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Natural Histories

Factual: Science & Nature: Nature & Environment

Nature that has had a profound impact on human culture and society across history.

Nature that has got under our skin and profoundly impacted human culture and society across our history.

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Natural Histories: Mammoths

Factual: Science & Nature

Mammoths

11/08/2015

BBC Radio 4 - Natural Histories, Mammoths

Brett Westwood explores the role woolly mammoths have played in our lives.

Brett Westwood explores the role woolly mammoths have played in our lives since the ice age. Our ancestors used them for food and instruments, today they are in Hollywood films.

"Manny" the hairy, grumpy, yet ultimately caring hero of the animation series Ice Age sums up our love of these giants of the past. When a superbly preserved baby mammoth was displayed at the Natural History Museum she became a star attraction.

We are intrigued by the idea of a hairy elephant wandering our land so tantalisingly recently; the last mammoths are thought to have died out in Russia just 4,000 years ago. Bones of these huge elephants have often been found, people believing they were the remains of giants, or that they were the huge burrowing creatures that died underground.

Beautiful paintings of mammoths adorn ice age cave walls, symbolising our close relationships with these animals that provided us with so much cultural material. Not only mammoth meat but bones and tusks to build shelter, skins for walls, ivory for carvings and teeth for musical instruments; the first flute was a mammoth bone.

Music played on instruments made from mammoth bone created haunting sounds. Delicately carved tiny mammoths are found in places many miles from where mammoths lived, dating back at least 30,000 years. If they were alive today we would no doubt be protecting them from ivory traders, but as they are extinct, the mass of ivory bone being exhumed from the tundra (it is thought there are 150 million tusks buried there) is legally sent to China to be made into jewellery, trinkets and pieces of art.

Not far off 50% of the ivory entering China is mammoth. Some think it is a sustainable alternative to elephant ivory, others believe it keeps the whole trade alive. Should mammoth ivory be treated the same as elephant? Should mammoth become the first extinct animal to be listed as an endangered species?

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