Waking the Baby Mammoth

The Yamal region in Siberia has given up five baby mammoths in the 300 years of Russian mammoth study. The most recent, discovered in 2007, is Lyuba ("Love" in Russian), a nearly perfectly preserved female woolly mammoth of about 1-2 months in age and 40,000 years dead. The mysteries of her appearance on a frozen river bank in the Yamal, and the intersection of the people who tend to her, are the subject of National Geographic's Waking the Baby Mammoth documentary, which first aired on the NatGeo channel on April 26, 2009 and is now available on DVD.

Waking the Baby Mammoth takes us on a journey to three different countries-Japan, Russia and the United States-where scientists and nomadic Nenets reindeer herders work to study and celebrate the nearly perfectly preserved remains of a tiny one or two month old, 40,000 year old woolly mammoth.

"Finding ivory is bad luck, but sharing it transforms its power into a force of good," is an old Nenets proverb, and it is the heart of the meaning of Waking the Baby Mammoth.

The video is not really, or rather not just, about the mammoth. It is about the place where scientists and nomadic reindeer hunters meet. By "place" I mean geographically (in Japan, in Russia, in the United States) but also where they meet to create the vision of what Lyuba represents.

Lyuba represents a time when the Siberian steppe was warmer and dryer, but also when reindeer herders didn't use helicopters to get into town. The vision that all of the people in this video share is represented by a CGI representation of the little woolly mammoth peering from behind a museum case at reindeer herder Yuri Khudi or scampering around paleontologist Dan Fisher as the two men contemplate the past and what Lyuba represents.

A Bit of a Meander

Like most scientific explorations, this video meanders a bit. The tale of the discovery is a bit cloudy, because part of the puzzle hasn't been solved. Lyuba was discovered by the reindeer herder on the banks of a frozen river-not eroding out of anything, but deposited there during a flood event. The scientists have not been able to identify where Lyuba was buried in the permafrost before she appeared on the riverbank, although their investigation certainly does support that interpretation.

But the analysis of Lyuba does provide new information on diet and climate and woolly mammoth biology and behavior.

And, as a bonus for those of you fond of arctic archaeology, the scientists were stranded the Yamal steppes, living with the reindeer herders for the better part of a week, and so there are wonderful, wonderful video images of what life is like for the Nenets nomads.

Waking the Baby Mammoth is a fascinating documentary, not just for the insight into how one goes about studying long-dead mammoths, but for the images of the way modern nomadic reindeer herders live their lives, when they intersect with science. The documentary is about an hour and 40 minutes, without commercials, with narration by Victor Garber.

Throughout the documentary, the researchers are haunted by a CGI ghost of a scampering baby woolly mammoth. I'm a little torn about this issue, to be honest. On the one hand-she's adorable and it's definitely a good thing to think about her as a (once) living creature, and it's also useful to be reminded that the Siberian steppe wasn't always as unremittingly cold as it is today.

On the other hand, reality is a tad bit blurred by her presence. How much of the rest of the film has been altered? When were the discovery scenes shot? How much of the documentary was shot after the fact? However, I suppose that is a fairly minor quibble for something that so ably brings us into the landscape of past and present.

Photo Essay Extras

Two photo essays have been prepared to go along with this review:

• Scientific Examination of Lyuba: A Photo Essay
• Lifestyles of a Reindeer Herder