CHAPTER 1

Summer in Siberia

The only way to reach Chersky in eastern Siberia is to fly there in a small, battered prop plane. There are twice-weekly flights from the new airport in Yakutsk, the coldest city on Earth. In winter, the temperature here can fall to minus 50 degrees Celsius, but today, in mid-July, it’s oppressively hot.

We are sitting in a small bus, waiting to board: 13 adults, two children, and a tiny dog with tufty paws and ears. A man holds an orchid in a plant pot; a woman grasps what appears to be a Christmas decoration the same size as herself, wrapped in a black plastic sack; another woman has a set of curtain rails. I am the only non-Russian-speaker, the only one not heading home after a shopping expedition to the metropolis of Yakutsk.

The plane looks as though it might fall apart at any moment, and a mechanic in dungarees wanders around, poking about under the inspection hatches with a screwdriver. One of the pilots goes and fumbles with the propellers to check whether they will turn. I sit in the bus, growing increasingly nervous. Should I decide not to board the plane after all? But what else can I do? After all, this is the only way to get to Chersky, and no one else seems to be particularly concerned about the safety of the flight. Finally, I climb the rickety steps along with everyone else.

No one pays any attention to the seat numbers printed on the tickets. The two female cabin attendants instruct us to sit right at the front. They speak no English, but point and gesture. The ramshackle seats are so worn-out that the backrest won’t stay in place, so we passengers spend the whole journey semi-recumbent. The promised lifejacket supposedly stowed under the seat is conspicuous by its absence. The cabin staff walk along the narrow aisle distributing sick-bags and coffee, while the little dog scampers around between the seats. The plane shakes and rattles menacingly, but once airborne it flies smoothly, setting a course almost due east. Nonetheless, my pulse rate is higher than usual for the five hours of the flight.

‘That plane hasn’t crashed in 50 years,’ says Nikita Zimov once I’m back on terra firma. ‘So why should it crash this time?’

We are sitting in the spacious, round common room that is the heart of the research station I have come to Chersky to visit. It was Nikita’s father, Sergey, who set up the station in the 1980s. It is a few kilometres outside the town — which itself is about as far away from anywhere else as you can possibly get.

This is the Siberian back country; the town lies to the north and slightly to the east of Japan, but not quite as far east as the Kamchatka Peninsula. To reach the northern, Arctic Ocean coast takes a few days by boat along the broad River Kolyma. There are no roads to Chersky; the only way to get here is by plane or boat. Prisoners were sent here in Soviet times, and the Russian Gold Rush came here in Chersky’s boomtown days. Now about a third of the houses are abandoned, and the population has shrunk to barely 3,000. I’m told there were two swimming baths for a while in the ’80s, but now they’re gone, just like the restaurants.

Setting aside the decrepit buildings in town, this is a very beautiful place: a broad, flat landscape full of meandering rivers and shallow lakes. Sallow and larch woods cover the land beyond the river floodplains. Succulent green tufts of grass grow in stretches of shallow mud. The river bends enclose long shorelines, and there are bushy dwarf birches on the hillsides, where the soil is dryer. Now, in July, rosebay willowherb and tansy, bright-pink carnations and blue spike speedwells are in bloom everywhere.

‘I’ve heard you Swedes can hold your liquor,’ says Nikita, handing me a shot of vodka on my first evening. Everyone drinks vodka at dinner. Sergey has at least one glass over lunch.

It would be easy to resort to stereotypes and clichés in attempting to describe Sergey Zimov. A Russian scientist living an isolated life in the remote wilds of Siberia, he has long grey hair and a beard that is almost equally long and grey. He flits around the station in a T-shirt, a beret on his head and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. His wife, Galina, deals with most of the paperwork.

Sergey has a whole set of opinions on what is fitting for each sex. But he is by no means the only one; throughout my time here, for example, I can’t get into a boat or climb out of one without being offered a helping hand. Sergey is clearly proud of having a son, Nikita, to take over the station. He talks rather less about his daughter, a novelist living in St Petersburg. But there’s nothing wrong with women scientists — some of the best scientists to visit the station have been women, Sergey tells me on the first evening.

He began his research out here at a time when the Soviet Union was doing its utmost to spread resources and influence in northern Siberia. That was an attempt to cement Russian influence over the country as a whole; Russian is not the mother tongue of the locals in this area, who have a written language of their own. ‘Ethnic Russians’ were sent here in an attempt to hold the country together, and quantities of research stations, mines, and other projects were set up, while air traffic expanded at the same time.

‘This was a good place to be. I had plenty of freedom, and I was a long way away from any Communist propaganda,’ he says over an evening meal of elk burgers.

The food at the station is excellent, provided you like elk meat (moose to North Americans). In the evenings, when we drink beer and play cards, everyone chews dried, salted squid. It’s tasty, if a little tough.

When the Soviet Union fell apart, support for the station dried up. Sergey was ordered to pack up his family, leave the station, and return to the University of Novosibirsk. He refused. Instead, he decided to stay and set up Russia’s first private research station, together with his family.

It was hard in the beginning. Nikita recalls the 1990s, when he was a teenager, as a grey time. The family could barely afford food sometimes. The situation is different now, with 50-odd international scientists, mainly Americans, coming here each year to study the natural environment and the permafrost. I am one of about 15 visitors, including some German scientists and a group of students from the US who play their guitars in the evenings.

‘The hero of Forrest Gump becomes a successful shrimp fisherman by chance, just because a storm has destroyed all the other boats. It was like that for us — there are still very few research stations in the north with our capacity,’ says Nikita.

The reason I have come all the way here is to look at mammoths, or at least at what remains of the ecosystem they lived in. About ten different species of mammoths have evolved and died out over the last five million years, the last of which was the woolly mammoth. That’s the one most of us think of when we hear the word: a massive creature with a sloping back, covered in thick, curly fur and sporting huge, curved tusks. It evolved from its precursors about 400,000 years ago, somewhere in east Asia.

Mammoths inhabited a vast area stretching from today’s Spain, Italy, and southern Sweden, through the whole of Siberia and large tracts of China, into Alaska and North America. In all probability, they lived in herds led by older females, like modern elephants. Humans encountered mammoths for the first time between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago, when we left Africa and made our way into the Middle East and Europe. By that time, the Neanderthals had already been living side-by-side with mammoths for a long time, hunting them, and sometimes using their bones as building material.

The last Ice Age began roughly 100,000 years ago. At the time when Scandinavia was covered by thick glaciers, a fertile steppe landscape was flourishing here in eastern Siberia. Winds and ocean currents made the region dry and windswept but kept it free of ice, so grass could grow during the warm summer months. The mammoths thrived here, together with woolly rhinoceroses, musk oxen, horses, and wolves. Nikita and Sergey have tried to calculate the number of animals that would have lived here some 40,000 years ago; according to their models, the wealth of fauna was almost as great as in the African savannah. When the first people arrived, about 27,000 years ago, there must have been almost infinite quantities of game for them to hunt.

About 10,000 years ago, the climate changed and the Ice Age ended. Siberia grew warmer, and, at about the same time, the mammoths vanished, too. Exactly why they disappeared remains unclear and is a subject of heated debate among scientists worldwide. Was it because of the warmer climate, or because the people multiplied and their hunting skills improved? It may have been a combination of the two, according to palaeogeneticist Beth Shapiro. Her research has shown that mammoths survived warm periods before the last Ice Age, though they dwindled in number, partly because the grasslands shrank and gave way to peat bogs and marshland. The same thing happened at the end of the last Ice Age, but Beth believes the presence of human hunters was the last nail in the mammoths’ coffin. The question is a long way from being settled.

Neolithic cave painting of a mammoth, Rouffignac (in the Dordogne region of France).

Many other species disappeared at the same time as the mammoths, including the woolly rhinoceroses, and the broad, grassy steppes were replaced by today’s wetlands and larch woods. Mammoths survived for much longer on a number of islands in the Arctic Ocean, especially Wrangel Island. The last one died about 4,000 years ago, a few hundred years after the great Egyptian pyramids at Giza were completed.

‘At the time when there were most mammoths here, the ecosystem was so rich that it still provides local people with a livelihood,’ says Sergey.

If you don’t happen to run a research station, there are two ways to earn money in Chersky, he tells me. Either you fish the local char in the rivers, or you hunt for mammoth tusks. Many people have started searching for tusks in recent years. The prices that Chinese buyers are prepared to pay have risen rapidly. In Soviet times, such tusks were essentially worthless.

Some people in Chersky have bought diving equipment to go diving in the river, while others spend several months at a time in remote wilderness areas searching for tusks. An estimated 55 tonnes of mammoth ivory are shipped out of Siberia every year, nearly all ending up in China. The trade is legal, but a fairly high proportion of it is transacted on the black market so as to avoid tax and customs duties.

‘Finding a tusk is the only way people here can afford an expensive item like a snow scooter,’ says Sergey.

He has found umpteen tusks on his expeditions, he says, but, now they have a monetary value, they have become far rarer. Then he starts to tell me about the biggest tusk he’s ever found.

‘The base of it was this broad,’ he says, measuring out a generous length with his hands — almost half a metre. ‘And it was this long,’ he continues, stretching out his arms.

I imagine this is Chersky’s answer to fishermen’s bragging tales, and that the tusk grows by a few centimetres for every journalist who gets to hear the story. However, it’s true that mammoth tusks can be enormous. Both males and females bore tusks, but the females’ were smaller and more slender. They spiralled as they grew, first growing straight out from the mammoth’s head, then inwards again until they met, even crossing one another in some cases. The longest tusk ever found measures just over four metres.

In the corner of Sergey’s living room stand two well-preserved tusks a metre long and two woolly rhino skulls.

‘That’s my insurance for if times get worse. The longest tusk is worth about 50,000 dollars,’ he chuckles.

There are bits of mammoth all over the station, in fact. Chunks of mammoth tooth are used as paperweights here and there in the common room. Just like elephants, mammoths had huge teeth, and there were only four in their mouths at any one time: two in the upper jaw and two in the lower. A mammoth tooth can weigh nearly two kilograms.

There’s a large cardboard box in the corridor between the toilets and the bedrooms, full of long mammoth bones lying higgledy-piggledy. Someone has written something indecipherable in Russian on the box with a felt pen, but judging by their shape, I guess the bones are femurs. I can’t stop myself touching them each time I go past. Scientists hope to be able to recreate mammoths with the help of just such bones as these. The American palaeogeneticist Beth Shapiro, whom I mentioned earlier, is one of the world’s main experts in extracting genetic material from Ice Age animal bones. She describes the process of fitting together the genes of creatures like mammoths as lengthy and difficult.

Imagine that an organism’s hereditary material is a thick book, along the lines of War and Peace, The Lord of the Rings, or Shakespeare’s collected works, and that it is present in every cell of a mammoth’s body. But genetic material differs from books in that it needs to be constantly repaired in order to stay in one piece and remain legible, so there is an ongoing renovation process inside the cell. However, as soon as the mammoth dies, the long DNA molecules begin to decompose into ever-smaller fragments. Imagine that the glue holding the book together loosens, so the pages come apart. Then the paper starts to fall to bits, separating into individual sentences and words.

Imagine that you then pick up the resulting fragments and, as Shapiro puts it, you spread them out over a muddy field, in the rain, and have a horde of Ice Age animals trample them underfoot. Attempting to piece together Shakespeare’s Hamlet out of the resultant mess is roughly what the people who sequence ancient DNA have to do.

Mammoth bones lie frozen in the permafrost, and they have lain buried in the earth for tens of thousands of years. They may be the remains of an animal that drowned in a mere and came to be embedded in frozen sediment. Although they are preserved by the cold, the mammoth’s genetic material continues to disintegrate throughout that time. The ancient bones are ground down, enabling scientists to extract the remaining short sections of the DNA molecule — but now we come to the next problem. The muddy field where you are hunting for your book is strewn with other books. Scientists find quantities of DNA from bacteria, fungi, insects, and everything else that existed inside the bone at some point during the tens of thousands of years that it lay frozen in the tundra. In some cases, just 1 per cent of the DNA present comes from the mammoth itself.

Once you have identified all the minute fragments and established which ones actually come from the mammoth, you face the task of fitting them together in the right order. The only way to do this is to take a closely related species, such as the Asian elephant, as a kind of model. Each tiny piece of genetic material is compared with the model and inserted in the right place. Ultimately, you build up a kind of patchwork quilt in which each fragment of DNA overlaps with another fragment. This ultimately gives you an impression of how the mammoth’s DNA would have looked.

This method has enabled scientists to assemble the mammoth’s hereditary material step by step, and with increasing precision. The latest major study, which included scientists from the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, involved sequencing the mammoth genome.

So scientists today know exactly what genes mammoths bear, and how they differ from those of the Asian elephant. It is possible to identify the genes that made mammoths different from elephants: those that gave them a thick coat, subcutaneous fat, smaller ears so that they could better retain heat, and so on. This knowledge raises hopes that it may be possible to recreate the mammoth.

Nikita and Sergey are not just researching the natural environment where mammoths once lived; rather, this is the habitat where new mammoths could live in future. The work of creating new shaggy-coated giants is already under way, and the cells that represent the first stage in that process are already growing in a Boston laboratory.

But before flying to the United States, I plan to visit the city of Yakutsk and its top tourist attraction.