Scientists argue that the disappearance of mammoths as a population did not occur gradually, but in a surprisingly short time. In other words, most of these animals died in just a few hours …
Death at dinner
In the regions of permafrost - in the north of Siberia and Alaska - researchers still come across completely whole carcasses of mammoths. They are so well preserved that their meat, in principle, can even be eaten. Scientists examined the stomachs of unique finds and found there pine and spruce cones, bark and needles of trees growing in modern times many hundreds of kilometers south of the places where frozen carcasses were found. Consequently, tens of thousands of years ago in the permafrost region it was much warmer than it is now.
But there is an even more interesting fact: in the stomachs of mammoths, and not only in the stomachs, but even just in the mouths of some specimens, undigested and even under-chewed greens were found! This suggests that these animals died completely unexpectedly, and all at once.
The theory of global cooling has been more or less researched and will hardly surprise anyone now. It is known that at least four ice ages have occurred on earth over the past six hundred thousand years. The last one was about twenty thousand years ago and ended about ten thousand years later.
But the ice age is still a gradual decrease in temperature. And then it turns out that a huge mammoth carcass, covered with incredibly thick wool, was killed right during lunch with a powerful drop in temperature by several tens of degrees, and even froze the carcass and stomach contents so that both the meat and grass were perfectly preserved to our time. What happened? What "ice bomb" did nature use to bring these giants off the face of the earth?
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Bible and mammoths
One of the hypotheses explaining the reason for the sudden death of mammoths is taken directly from biblical mythology, which tells about the Flood, and from Plato's description of the death of Atlantis. According to this hypothesis, “a cosmic body of enormous size - a planetoid or part of the nucleus of Halley's comet - collided with the Earth. The earth shuddered and shifted 30 degrees in the direction of the external force. And since the direction of the planet's axis of rotation in space remains unchanged in relation to the solar system, the poles turned out to be at a different point on the earth's surface. Of course, it was not the earth's axis that changed its position in relation to the earth's globe, but the earth itself shifted in relation to the stationary axis. As a result of the pole shift, there was a change in the geographical latitude of all points on the planet's surface, that is, a general climate change”.
So, death overtook the mammoths suddenly, but the culprit for their death is not frost at all, but a general cataclysm that swept our planet as a result of a collision with a comet. There are sudden and numerous volcanic eruptions, accompanied by the release of poisonous gases and volcanic dust, and powerful floods, and much more. Which, however, does not explain why many mammoth carcasses froze through much faster than they could decompose.
"Shooting" from space
Another hypothesis about the death of mammoths, also related to intervention from space, was proposed by American scientists.
Someone Richard Firestone and Allen West suggested the following: the mass extinction of large mammals (mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed tigers) was caused by a strong meteorite impact about 13 thousand years ago. West suggested that fragments of the meteorite could be preserved in mammoth tusks or antlers of deer and elk, and turned to one of the private companies involved in the sale of fossil remains, with an unusual request: to examine the contents of its warehouses with a magnet.
When permission was granted, the researchers carefully examined tens of thousands of prehistoric animal bones, and in some of them they found strange holes with scorched edges ranging from two to five millimeters in diameter. When scientists brought a powerful small magnet to these holes, it immediately stuck to the hole, indicating the presence of iron. Thus, seven mammoth tusks from Alaska and a bison skull from Siberia were selected.
Iron in bones
With the help of an electron microscope, other foreign fragments were found in the bones, in some cases, traces of their rupture after they entered the bone. Chemical analysis showed high iron and nickel and low titanium content, which may confirm the alien origin of the finds. However, what is interesting: in all cases, the holes were located only on one side of the bone - apparently, the one that was facing the epicenter of the explosion.
All this led scientists to assume that once a large meteorite exploded above the ground in the atmosphere, small fragments of which “shot” many animals, including those that were at a very great distance from the epicenter of the explosion. Due to the small diameter of the fragments, some animals could survive the catastrophe: for example, the bone tissue in the bison's skull definitely continued to grow after being wounded.
However, there are some contradictions. The fact is that the age of most of the bones is set at 34-30 thousand years, but one tusk falls out of this list - it is 21 thousand, and the bison's skull is 26 thousand years old. West and Firestone suggest that this can be explained by the errors of the radiocarbon method, however, in any case, the dates are obtained too early and do not agree with the generally accepted date of the mass extinction (10 thousand years ago), nor with the hypothesis of scientists about the fall of a meteorite (13 thousand years ago). It is also not entirely clear how to explain such a strong geographical spread of finds: from Alaska to Siberia.
The theory of Firestone and West is supported by the Irkutsk scientist Kirill Levy: “We have raised materials on the mammoth fauna of Siberian, Chinese, and Eastern European. It turned out that, indeed, in the interval somewhere around 12-13 thousand years ago, the number of dating for mammoths sharply decreases. Almost doubled. Having studied the materials, Kirill Levy drew up a graph that clearly confirms the fact of the bio-disaster. Moreover, the study of our prehistoric past allowed Irkutsk scientists to draw conclusions: the Earth is on the verge of not global warming, but a new ice age.
Elena ALEXANDROVA. Magazine "Secrets of the XX century" № 16 2008