contempory Mammoths and pleistocene critters.

this is actually an interesting problem and yes we do have a small handful of odd eye witness reports by pretty good observers.  not too easy to discount.

first though, all these animals thrived close by the edge of Ice sheets along at best a narrow strip of what we know as boreal forest.  all of Canada except an unusual region including alaska and the yukon mountains were covered.  The narrow band was mostly along the southern edge mostly in the USA.

We are pretty sure that the Pleistocene Nonconformity was a comet impacting the ice by greenland which ran a shock wave killing of most large animals through siberia and over the fortieth parraell at least.  It is certainly what has been described culturally and our frozen Mammoths nicely attest to just that.  I do not think we have millions of years of mammoth bones stacked up deep into the permafrost.

It would be surprising if we had no lucky survivors.  so just where are they?  I do think that remnants were simply hunted out.  we do have later reports too far from human involvement.

My takehome is that the Yukon mountains provided a refuge and also suppressed to this day human interaction.  And it is exactly here we actually have scant reports from naturally scant humans.  and we do have native reports passed down to us.  the natives are no longer pushing their luck.

understand that the only passages out in this country is by valley bottom and mostly on foot.  A single pathway will leave a million square miles utterly unchecked. I personally walked part way along the Stein river Valley in southern Bc.  this penetrated a block of country over 100 miles wide and 70 deep away from the Frazer Canyon.  Off the trail was steep and dangerous and ill advised.  That is why prospectors depend of rivers and reentries to bring gold to them.

now understand that this applies fully to the Yukon mountains and the southern portions are pine frorest and all that.  all this country is hard and there is at least 100,000 square miles here and an additional 100,000 square miles south in BC.  the average prospector inspects perhaps a square mile in his lifetime.  do not blame him though as it all looks the same from a distance.

so we have a real refuge and actual survivability and local continuity as well.  similar locales may also vexist in siberia but likely way more luck needed.  Here we have real mountains to provide a shockwave shadow.  In fact it is mostly the only place.

It is also plausible, just as we discouvered with hte Big Foot and the Giant sloth that real avoidence is practised.  right now we need a noisy helicoptor and no one tries river passage in this country and again that only opens up a swath a couple hundred yards across in most places..

These pictures are also certainly misleading, think eating pine boughs and tops all day.  Easy to hide in and easy to simply freeze.  that is were they are and they must feast on pine along with larch and aspen.  all easy to hide in for the price of walking a few feet.  jusy like the forest elephant we searched years for.

all the other critters may even be about too.  We have had conforming reports.

contemporary Mammoths and pleistocene critters.

13 Apr 2023

Since at least the days of Victorian paleontology, the Western mind has accepted the fact that the mammoth was contemporaneous with our caveman ancestors. Although most paleontologists believe that the last of those prehistoric pachyderms died near the end of the last ice age, a surprising number of native legends suggest that woolly mammoths survived in the Canadian wilderness well into the 19th Century, and perhaps beyond. In this video, we explore these traditional First Nations stories about living mammoths in Canada.

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