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Ice age wolf head, 40,000 years old

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  • Ice age wolf head, 40,000 years old



    Searching the fields of NW Indiana and SW Michigan

  • #2
    Remarkable find! One mystery yet to be solved is that the head appears to have been 'severed' from the body. The possibility of it being a hunting 'trophy' or a discard from butchery is pretty unlikely, especially given that it dates to 40,000 years ago and - as far as we know - humans only began arriving in this part of Northern Russia around 32,500 years ago.
    I keep six honest serving-men (they taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who.

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    • #3
      That is very cool indeed!! Amazing it survived that long and still has fur and the nose. Thanks for sharing sir!
      Johnson county Missouri

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      • #4
        Incredible! So what'd they carbon date it or something?
        "The education of a man is never completed until he dies." Robert E. Lee

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        • painshill
          painshill commented
          Editing a comment
          It seems not everyone agrees about the date. The head was discovered in August 2018 and originally claimed (estimated) by the Republic of Sakha’s Academy of Sciences to be 40,000 years old. The Stockholm Museum of Natural History said 30,000 years was more likely, but it was later claimed that carbon dating supported the 40,000 year claim (unpublished data from Japanese researchers, I believe). Tori Herridge, an evolutionary biologist at the London Museum of Natural History (who witnessed the recovery of the head) said in a tweet that she had performed carbon dating on the tissue and got a result of about 32,000 years old. That seems more consistent with the presence of humans in the area and the possibility that the head was severed by human hand (as mentioned above).

        • Kentucky point
          Kentucky point commented
          Editing a comment
          I'd say in the neighborhood of 15,000 tops, but that's just me.

      • #5
        Is this a dire wolf?
        Digging in GA, ‘bout a mile from the Savannah River

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        • painshill
          painshill commented
          Editing a comment
          No. The dire wolf (Canis dirus) habitat stretched from South America to Canada and coast to coast in North America, but never reached Eurasia. This one is believed to be an ‘ecomorph’ of the timber wolf or grey wolf (Canis lupus) known as the megafaunal wolf and unique to northern Holarctic regions. An ecomorph is a genetic anatomical adaptation of a species to a particular environment and – in this case – the adaptation was a shorter and broader palate with enlarged carnassial teeth suitable for preying on or scavenging Pleistocene megafauna. The uncertainty of its taxonomic relationship to Canis lupus is reflected in its binomial: Canis cf lupus. The DNA from this specimen may help to resolve that uncertainty.

        • Cecilia
          Cecilia commented
          Editing a comment
          Pain, you are a pleasure!

      • #6
        Originally posted by Cecilia View Post
        Is this a dire wolf?
        Or maybe it’s just a big old dog that got snappy around mammoth cooking on the camp fire?

        Von
        Last edited by Von; 11-20-2019, 07:43 PM.

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        • Cecilia
          Cecilia commented
          Editing a comment
          😉. Words like “saber-toothed” and “dire” had my preteen brain whirling years ago!

      • #7
        Very interesting find
        South Dakota

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        • #8
          Hi Greg. Thanks for bringing this interesting article to our attention.

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          • #9
            Very interesting Greg.. TY Sir !
            Lubbock County Tx

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            • #10
              I don't know, maybe it's my imagination, but is that the way scientists treat a very rare 20K - 40K year old frozen fossil? By the looks of the background, the foliage, man in long sleeve shirt, it looks like early fall. Still warm. And they have the frozen head, unattended, for photography, on what, maybe a picnic table? Mean while, it's starting to thaw out, you can see moisture dripping, with melt water on the table. I wonder if they ever thought of how many unknown species of bacteria are coming to life? Wouldn't that head have been put into a cooler filled with ice, and taken immediately to a lab, equipped with permafrost conditions, to keep it frozen while studying the head? Maybe do some photography at the find site, and then in the lab, but it's laying out in the open long enough to melt!!
              http://www.ravensrelics.com/

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              • Cecilia
                Cecilia commented
                Editing a comment
                August in Russia.....I thought every one your thoughts, PK, plus one in which I’d have to go back to school, get very own doctorates in molecular paleontology, cryobiology, lupineology, and a coupla more ologies, then personally conduct thorough study of THIS depicted object before I may believe .....

                But that seemed too hard, and since think I may have a cultural deference to country conducting actual study, decided to wait forJapanese scientists’ opinion. Besides, they displayed frozen mammoth head several yrs back....

              • pkfrey
                pkfrey commented
                Editing a comment
                I don't know, Cec, there's a lot of conflicting stories surrounding this wolf. One report states it was found by some locals looking for mammoth ivory, another states it was found by a man strolling along the river, the C14 dates are conflicting, and it's laying out on a table, melting! Every media report is different. Maybe a fossil wolf head exists, but I'd like to read some accurate information on it. I don't know what predatory animal from that ice age would sever a wolf's head, and leave it behind, and take the body. I could have missed it, but I researched every report I could find, at least on the internet, and so far, no theory as to why there's just a severed head. I can't find any scientific up to date journals with any information relating to this discovery. But I don't want to cry " wolf " yet, I'm still looking!!!

              • Cecilia
                Cecilia commented
                Editing a comment
                😏😉

            • #11
              I’m less cynical about the discovery. It was originally reported in the Siberian Times, and their articles frequently suffer from translation errors, as well as not being written by scientists. It’s a newspaper (and a not very good one at that).

              Nevertheless, the find was reportedly made in the Abyisky district in northern Yakutia on the shore of the Tirekhtyakh River, a tributary of the Indigirka, by a local man named as Pavel Efimov. He is indeed one of several groups of people in the area who look to earn some cash from ‘mammoth hunting’, and mostly they’re looking for ivory (tusks).



              However, that’s not where the wolf-head pictures were taken. Apparently, although the head was fully frozen in permafrost conditions when found, Efimov took it to a group of researchers who he had been told were filming a documentary in Siberia at the time. It’s not clear how frozen it was by the time he arrived where they were filming, but there’s a video here (no commentary) that may show how it originally looked:

              Scientists have found the furry head of an Ice Age wolf perfectly preserved in the Siberian permafrost.#WolfHead #IceAge #Siberia #ABCNewsSUBSCRIBE to ABC NE...


              That group of researchers, who seem to have been among the first ‘professionals’ to examine it, included Love Dalén, an evolutionary geneticist at the Swedish Museum of Natural History and Tori Herridge, an evolutionary biologist at London’s Natural History Museum. Both highly respected scientists. As I mentioned earlier, Herridge took samples for carbon dating and later tweeted her result of 32,000 BP on her blog.

              Given the head’s state of preservation, researchers are hopeful that they can extract viable DNA and use it to sequence the wolf’s genome


              There was further study of the head using a CT scanner by Naoki Suzuki, a professor of palaeontology and medicine at the Jikei University School of Medicine in Tokyo as part of a project to display it, a fully-preserved cave lion cub found in similar circumstances, and various mammoth and other items at a special exhibition in Tokyo. This seems to be when the second carbon dating was performed, with a claimed (but unreported) date of 40,000 BP. Until the full peer-reviewed data and testing protocol is published it’s difficult to comment on the discrepancies. It’s not even clear if the quoted dates are calibrated or uncalibrated. Newspapers reporting dates don’t understand the difference that makes or that you’re not comparing like with like unless the dates have the same frame of reference. Even some respected journals don’t make it clear.
              I keep six honest serving-men (they taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who.

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              • #12
                I bet it smells pretty rough.😟
                Wandering wherever I can, mostly in Eastern Arkansas, always looking down.

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                • Cecilia
                  Cecilia commented
                  Editing a comment
                  Oohh, yeah.....

                • SurfaceHunter
                  SurfaceHunter commented
                  Editing a comment
                  Lol
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