shape.