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On March 25 th 1993 The Anchorage (Alaska) Daily News Services released some amazing information in an article titled, Small but Hardy.

According to the report, Three Russian scientists found the remains of a race of dwarf woolly mammoths.  Some of the remains found on Russia's Wrangel Island indicates they may have been alive about 3,500 years ago according to a report by Russian researchers made in Nature magazine.  This is considerably younger than the establishment belief that mammoths died out 7,000 to 10,000 years ago.

The discovery is reported by (Andrei) Sher, S.L. Varanyan of the Wrangel Island State Reserve and V.E. Garutt of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.  Andrei Sher works at the Severtsov Institute of Evolutionary Animal Morphology and Egology, part of Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.

The report said the scientists estimated that the dwarfs would have stood about 6 feet and weighed about 2.4 tons.  The full size wooly mammoth of the same type as that found stood 10 ½ feet and weighed 6.6 tons.

The report then theorizes that the "dwarfing" was probably caused because evolutionary selection on islands towards small size seems to result from both limited food resources and absence of large predators.

Sounds logical, but could there be another reason?

The Hollow Earth and the Woolly Mammoth

Marshall B. Gardner devoted a complete chapter to the mammoth in A Journey to the Earth's Interior because he felt that the facts brings proof to bear so startling, so incontrovertible, that we wonder how these observations could have been made by the regular scientists and their significance been overlooked.  Mr. Gardner then answers his own question; But then the regular scientists had a theory of the earth?s composition in their minds before they made these observations.  And the theory being there first would not bulge to make room for the truth.

These truths being, according to Gardner, that mammoths come from the interior lands and he sighted thousands of tons of mammoth bones and tusks found above the Arctic circle, stating that they are carried to the exterior by the glaciers which form in the area around the inside lip of the hole at the North Pole.  He offers as proof the numerous whole mammoths found frozen in the glacier ice, even telling us of explorers who have eaten mammoth meat.  He states that these are animals that wandered out on to the ice shelf that surrounds the opening and fell through crevices in the ice to eventually be carried along with the glaciers to the exterior.  He explains that the "accepted" scientists say the animal is extent.  That they try to explain the freshness of the carcass (es) by saying that [they were] preserved by the ice.   (Page 233).

Next he considered the possibility the mammoth had fallen into a pit or water hole and couldn't get out, and then the climate changed and froze thim in.  The problem with this theory is that food begins to break up the minute it reaches the stomach and is acted on by the gastric juice.  The heat and moisture of the mouth is such that all food not washed away from the teeth immediately after eating begins to decompose.  This is not the case.  Many of the mammoth carcasses had undigested forage in their stomachs and even still in their mouths.   

Mammoth Vs Pole Shift

Lately there has been some speculation that these mammoths may have been caught in a sudden polar shift and were moved from the tropics to the Arctic instantly.  I have a real problem with this.  If the pole shift was that fast, I doubt these poor animals would be standing in one spot after the upheaval, nor for that matter, in one piece.  Studies have shown that nothing would be left standing in the same place, in one piece.

If the unlucky beasts were quick frozen by some strange force of Arctic wind of which we are unaware it stands to reason that the same kinds of vegetation found in their mouths would also be found quick frozen on the ground at their feet.  This has never been the case.

The most logical explanation for the mammoth mystery comes from Gardner:

The mammoth is wandering today in the interior of the earth.  When he ventures too near the polar orifice [ it must be remembered that the mammoth and mastodon and elephant are all characterized by a tendency to wander widely ] he becomes stranded on a breaking ice floe and carried over from the interior regions, to the outer regions or perhaps falls in a crevasse in ice which afterwards begins to move in some glacial movement.  In these ways the bodies are carried over to Siberia, and left there where we have seen them discovered.
(Pages 240, 241).

Ancient Beliefs

In A Modern Look at Monsters (1970) by Daniel Cohen we read that over a hundred thousand mammoths have been uncovered in one state of preservation or another throughout Siberia.  The presence of these huge bones in such great numbers, as well as the occasional find of a well preserved frozen carcass had to explain someway.  The mammoth remains led to a large number of legends about huge beasts that either had or still live underground in Siberia  The Tartars also believed that the mammoths were really monsters that inhabited the interior of earth but died immediately upon seeing the light of the sun.  This explained why, although there were plenty of dead mammoths, no one had ever seen a living mammoth.?               (Pages 189, 190).

In Northern Tales: Traditional Stories of Eskimo and Indian Peoples Northern Tales: Traditional Stories of Eskimo and Indian Peoples edited by Howard Norman, he relates a Caribou Eskimo tale explaining why woolly mammoths decided to flee underground.  According to the legend by the time Noah and his family had got north, they had eaten all the animals.  Finally after all this travel he found some animals around ice floes.  (Page 271).

The problem was, the legend explains, Noah didn't know how to hunt, in fact he was a Cheechako, (loosely translated, a tenderfoot; a klutz from the south) so he was having it rough.  Then one day some people were out hunting wooly elephants ... the elephant was chased out near the sea, so it swam out and got on the ark.  But the tusks tore into the sides.  The hunters fixed Noah's ark, and asked for the mammoth in exchange for helping him. Noah wouldn?t go along with that.  No, I need it.  Ill kill it and eat it, he said.   With a little Cheechako luck and a mild summer Noah was getting along pretty good.  Then winter hit.  The ark was frozen in.

Mr. Norman continues;  The boat was locked out there, and Noah ran out of food  He didn't know about how to hunt seals through breathing-holes.  He didnt know about ice-fishing. The Eskimos wouldn't help him.

As most legends go, this one is repetitious and a hunting party chases another mammoth on the ice.  He too became impaired and Noah again refused the people their trophy, but decided to kill it himself.

As Mr. Norman concludes; But as he didn't know how to use a spear properly, when he threw he missed. With this the elephant left the ark and fled underground, so as not to be killed improperly by this person.  After that elephants lived underground.  (Pages 271-274)

The Bottom Line - For Now

The best Hollow Earth connection for the mammoth I've found in mythology was presented by Daniel Cohen in the already quoted A Modern Look at Monsters.   "The name mammoth itself may originally have come from a Turkish word that means "Mole"".

Different stories from different folks living far apart in time and place with totally alienated cultures yet all with the same basic belief  -   woolly mammoths live in lands in the earth's interior.

Alien Mammoths

Returning to the dwarf mammoths of Wrangel Island using this perspective we too can offer a logical scenario: Due to some pre-historical catastrophe, a group of normal sized mammoths became stranded on the exterior island and couldn'treturn to their winter, interior glazing lands.  Much as white fox, caribou and other northern animals do today. (See THEI Volume 1 #4 Down to Earth). Over the ages the herd of stranded mammoths evolved into a smaller, lighter specimen to better live with the much stronger gravitational pull of the exterior world.

(1992) by Dennis Crenshaw
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