October 29, 2020

Mammoths and Men

Post By MANUFACTURING BV Blog 37 Comments

For five months Karl Gorokhov has tracked his ancient prey across a desolate island in the East Siberian Sea, slogging 18 hours a day over the icy tundra. He is cold and exhausted, with a hunger so primal that he has been reduced to eating seagulls. Even the two polar bears that attacked his camp were famished; their stomachs, slit open after they were shot dead, were empty. Gorokhov, a 46-year-old with wind-chapped cheeks and a scraggly, reddish beard, heads out every day past the nine graves near his camp—the final resting places, he presumes, for unlucky souls who came to the island to escape the Soviet gulag.

Gorokhov is running out of time. Late summer blizzards are howling across Kotelnyy Island, 600 miles north of the Arctic Circle, and the deep freeze of another northern winter looms. His fingers and palms start to itch. It’s “a lucky sign,” Gorokhov said later. The itching usually strikes when he’s on the verge of finding what he’s looking for: the ivory tusks of a mammoth.

The shaggy giants that roamed northern Siberia during the late Pleistocene epoch died off about 10,000 years ago, though isolated populations lingered on islands to the north and east, the last dying out some 3,700 years ago. The mammoths’ tusks, which could spiral to more than 13 feet, are reemerging from the permafrost—and fueling a trade that benefits the people of Arctic Siberia, including the native Yakuts, an Asiatic ethnic group that speaks a language of Turkic origin. For nearly a decade Gorokhov has been a tusk-hunting pioneer, exploring one of the world’s most inhospitable expanses. Now, trusting his itchy fingers, he scours the tundra until he almost trips over the tip of a tusk. “Sometimes the tusk just appears in front of you,” he says, “as if it were guiding you all along.”

It takes Gorokhov almost 24 hours of continuous digging to extract the tusk from the pebbly ice below. The specimen that emerges is as thick as a tree trunk—150 pounds—and in near-pristine condition. Before hauling the tusk away, Gorokhov tosses a silver earring into the hole he has dug, as an offering to the local spirits. If he gets the ancient relic safely home, it could fetch more than $60,000.

The trade in mammoth ivory barely existed when Gorokhov was born in northern Siberia in 1966, on the same day, May 5, as his namesake, Karl Marx. He remembers as a child seeing rotting tusks on the banks of the Yana River, near his fishing village of Ust-Yansk. Free enterprise was banned in the Soviet Union, and many locals considered it bad luck to disturb the tusks, which some believed came from giant molelike creatures that lived deep under the permafrost.

The journey from permafrost to market—nearly 90 percent of Siberia’s tusks end up in China—begins by small boat.
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Still, the ancient tusks held Gorokhov in their spell. Growing up in Yakutiya, a resource-rich region nearly the size of India that’s inhabited today by fewer than a million people and is officially called the Republic of Sakha, he was told that the Earth’s creator got so cold flying over this region that he dropped a wealth of treasures: gold, silver, diamonds, oil. But it was his schoolteachers’ real-life stories about 17th-century pioneers trading in mammoth tusks that captivated Gorokhov. Years later he would find library books with photographs of early 20th-century explorers: bearded men standing on Kotelnyy Island, dwarfed by mammoth tusks, their boats groaning with stacks of ivory. “I always wondered if more tusks were out there,” Gorokhov says.

Nobody, not even Gorokhov, imagined that mammoth tusks would become an economic lifeline for a region that had been largely abandoned after the shuttering of Soviet-era mines and factories. (The population of Yakutiya’s Ust-Yanskiy District, which covers a swath of tundra three times the size of Switzerland, has dropped from 80,000 to just 8,000 in the past five decades.) Now hundreds, if not thousands, of Yakutiyan men have become tusk hunters, following their ancestors’ routes, enduring the same brutal conditions—and chasing the same Paleolithic beasts.

Nothing, however, has fueled the mammoth tusk trade more than the rise of China, which has an ivory-carving tradition going back thousands of years. Nearly 90 percent of all mammoth tusks hauled out of Siberia—estimated at more than 60 tons a year, though the actual figure may be higher—end up in China, where legions of the newly rich are entranced by ivory. The spike in demand has worried some scientists, who lament the loss of valuable data; like the trunk of a tree, a tusk contains clues about diet, climate, and the environment. Even Yakutiyans wonder how quickly this nonrenewable resource will be depleted. Millions of mammoth tusks, perhaps more, are still locked in Siberia’s permafrost, but already they’re becoming harder to find.

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