The rush for Siberian mammoth tusks

Glancing 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 now some parts of this layer do 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 2020 but exports have dropped off as a growing underground trade in tusks appears to be eating into the official trade. 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.

wired.co.uk