Unveiling the Divine Mystery: The Mammoth Riddle of the Ice Age Mamut

Mammoth: Riddle of the Ice Age

The discovery of a nearly complete frozen mammoth in Siberia has once again sparked curiosity about these fascinating creatures. Many questions arise: What exactly are mammoths? Where did they come from? When did they live? Why did they go extinct? Can they be cloned?

What is a mammoth?

Mammoths, belonging to the proboscidean order, are a variety of elephant. They share the typical elephantine traits of a trunk and tusks. Mammoths had a large hump and sloping back, small ears and tail, complex teeth, a small trunk with a distinctive end that resembled fingers, immense spiral-curving tusks up to 3.5 meters (11.5 feet) long, and spiraling loops of dark hair covering a silky inner coat. Some mammoths were massive - the Columbian mammoth measured up to 4+ meters (14 feet) tall at the shoulders, similar in size to the largest living elephants. However, the woolly mammoth was smaller, and there were dwarf mammoths only two meters (six feet) tall.

Where do mammoths come from?

The answer to questions about the past comes from the Word of someone who was there - the Creator. He revealed in Genesis that He created land animals and humans on the Sixth Day of Creation. This passage teaches that God made different kinds of animals that would multiply "according to their kind."

Each of these "kinds" could be divided into broad varieties when small populations with a fraction of the original pre-existing genetic information became isolated. Copied errors (mutations) that reduce information can produce other varieties. This is not evolution in the sense of particles-to-people because that requires new genes with new information.

The Rise and Fall of the Mammoth

The Flood

After creating them, God cursed the elephant kind, along with "all creation," when Adam sinned. About 1,600 years later, God sent a global flood to destroy man and all land-dwelling animals (vertebrates), except for representatives of each kind that Noah took on the Ark. Noah may have taken only a pair of proboscideans on board.

However, by then, the elephant kind could have already divided into varieties (or "kinds") like mammoths, mastodons, and African and Asian elephants. The Ark was easily large enough to have carried pairs of each kind of land-dwelling vertebrate animal, providing enough genetic variation to give rise to today's varieties. Fully grown elephants were not necessary; instead, it would have been sufficient to take young ones old enough to breed at the end of the Flood.

The Flood did not leave many large mammal fossils, partly because they tended to bloat and float and be destroyed by scavengers. Many large mammal fossils we do not find were probably produced by post-Flood local catastrophes. One such catastrophe involved mammoths...

The Ice Age

There is strong evidence that after the Flood, for a time, ice and snow covered most of Canada and northern United States, northwestern Eurasia, Greenland, and Antarctica. Evolutionists believe there were many ice ages, but it is more likely that they were advanced/delayed cycles within a single Ice Age.

Evolutionists find the cause of the Ice Age to be a mystery. Obviously, the climate needed to be colder. But cooling alone is not enough because there would then be less evaporation and therefore less snow. How can you have a cold climate and lots of evaporation at the same time?

The creationist meteorologist Michael Oard proposed that the Ice Age [possibly referred to in Job 37:10 and 38:22] was a consequence of Noah's Flood. When "all the fountains of the great deep" broke open, hot water and lava would have poured directly into the oceans.

This would have heated the oceans, increasing evaporation. At the same time, a large amount of volcanic ash in the air after the Flood would have blocked much sunlight, cooling the land.

The End of the Ice Age

The formation of ice probably lasted several centuries. Eventually, the oceans would gradually cool, so evaporation would decrease, and therefore the supply of snow to the continents. And as ash settled out of the atmosphere, it would allow sunlight to pass through. Thus, the ice sheets began to melt. Sometimes the melting would be rapid enough for rivers draining these ice sheets to overflow. These catastrophes would have occurred approximately 700 years after the Flood.

The Mammoths and the Ice Age

In areas most affected by the Ice Age, natural selection would have eliminated creatures that lacked genes for surviving in the cold. It would favor creatures with existing genes for long fur insulation, small ears, tails, and trunks (to prevent heat loss in areas of large surface area). Again, this is not evolution; it does not generate new genetic information. Undoubtedly, modern elephants never developed thick hair even when exposed to freezing temperatures at night for months simply because the genetic information was missing.

Elephants can multiply so rapidly that their population could double four times per century, so the population could easily have exceeded a million during the Ice Age. However, most mammoths have left no trace: there are fewer than 50 known skeletons of woolly mammoths, of which only half a dozen were complete. But an estimated 50,000 tusks have been found. Humans hunted mammoths extensively and even recorded them in cave paintings. Fierce predators like the Smilodon (saber-toothed tiger) also contributed to the mortality.

Could a Mammoth be Cloned?

There were great hopes with the recent discovery of a mammoth in Siberia that enough hereditary material - DNA - could be found to clone a mammoth. The proposal was to extract DNA from the nucleus of an intact cell and implant it into an egg cell (stripped of its own nucleus) from an Asian elephant.

However, a recent article in New Scientist frankly stated "Forget about cloning mammoths." The DNA from this mammoth is so fragmented that the longest sequence only has 100 base pairs. The extreme instability of DNA is currently a major problem for theories about the origin of life from a primordial soup.

Have Any Mammoths Survived Today?

There have been stories of mammoths seen in the Eastern Ural Mountains and Vladivostok in Russia as recently as 1918. While these are not verifiable, there is conclusive video and photographic evidence that some genes with characteristic mammoth traits have survived in elephants in Nepal.

In conclusion, while the media may use mammoths as propaganda for evolution, they can be properly explained from a biblical worldview. Mammoths are a variety of the elephant kind, created on Day 6. The elephant kind was preserved from extinction by being taken on Noah's Ark. But many descendants of the Ark animals, including mammoths, died in catastrophes at the end of the Ice Age, about 4,000 years ago. Some mammoth corpses are preserved, but their genetic material is not intact. Some mammoth genes have lived on in Nepalese elephants.

(Source: Sarfati, J. "The Mammoth: Enigma of the Ice Age")