Woolly Mammoth: Secrets from the Ice

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Imagine an elephant, but with tusks

at least twice the size

of those borne by an elephant

living today.

Imagine an elephant, but covered

in a thick shaggy coat of hair,

some of those hairs

over a metre in length.

Imagine an elephant which lived

not in the warmth of the tropics,

but in the ice

and snow of the north.

The woolly mammoth.

These majestic titans ruled Europe

and Asia

long before our own ancestors

fell under their spell.

Extinct for thousands of years,

they are iconic, yet mysterious.

Climate change means that the frozen

north is melting faster than ever before.

Prehistoric carcasses are emerging

and, from them,

we can unlock the secrets

of these long-lost beasts.

Using the latest technology,

we can now answer questions about the

mammoth which have long-puzzled scientists.

This is, in essence,

virtual time travel.

That's starting to sound

a little bit like Jurassic Park!

We're able to trace their evolution,

revealing their adaptations

to one of the harshest places

on the planet.

This is amazing!

And with every new find,

we take a step closer

to answering the biggest question

of all -

why did these magnificent animals

suddenly go extinct?

I want to show you. Oh, fantastic. That's

brilliant. I want to share with you.

Siberia.

Here, the temperature hovers

around minus 40 for months on end.

Few animals can survive here.

A hundred thousand years ago,

it was a different story.

THUNDER RUMBLES:

This giant swathe of Eurasia was

home to vast herds of woolly mammoths.

Perfectly adapted

to the extremes of the Arctic,

a tiny population survived

on a remote island

until about 4,000 years ago.

But, on mainland Siberia,

they mysteriously died

out at the end of the last Ice Age.

But we're left with a treasure trove

of their remains,

locked in Siberia's layer

of frozen ground...

.. the permafrost.

As global warming

raises the earth's temperature,

melting the permafrost

faster than ever,

the secrets of the mammoth

are finally emerging.

After centuries of collecting

their remains,

we can paint a detailed picture

of these long-lost beasts

far better than we can

for any other extinct species.

We know that they lived

for up to 60 years

and were perfectly built

for life in the freezer.

But many of their adaptations

have remained secret, until now.

And there's one big question,

which remains unanswered.

What killed them off?

This is one of the most famous

mammoth-finds of recent years.

She's called Lyuba,

and she's a little baby mammoth,

probably just a month old.

She was found in 2007

and she is amazingly well preserved,

so that we have her skin,

her soft tissues

and we even have

the contents of her gut.

Lyuba has been radio carbon dated

to 37,000 years old.

Found in the far northwest

of Siberia,

she's considered to be the

best-preserved mammoth ever discovered.

It's wonderful to get so close

to this little baby mammoth

and see how beautifully preserved she

is. You can see the texture of the skin.

You can see individual

hair follicles there,

and there's even some fur preserved,

some little patches of it.

And then on the surface of the skin as

well, there are these peculiar blue discs,

which are part of a fungal infestation

that happened after she died,

part of the burial environment

that she was in.

And she's lost her tail,

that's about the only bit of her

that isn't there.

It's thought that Lyuba

died in a bog,

where she was first pickled by natural

chemicals, and then quickly frozen.

Large specimens,

like fully-grown mammoths,

usually deteriorate

before this occurs.

In fact, any type of frozen carcass

is incredibly rare.

Lyuba is one of a mere handful

of frozen specimens ever discovered.

Isn't it peculiar to think

that humans saw these alive.

I think

that's quite a strange thought,

to know that there were people

living here in Siberia

during the peak of the last Ice Age, and these

animals would have been in their environment.

They would have been

very familiar to them,

just as people living in Africa and southern

Asia share their landscape with elephants.

Our relationship with mammoths dates back

to the early days of modern humans in Europe.

Their herds clearly inspired

cave art.

We've been transfixed by their

majesty for thousands of years.

But, once extinct, mammoths became

the source of myth and legend.

Their huge bones were thought by some

to belong to a long-lost race of giants.

Others believed they belonged to a

bizarre subterranean mole-like creature

that died

when it came to the surface.

The name "mammoth" comes from

an ancient Russian word, "mamont",

meaning "earth horn"

used to describe the animal's tusks.

But it wasn't until 1728 that

British scientist Sir Hans Sloane

spotted the similarities between Siberian

remains and a group of modern specimens

that it was eventually realised that

mammoths were a type of elephant.

Major differences were obvious

in the mammoth remains -

huge tusks, increased musculature

to carry the tusks, a shoulder hump.

the big question was how and why

such an animal

came to live in the extremes

of the northern hemisphere.

We now know that mammoths

were a species created by,

and perfectly adapted to, the most

extraordinary period in Earth's history

the Pleistocene, or Great Ice Age.

This two-and-a-half million-year

cold snap changed the planet,

and transformed the mammoth

into a titan

capable of thriving in the extremes

of the Arctic Circle.

That change occurred

in a blink of evolutionary time,

and was driven by a perfect storm of

exceptional events on a planetary scale.

For millions of years,

Antarctica had been drifting

southwards to its current position,

sending the southern hemisphere

into a deep freeze.

And South America

was charging northwards.

It crashed into North America,

and this altered the ocean currents

and gave birth to the Gulf Stream.

And the knock-on effect of that was increased

precipitation in the northern hemisphere,

which in lower latitudes fell

as rain, and, in the north, as snow.

While these tectonic events

were changing the face of the earth

and propelling it into an ice age,

there were also changes occurring

on a celestial scale, producing dramatic

fluctuations in the earth's climate.

The earth's distance from the sun

changes over time.

Every 100,000 years, the earth is at its

furthest position from the sun's warmth

and our planet enters a cold phase.

Then there's also variation

in the tilt of the earth on its axis

and that happens over a cycle

lasting 41,000 years,

and affects the degree of difference

in the seasons.

Finally the earth also wobbles

on its axis

on a cycle

lasting about 23,000 years.

When all those planetary factors

coincide, winter takes over,

with ice sheets covering

To glimpse the extreme conditions

that mammoths faced,

I'm visiting a remnant

of one of those immense ice sheets.

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