
A Siberian mammoth tusk gold rush - herendin2
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/mammoth-tusk-hunters-russia-china
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bloogsy
Grim and disturbing for multiple reasons. It's deeply scary to me that the
permafrost is melting like this and it also makes for uneasy reading to see
that interesting archaeological finds are being sold off to make trinkets or
simply left to deteriorate if they have no value. We're burning the world and
then scrabbling around to sell the ashes.

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ofrzeta
Related, more and better pics: [https://www.boredpanda.com/mammoth-tusk-
hunting-russia/](https://www.boredpanda.com/mammoth-tusk-hunting-russia/)

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kabouseng
And copyright infringed.

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wooger
Wired have the cheek to ask you to turn off your ad blocker 'to fund their
journalism' too!

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leguminous
The article focuses on China, but people in America are buying some of this
stuff, too. Some (mostly boutique) American guitar manufacturers offer mammoth
ivory parts.

It's kind of depressing how many ethically challenging materials are used in
musical instruments and how little buyers seem to care about it. Or rather,
how little buyers seem to care about the ethical problems--exotic (and often
endangered) materials are seen as highly desirable.

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wooger
It's almost as if to accumulate the wealth to afford a musical instrument made
of exotic ivory parts (with no effect on sound) requires a certain lack of
ethics in the first place.

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lawlessone
>Everything they left behind – mammoth skulls and bones – was consumed by the
elements.

that's a shame.

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kirstenbirgit
This is so disturbing. Soil that have been frozen for hundreds of thousands of
years is just now thawing. Worrying.

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Permit
I think you’re off by an order of magnitude. Mammoths were around as recently
as 4,000 years ago. For reference that’s about when the Egyptian pyramids were
being built.

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tempguy9999
His point was soil thawing, not the timespan of mammoths.

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ejolto
I think the GP meant "If the soil has been frozen for hundreds of thousands of
years, how does it contain mammoths that lived < 10000 years ago".

Either the permafrost is younger than "hundreds of thousands of years" or the
mammoths are older than 4000 years.

Mammoths lived from 5 million to 4000 years ago, so it could be either.

Edit: after some research it looks like both are right. Some permafrost in
Yukon formed 700 000 years ago, some permafrost formed during the last ice age
10 000 years ago, some formed in the little ice age 400-150 years ago. That's
not a complete list but you get the point.

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lawlessone
> so it could be either. or both

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ejolto
You're right, it's both.

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jolmg
This reminds me of this tangentially related movie:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammoth_(2009_film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammoth_\(2009_film\))

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mirimir
This has been going on for over a decade.

And it's not just China.

The ban on ivory is the driver.

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Cthulhu_
The demand for ivory is the driver, the ban wouldn't be necessary if elephants
weren't poached (and are being poached) to extinction.

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mirimir
Yes, totally.

But the driver for this is arguably the ban. From what I've heard, people
weren't using much mammoth ivory before the ban. However, permafrost thawing
due to climate change has certainly made it easier to dig up.

It is sad, though, that the availability of mammoth ivory complicates
enforcement of the ivory ban. Ideally, it could reduce demand for elephant etc
ivory.

I'm sure that C-14 dating would work, but it's still expensive.

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tjr225
> But the driver for this is arguably the ban.

I would argue that the driver is shortsighted humans who create demand for
both ivory and mammoth tusks.

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mirimir
What's shortsighted about using mammoth tusks?

It's not like they contribute to climate change.

Or that the mammoths are alive to need them.

I mean, would you rather that they just rotted?

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tempguy9999
I've seen these pics before and have noted that, given tusks are teeth and
have a large amount of phosphorus in them, surely these buried tusks must have
extracted then locked up an enormous amount of bio-available phosphorus which
must(?) have seriously limited that plant nutrient.

Any thoughts from biologists?

