Deep-Frozen Mammoth

[sophia8]

The other night, I was flicking throught he channels and hit on the movie "The Day After Tomorrow" - the one where the whole Northern hemisphere freezes solid in about 3.2 seconds flat. I watched just long enough to catch a scene where somebody was explaining that it had happened before, in prehistory - the proof being that Ice Age mammoths had been found flash-frozen in Siberia, with no signs of decomposition and even undigested food still in their stomachs.
As I'd always thought that was an urban legend, I turned to another channel at that point. But, being a good skeptic, I started wondering if there is any truth in the story.
So, can anybody here do any bunking, if possible?

 

[Cuddles]

There is no way to flash freeze a mammoth. Heat takes time to be conducted out of anything. The lower the temperature of the environment the faster the heat is lost. If you stick your hand in liquid nitrogen for a second you will hardly feel it. If you leave it in for longer you will get frostbite, but still be otherewise OK. If you leave it in for 10-15 seconds you might need it to be aputated, but you would still not have even started cooling the bone, it would just be damaged in the fleshy parts. Nitrogen is liquid at -196^oC (77K). Even in the worst ice ages the Earth has never even been close to that sort of temperature. Also, mammoths are quite a bit bigger than a human hand. It is simply not possible to freeze something that big that quickly.

On the other hand, they probably have been foudn without decomposition and with undigested food. Things can take days to start to decompose even in a warm environment. In a cold place like Siberia in an ice age they would take much longer, and it would not be at all surprising for something to die in conditions where it would not decay at all. Just think how long things last in your freezer.

As for food, I assume that the elephant's digestive system is similar to a mammoth's. Very little digestion actually takes place in the stomach. In fact, if you do not find undigested food in any elephant's stomach, let alone a frozen, dead one, you should be very surprised.

 

[sophia8]

Thanks for that, Cuddles - I suspected that it was the permanently low temperatures in the steppes that they roamed that accounted for the "deep-frozen" bodies that have been found.
And now I've discovered the TalkOrigins explanation:

"However, the desiccation of fossil mummies is quite different than freeze-drying. Moisture contained in a buried carcass is not released to the atmosphere but is crystallized in place, in ice lenses around the mummy. This process is more comparable to tightly wrapped food left too long in a freezer. When a stew is first frozen, it swells to a somewhat larger size, bulging the sealed plastic container. The longer it stays in the freezer, month after month, the more the moisture begins to separate, forming ice crystals inside the container. The stew itself shrinks and desiccates. Year follows year, and the stew becomes more and more desiccated, as ice segregates from it. Eventually, the stew has become a shriveled, dehydrated block; unlike freeze-drying in which the object theoretically retains its original form, the stew is shrunken in size and surrounded by a network of clear ice crystals. Soft tissue becomes mummified and shrunken down, looking like a desiccated mummy dried in the sun. These two processes of cold mummification and freeze-drying were not distinctly understood by people unfamiliar with long winters and the back corners of deep freezers." (Guthrie 1990)

As for instant freezing, as claimed by Ted Holden, there is no evidence of that. The Berezovka mammoth shows evidence of having been buried in a landslide, the cold mud acting as preservative and the underlying permafrost completing the process by freezing the carcass.

Which is pretty much what you said.
Damm Hollywood.

ETA: Should have thought of going to Talk Origins first - they have the straight dope on pretty much everything to do with palaeontology. But you guys always have the answers, so when I have a science-related question, the JREF is where I go!

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Damm Hollywood.

It's entertainment, not science.

~~ Paul

 

[casebro]

I wonder what is in their stomachs? It would show the climate. If they were eating Figs in Siberia, there goes the hockey stick. If they were supporting those huge bodies by eatin lichen... perhaps we need to culture lichen?

 

[thatguywhojuggles]

It's entertainment, not science.

~~ Paul

You and I know that...

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

Deep-Frozen Mammoth

Can I get some in a cone to go?

 

[Overman]

Deep Frozen Mammoth makes me hungry for some reason...

 

[ReligionStudent]

Decomp can also be put off if they fell in water etc. The constant contact of cold water will freeze/preserve something more quickly than air. The constant convection around somthing makes cooling much quicker. (For good discussions on this watch Food Network's Good Eats. Alton Brown explains it at least once a season)

 

[Mangoose]

Are the stories true that people ate frozen mammath carcasses as recent as the 19th century?

 

[Rat]

Are the stories true that people ate frozen mammath carcasses as recent as the 19th century?

I recently read something that said no, or at least not for pleasure. I wish I could remember where. Mammoths are found and have been for some time in recognizable condition, but the flesh is decayed far beyond jerky stage.

 

[Babylon Sister]

Are the stories true that people ate frozen mammath carcasses as recent as the 19th century?

There are all sorts of stories but no actual evidence. Dogs and wolves are more likely candidates for munching on frozen mammoth and have been known to feast until they're sick when a mammoth is available. The meat spoils very quickly when it's taken out of the permafrost and exposed to the air.

Now if you want to talk about eating unfrozen mammoth 8-12 thousand years ago, that's an entirely different story. Plenty of evidence for that.

 

[Mangoose]

I recall a picture book when I was in grade school which repeated that story. It showed a Russian czar at the end of a long banquet table, and there was a huge covered dish with a mammoth inside, and they were carving it up like a Thanksgiving turkey, and I wondered ever since how that would've tasted.

Too bad that's a myth.

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

You mean Northern Exposure didn't have its facts right?

 

[Madalch]

I recently read something that said no, or at least not for pleasure. I wish I could remember where. Mammoths are found and have been for some time in recognizable condition, but the flesh is decayed far beyond jerky stage.

I remember reading in Discover magazine in the late 1980s an article about frozen mammoths. It mentioned an entrepenuer who planned to can frozen mammoths and offer it as a delicacy- it didn't work.

Much more common to feed it to the sled dogs.