Below is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood,
by Dr. Walt Brown. Copyright © Center for Scientific Creation. All rights reserved.
Click here to order the hardbound 8th edition (2008) and other materials.
Evidence Requiring an Explanation
Summarized below are the hard-to-explain details which any satisfactory theory for the frozen mammoths should explain.
Abundant Food. A typical wild elephant requires about 330 pounds of food per day. Therefore, vast quantities of food were needed to support the estimated 5,000,000 mammoths that lived in just a small portion of northern Siberia. Adams’ mammoth, discovered in 1799, “was so fat ... that its belly hung below its knees.”109 How was abundant food available inside the Arctic Circle, especially during winter months when the Sun rarely shines?
Warm Climate. Abundant food requires a temperate climate, much warmer than northern Siberia today—or during the Ice Age. Little of the food found in Berezovka’s mouth and stomach grows near the Arctic Circle today. Furthermore, the flower fragments in its stomach show that it died during warm weather. Despite the popular misconception, the mammoth was a temperate—not an Arctic—animal.
Away From Rivers. Although most frozen remains are found along river banks where excavations naturally occur, some frozen remains are found far from rivers.
Yedomas and Loess. Frozen mammoths are frequently found in yedomas and loess. What accounts for this and the strange properties of yedomas and loess? What is the source of so much loess?
Elevated Burials. Mammoth and rhinoceros bodies are often found on the highest levels of generally flat, low plateaus.110 Examples include dense concentrations of mammoth and rhinoceros remains in yedomas and the interior of Arctic islands. Dima was discovered in a mountainous region.
Multi-Continental. Soft parts of large animals have been preserved over a 3,000-mile-wide zone involving three continents (Asia, Europe, and North America). It is unlikely that so many unrelated local events would produce such similar results over such a broad geographical area.
Rock Ice. Strange, granular, Type 3 ice containing clay, sand, and a large volume of air pockets is sometimes found near frozen mammoths. [See Table 13 on page 285.]
Frozen Muck. Mammoth carcasses are almost exclusively encased in frozen muck.111 Also buried in muck are huge deposits of trees and other animal and vegetable matter. The origin of muck is a mystery.
Sudden Freezing. Some frozen mammoths and rhinoceroses had food preserved in their mouths, stomachs, or intestines.112
Suffocation. At least three mammoths and two rhinoceroses suffocated. No other cause of death has been established for the remaining frozen giants.
Dirty Lungs. Dima’s respiratory and digestive tract contained silt, clay, and small particles of gravel. Just before he died, Dima breathed air and/or ate food containing such matter.
Peppered Tusks. Why, over wide geographical areas, did millimeter-size particles (rich in iron and nickel) become embedded in one side of some mammoth tusks?
-150°F. Temperatures surrounding some mammoths must have plunged below -150°F.
Large Animals. Most frozen remains are from the larger, stronger animals, such as mammoths and rhinoceroses.
Summer-Fall Death. Vegetation in the stomachs and intestines of preserved mammoths implies that they died in late summer or early fall,114 perhaps in August115 or even late July.116
Animal Mixes. Bones of many types of animals, friends and foes, are frequently found near the mammoths.
Upright. Several frozen mammoths, and even mammoth skeletons,117 were found upright. Despite this posture, the Berezovka mammoth had a broken pelvis and shoulder blade, and a crushed leg. Surprisingly, he was not lying on his side in a position of agony.
Vertical Compression. Berezovka’s crushed leg bone and horizontally flattened penis show severe vertical compression before or soon after death. Dima was also compressed and flattened.
Eighteen pieces of the problem are now before us. Fitting this centuries-old jigsaw puzzle together will be our final task. As you will see, clever and imaginative proposals have been made, but most address only a few pieces of the puzzle.
What Happened?
Two strange, but admittedly secondary, reports may relate to the frozen mammoth problem. Each is so surprising that one might dismiss it as a mistake or hoax, just as with any single report of a frozen mammoth. However, because both reports are so similar yet originated from such different sources, it is probably best to reserve judgement. Each report was accepted as credible and published by a scientific authority. Each involved the sudden freezing of a river in apparent defiance of the way bodies of water freeze. Each contained frozen animals in transparent ice, yet natural ice is rarely transparent. Each discovery was in a cold, remote part of the world. One was in the heart of Siberia’s frozen mammoth country.
The brief reports will be given exactly as they were written and translated. The first was published by the former Soviet Academy of Sciences. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, recalled this report (as best he could remember it) in the first paragraph of his preface to The Gulag Archipelago. Unfortunately, Solzhenitsyn did not give the report’s date, so I began a difficult search. The report was finally found in Moscow’s Lenin State Library.
Y. N. Popov, author of this report, was discussing the scientific importance of finding mammals frozen in Siberia. He then described some frozen fish:
Figure 163: Fish Frozen in Underground Ice.
There are some cases of finds of not only dead mammals, but also fishes, unfortunately lost for science. In 1942, during road construction in the Liglikhtakha River valley (the Kolyma Basin) an explosion opened a subterranean lens of transparent ice encasing frozen specimens of some big fishes. Apparently the explosion opened an ancient river channel with representatives of the ancient ichthyological fauna [fish]. The superintendent of construction reported the fishes to be of amazing freshness, and the chunks of meat thrown out by the explosion were eaten by those present.120
The second report comes from M. Huc, a missionary traveler in Tibet in 1846. Sir Charles Lyell, often called the “father of geology,” also quoted this same story in the 11th edition of his Principles of Geology. After many of Huc’s party had frozen to death, survivors pitched their tents on the banks of the Mouroui-Oussou (which feeds into the famous Blue River). Huc reported:
At the moment of crossing the Mouroui-Oussou, a singular spectacle presented itself. While yet in our encampment, we had observed at a distance some black shapeless objects ranged in file across the great river. No change either in form or distinctness was apparent as we advanced, nor was it till they were quite close that we recognized in them a troop of the wild oxen. There were more than fifty of them encrusted in the ice. No doubt they had tried to swim across at the moment of congelation [freezing], and had been unable to disengage themselves. Their beautiful heads, surmounted by huge horns, were still above the surface; but their bodies were held fast in the ice, which was so transparent that the position of the imprudent beasts was easily distinguishable; they looked as if still swimming, but the eagles and ravens had pecked out their eyes.126
Figure 164: Frozen Oxen Found in Tibet in 1846.
Any explanation for these strange discoveries must recognize that streams freeze from the top down.127 The ice formed floats and then insulates the warmer liquid water below. The thicker the ice grows, the harder it is for the liquid’s heat to pass up through the ice layer and into the cold air. Freezing a stream fast enough to trap more than fifty upright oxen in the act of swimming across seems impossible, especially because a stream’s velocity varies across its width. Therefore, different parts of the stream should freeze over many days or hours. Freezing a river so fast that large fish are frozen, edible, and underground, defies belief. However, the similarities with the frozen mammoths are so great that these reports may be related. An explanation will follow shortly.