June 18, 2025 - Driving to Alaska
Beringia Museum, Whitehorse, Yukon
Lynnette went over to say hi to the Museum's Woolly Mammoth.
Its habitat was the mammoth steppe, which stretched across northern Eurasia and North America. Individuals could probably reach the age of 60.
The woolly mammoth coexisted with early humans, who hunted the species for food, and used its bones and tusks for making art, tools, and dwellings. The population of woolly mammoths declined at the end of the Late Pleistocene, with the last populations on mainland Siberia persisting until around 10,000 years ago, although isolated populations survived on St. Paul Island until 5,600 years ago and on Wrangel Island until 4,000 years ago. After its extinction, humans continued using its ivory as a raw material, a tradition that continues today. The completion of the mammoth genome project in 2015 sparked discussion about potentially reviving the woolly mammoth through several various methods. However, none of these approaches are currently feasible.
An old pay phone! You don't see many of these anymore. It was out of service.
Going in, we had no idea of what this museum was about. It turns out the Beringia was this rather large land area between what is now Siberia, Russia and Alaska. At various times, it formed a land bridge referred to as the Bering land bridge or the Bering Strait land bridge that was up to 620 miles wide at its greatest extent.
It is believed that a small human population of at most a few thousand arrived in Beringia from eastern Siberia during the Last Glacial Maximum before expanding into the settlement of the Americas sometime after 16,500 years before present (YBP). This would have occurred as the American glaciers blocking the way southward melted but before the bridge was covered by the sea about 11,000 YBP.
Most of Beringia's ancient mammals were gone by the end of the Ice Age, 11,700 years ago. It is likely that both environmental change and human activity together caused the extinction of Beringia's large mammals.
Watch out!
Cougar?
A diorma of Bluefish Caves -- located in north Yukon about 34 miles south of Old Crow -- one of the most debated archeological sites in North America. A mammoth leg bone is a the center of this debate. Several unusual large flakes appear to have been removed from one end of this bone. This distinctive flaking on the bone is considered by some archaeologists to be evidence of human tool makers. The bone was radiocarbon dated to about 24,000 years ago, and therefore is possibly the earliest evidence of human occupation in the New World.
