Tech

Seminal Tusks

By Adam Clark Estes

Jenya must be the luckiest boy in all of Siberia. The 11-year old was walking around on the tundra, probably listening to some Skrillex on his 2nd-generation iPod, when he stumbled upon some strange appendages jutting out of the permafrost. These weren’t just any animal parts, though. A little bit of digging revealed the best-preserved wooly mammoth carcass scientists have seen in over a century.

The mammoth had died at the tender young age of 16 after growing to be a sturdy six-and-a-half feet tall. The poor guy was missing a tusk, too, which scientists say probably contributed to his down fall. (The lack of tusk meant that it would’ve been hard for the young mammoth to defend itself against predators.) Some splits on the remaining tusk are indicative of human contact, leading the researchers to believe that it was indeed an Ice Age man who killed the mammoth some 20,000-30,000 years ago.

Read the rest over at Motherboard.