#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. Two ancient sculptures made of a mammoth tusk, found by archaeologists at the mouth of the Kova river in the Kezhemsky region, were recognized as having no analogues in the whole of Northern Eurasia. The finds are figurines of mammoth and seal and contain traces of black and red paint.
Actually the artefacts were discovered in the 80s of the last century by the expedition led by Nikolay Drozdov, an employee of the Krasnoyarsk State Pedagogical Institute. However, at that time it was not possible to study these fragments of colored material in details: there were no appropriate technologies.
Now scientists from Novosibirsk State University, the Institute of Archeology and Ethnography of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Siberian Federal University have carried out a number of experiments on the sculptures. And they found out: by their uniqueness, the objects found in the Krasnoyarsk region stand out from all works of art of the Late Paleotic period. Earlier attempts to find such artefacts in Siberia and in whole Russia were unsuccessful.
As for Taimyr, paleontological finds here have always attracted interest from scientists. So, now the Taimyr Museum of Local Lore contains the remains of the Sopkarga mammoth, known as the mammoth Zhenya. They were discovered in 2012 by an 11-year-old Nenets boy Zhenya Salinder, three kilometers from the polar weather station Sopochnaya Karga. The total weight of the remains was about 700 kilograms. From 2013 to 2016, they were studied by the best Russian and foreign experts. There have not been such large finds with well-preserved tissues since 1901, and no other museum in the world has paleontological artefacts of similar importance.
Text: Ekaterina Maksimova, Photo: provided by the researchers
