In May 2007, a nomadic reindeer herder in Russia’s remote Arctic Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Region discovered what he at first thought was a reindeer carcass sticking out of the damp snow. 2007年5月に、ロシアの遠い北極ヤマルネネッツ自治区の遊牧民のトナカイ飼い は、彼は最初は、何がじめじめした雪から突き出ているトナカイ死体かと思うものを発見しました。
It was a find of momentous paleontological value: the nearly complete carcass of a one-month-old woolly mammoth calf, frozen since its death from asphyxiation 40,000 years ago during end of the last ice age.
The three-foot-tall, 110-pound creature―which scientists playfully named Lyuba, after the reindeer herder’s wife―no longer had the shaggy coat that characterized Mammuthus primigenius, one of several species of mammoths that roamed the earth between roughly 3 to 4 million and 10,000 years ago. But otherwise, the creature was preserved in nearly perfect condition.
Lyuba promises to become a treasure trove of information about mammoths and the long-vanished world in which they lived and died.
リューバは、生きて、死に 長く消滅した マンモスの世界に関する情報の宝庫となる 約束されています。
But it is only the latest chapter in a long history of mammoth discoveries, dating back more than 2,000 years, which long have inspired curiosity and wonder.
2,000年以上、さかのぼる 好奇心と驚きの 長いマンモスの発見の歴史の 最新の章です。
Contemporary scientists are only the latest successors to the ancient Chinese, medieval European physicians and theologians, the early 18th century Russian czar Peter the Great, U.S. President Thomas Jefferson and scores of others who over the centuries have pondered mammoth remains.
Too many, sadly, saw them not as a precious remnant of the Earth’s past, but as a source of valuable ivory to be exploited and then tossed away to rot.
But eventually, mythmaking and greed yielded to science, and brought us to our state of knowledge about the elephantine beasts that our own ancient ancestors once hunted for food.