[meteorite-list] Quick Frozen Mammoths and The Younger Dryas Impact

[Paul H.]

In the post "some choice informed creative responses
from 138 re wattsupwiththat.com blog article New 
evidence supporting extraterrestrial impact at the 
start of the Younger Dryas" at
http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/meteorite-list/2012-March/083857.html
Rich Murray wrote,

"some choice informed creative comments from 138 re 
wattsupwiththat.com blog article New evidence supporting 
extraterrestrial impact at the start of the Younger Dryas: 
Rich Murray 2012.03.13 

really nice to see so much friendly, cooperative sharing of 
ideas and evidence ! 

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/12/new-evidence-supporting-extraterrestrial-impact-in-younger-dryas/#comment-921464 "

It is nice to see people sharing evidence. Unfortunately, 
sharing antiquated, discredited, and even fictional 
"evidence" only adds to the general s skepticism among 
Quaternary geologists and other Earth scientists about 
the Younger Dryas impact. People need to vet the
material, which they are sharing, in order to make sure 
that they are not recycling long-discredited pseudoscience 
from Young Earth creationists, Velikovskians, and 
supporters of Earth Crustal Displacement and Charles 
Hapgood, and other fringe sources. Such material only 
serves to detract from they credible evidence that is 
presented concerning the Younger Dryas impact.

For example, in the text quoted by Richard Murray,
Myrrh wrote on March 12, 2012 

“There’s a lot of muck in this. If what’s being said here 
about quick-frozen not cold-adapted mamoths and 
tropical forests is indicative of the conditions which 
prevailed at the onset of the Younger Dryas…”

First, the “tropical forests,” which the above comment 
claims existed at the “onset”  of the Younger Dryas
are completely imaginary in nature. In the considerable 
number of papers, monographs, and abstracts about 
the paleoclimatology of Alaska and northern Siberia,
there is a complete absence of any evidence for the 
existence of “tropical forests” within the Arctic region
at anytime during entire Pleistocene Epoch and even 
during the preceding Pliocene Epoch as documented 
in various published papers and monographs, including 
Andreev et al. (2004, 2009, 2011), Brigham-Grette 
et al. (2007), Ukraintseva (1993), and Velichko and 
Nechaev (2005).

Similarly, there is an abundance of published research,
which soundly refute the various claims about “not 
cold-adapted mammoths” which is a favorite claim 
of Young Earth creationists, i.e. Hans Krause and 
Joseph C. Dillow, and various fringe catastrophists, 
i.e. Ted Holden, as being quite scientifically illiterate. 
This is discussed by Philip R. Burns in “Woolly 
Mammoths: Suited for Cold?” at 
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/mammoths.html#burns
in http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/mammoths.html

Myrrh also stated,

“Second, the well-preserved mammoths and 
rhinoceroses must have been completely frozen 
soon after death or their soft, internal parts would 
have quickly decomposed.”

If a person reads what has been published about the 
mummified mammoths, rhinoceroses, and other large 
mammals, which have been found in the permafrost 
of Alaska and Siberia, they will find an abundance of
evidence that they are not as well preserved as Myrrh 
falsely imagines and incorrectly believes them to be. 
In the published literature, i.e. Farrand (1961, 1962)
and Kurten (1986), there is ample documentation and 
evidence that the majority of mummified mammoths,
bison, and other large mammals suffered appreciable 
decomposition before being entombed in permafrost.
In a number of cases, i.e. “Blue Babe” (Guthrie 1988),
there is solid evidence of scavenging before freezing 
and burial. Some examples are;

I. Zimmerman and Tedford (1976), about tissue 
recovered from a mammoth mummy in Alaska, stated:

"Abstract. Histologic examination of rehydrated tissue
samples from late Pleistocene Alaskan) mammal 
mummies demonstrates that the preservative effect of 
freezing and drying extends to remains 15,000 to 
25,000 years old. Some muscle and liver retained 
identifiable histologic structures. Most tissues were 
completely disintegrated and partly replaced by 
masses of bacteria, an indication of considerable 
postmortem decay before the remains were 
entombed beneath the permafrost zone."

II. Kurtn (1986), about one Siberian mammoth
mummy, wrote:

"Various legends exist about frozen mammoths. It as 
been said, for instance, that the scientists who excavated 
the Beresovka mammoth, discovered in the year 1900, 
enjoyed a banquet on mammoth steak. What really 
appears to have happened (as I was told by Professor 
Anatol Heintz) is that one of them made a heroic 
attempt to take a bite out of the 40,000 year old meat 
but was unable to keep it down, in spite of a generous 
use of spices."

and III. Kurtn (1986), about another Siberian 
mammoth mummy, noted that Otto Herz, a zoologist 
at the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg,
published an account about the expedition to the 
Beresovka River to salvage the mammoth carcass 
that had been discovered there in 1900. In this 
account, Otto Herz clearly stated that only the 
superficial part of this mammoth mummy had been 
preserved and that its internal organs had rotted 
away before the animal had become frozen.

Kurten (1986) provides a detailed explanation about 
how the frozen mummies of mammoths formed 
without the need to invoke an extraterrestrial 
catastrophe of some sort.

The idea that these mammoths were "flash-frozen 
at 150 below", as suggested by both Myrrh and
in another post by "Caleb" is nothing more than 
Young Earth creationist pseudoscience as pointed 
out by Farrand (1961, 1962) and other paleontologists 
and Earth scientists.

Finally, they also overlook the fact that the various 
mummies of mammoths and other large mammals 
range in age from 9,700 BP to greater than 39,000 BP.
The majority of mummified mammoth and other
mammal remains are far too old to have any 
association to a hypothetical Younger Dryas impact 
event. Some of the dates for mummified remains 
found in the permafrost are reported in Ukraintseva 
(1993) and “Woolly Mammoths Remains: Catastrophic 
Origins?” by Sue Bishop at
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/mammoths.html

>From "Frozen Mammoths", Myrrh quoted,

"Muck. Muck is a major geological mystery. It covers 
one-seventh of the earth’s land surface all surrounding 
the Arctic Ocean. Muck occupies treeless, generally 
flat terrain, with no surrounding mountains from 
which the muck could have eroded. Russian
geologists have in some places drilled through 4,000 
feet of muck without hitting solid rock. Where did
so much eroded material come from?"

As with the mummified mammoths, the "Frozen 
Mammoths," has its facts either wrong or grossly
misinterpreted. The so-called " muck," which this
article talks about is permafrost that is developed 
in a wide variety of sediments ranging in age from 
Holocene and Pleistocene to Cretaceous and a large 
variety of sedimentary deposits well-documented 
to have been deposited by a wide variety of 
depositional, i. e. alluvial, deltaic, lacustrine, Aeolian,
and other processes. The age and origin of what Walt 
Brown, the author of this article, calls "muck" is 
well known and documented and not a mystery. The
"tropical forest" described in the quote is not tropical 
and is Cretaceous in age and unrelated to any younger 
Dryas impact as many studies of the regional 
geology have demonstrated.

It is important to note that the article, “Frozen 
Mammoths,” which is found at
http://www.grahamkendall.net/Unsorted_files-2/A312-Frozen_Mammoths.txt
and is quoted by Myrrhis, is a direct reprint of a 
chapter from the Young Earth creationist  book 
"In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for 
Creation and the Flood," by Dr. Walt Brown at:
http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/FrozenMammoths2.html
Both “Frozen Mammoths” and other chapters in
Walt Brown's book consists of Young Earth 
creationist pseudoscience which was fabricated to 
support Walt Brown's hydroplate "theory." Citing 
such scientifically illiterate writings certainly does 
absolutely nothing to enhance the credibility of
the Younger Dryas impact theory. 

In another post, which Richard Murray quoted, Steve 
Garcia stated:

“Accounts from early expeditions exist, if not exactly 
journals. In 1829 German scientist G.A. Erman went 
there to measure the magnetic field. Here is some of 
what he said:

In New Siberia on the declivities facing the south, lie 
hills 250 or 300 feet high, formed of driftwood, the 
ancient origin of which, as well as the fossil wood of 
the tundras, anterior to the history of the Earth in its 
present state, strikes at once even the most uneducated
of hunters. . . .”

There are dangers in relying upon publications and 
interpretations, which are over 180 years old. In this
case, Erman's interpretations have been greatly 
revised by more recent and detailed research and the 
development of absolute dating techniques and in the
understanding of sedimentology and other Earth 
science disciplines. In this case, it is now very well 
documented that these hills are not formed of 
driftwood. Instead, they are composed of highly folded 
layers of Cretaceous sand, silt, mud, clay, and brown 
coal. These beds contain numerous abundant logs, 
leaf prints, other plant debris, and buried forests 
of upright tree trunks, which Erman confused with 
driftwood (Klubov et al. 1976). The age and 
sedimentology of the strata containing , Erman's 
so-called "driftwood" refute any possibility that it is 
associated with an Younger Dryas impact.

He further quoted G.A. Erman as stating :

“Other hills on the same island, and on Kotelnoi,
which lies further to the west, are heaped to an equal 
height with skeletons of pachyderms [elephants, 
rhinoceroses], bisons [sic], etc’, which are cemented 
together by frozen sand as well as by strata and veins of 
ice. . . . On the summit of the hills they [the trunks of 
trees] lie flung upon one another in the wildest disorder, 
forced upright in spite of gravitation, and with their tops 
broken off or crushed, as if they had been thrown there 
with great violence from the south on a bank, and there 
heaped up.”

If a person consults more recent publications, i.e. 
Dorofeev  et al. (1999), Makeyev et al. (2003) and 
Schirrmeister et al. (2010), they will find that Erman's 
descriptions of hills being heaped with skeletons and 
trees being flung about in the "wildest disorder" with 
"their tops broken off or crushed" are greatly exaggerated 
and involved a great degree of misinterpretation and 
imagination that lacks any documented basis in reality. 
It is true that some of the Pleistocene strata are very 
fossiliferous as they contain abundant well-preserved 
fossil bones (Dorofeev  et al. 1999). This is a result 
of them being preserved in permafrost. The majority 
of both the deposits and fossil bones predate the 
Younger Dryas by tens of thousands of years. Within 
Kotelny Island, the Late Pleistocene and Holocene 
deposits underlie terraces along streams and river 
and lack any evidence of any catastrophic event 
(Makeyev et al. 2003, Schirrmeister et al. 2010).

Talking about Edward von Toll, Steve Garcia stated,

“And Edward von Toll visited from 1885 to 1902, and
found them [wood hills] to cinsist of carbonized trunks 
of trees, with impressions of leaves and fruits.”

As previously mentioned, the "carbonized trunks 
of trees, with impressions of leaves and fruits" of the
wood hills are Cretaceous in age. Thus, it is rather 
silly and counterproductive to used these fossils as
evidence of a Younger Dryas impact. Such fossil
trees even predate the Chixulube impact. 

That the observations and interpretations of Edward 
von Toll, Erman, and other early explorers have been 
found in the decades since they were made to be quite 
speculative, highly imaginative and in many cases quite
wrong. As a result, it is entirely misleading for a person 
to used them as evidence for any type of catastrophe, 
whether it be Walt Brown's hydroplate "theory," Charles 
Hapgood's Eartrh Crustal Displacement, or a Younger 
Dryas impact without mentioning that these observations 
and interpretations have been in many cases discredited, 
refuted, or significantly revised by later investigators 
armed with numerous absolute dates and greater 
understanding of geology and paleontology. 

Finally, Steve Garcia stated about Edward von Toll,

“On another island Toll found mammoth bones and other 
bones, plus fossilized trees with leaves and cones, making 
him to write,

“This striking discovery proves that in the days when 
the mammoths and rhinoceroses lived in northern 
Siberia, these desolate islands were covered with 
great forests, and bore luxuriant vegetation.””

Although northern Siberia was populated by abundant
mammoths and rhinoceroses and extensive boreal forests
in places during interglacial epochs, it was quite barren 
and sparsely populated by large mammals during the 
the glacial stages. During the Last Glacial Maximum,
(LGM) in northern Siberia consisted of rather barren 
and depopulated polar desert as illustrated by Adams 
(1997) and discussed by Ukraintseva (1993) and 
Velichko and Nechaev (2005). This later changed
as the climate ameliorated after the peak of the LGM.

References Cited

Adams, J. M., 1997, Preliminary Vegetation Maps of
the World since the Last Glacial Maximum: An Aid to 
Archaeological Understanding. Journal of 
Archaeological Science. vol. 24, pp. 623–647.
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/new_eurasia.html
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/euras18k.gif

Andreev, A.A., G. Grosse, L. Schirrmeister, S. A. 
Kuzmina, E. Y. Novenko, A. A. Bobrov, P. E. Tarasov, 
B. P. Ilyashuk, T. V. Kuznetsova, M. Krbetschek, H. 
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Andreev, A. A., L. Schirrmeister, P. E. Tarasov,  
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Late Quaternary inferred from pollen records.
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Brigham-Grette, J., M. Melles, P. Minyuk, and Party, 
Scientific, 2007. Overview and significance of a 250 
ka paleoclimate record from El'gygytgyn Crater Lake, 
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Dorofeev, V. K., M. G. Blagoveshchensky, A. N. 
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Farrand, W. R., 1961, Frozen Mammoths and Modern
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Farrand, W. R., 1962, Frozen Mammoths. Science.
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Guthrie, M. L., 1988, Blue Babe : The Story of a Steppe 
Bison Mummy from Ice Age Alaska. University of
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Klubov, B. A., A. A. Korshunov, and I. G. Badera, 1976, 
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Kurten, Bjorn, 1986, How to Deep Freeze a Mammoth.
Columbia University Press, New York, New York.

Makeyev, V. M., D. P. Ponomareva, V. V. Pitulko, G. M. 
Chernova and D. V. Solovyeva, 2003, Vegetation and 
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vol. 35, pp. 56-66.

Schirrmeister L., G. Grosse, V. V. Kunitsky, M. C. Fuchs, 
M. Krbetschek, A. A. Andreev, U. Herzschuh, O. Babyi, 
C. Siegert, H. Meyer, A. Y. Derevyagin, S. Wetterich, 
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on palaeo-environmental records, geomorphology 
and remote sensing. Quaternary Science Reviews. 
vol. 29, pp. 3598–3614.

Ukraintseva, V. V. (1993) Vegetation Cover and
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Mammoth Site of Hot Springs of South Dakota, 1800 
Highway 18-Truck Route, Hot Springs, SD. 309 pp.

Velichko, A. A.,  and V. P. Nechaev, 2005, Cenzoic 
Climatic and Environmental Changes in Russia. Special 
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Zimmerman, M. R., and R. H. Tedford, 1976, Histologic
Structures Preserved for 21,300 Years. Science. vol. 194,
pp. 183-184.

Best wishes,

Paul H.