[MUSIC PLAYING]
GRANT ZAZULA: Mummified
remains of Ice Age animals
are incredibly
rare in the Yukon.
There was something found
while the mineworkers was using
one of these water
cannon's hydraulic monitors
and was washing
away the mud and hit
from what seemed to be some
frozen carcass of a beast,
some Ice Age animal.
TONY BEETS: So I
mean, the other day, I
came in the cut and first thing
I spotted was a mastodon tusk
and I found a buffalo horn.
I mean, Mike is
on the bulldozers,
he hadn't spotted them yet.
And then I looked at that and
then I looked across the cut
and I thought,
well s***, there's
no leather jackets
in permafrost,
so I scoot over there-- yeah,
sure as s***, there she was.
GRANT ZAZULA: You can go
back to really the early days
of the gold rush.
So 1896, the major
gold deposits were
discovered in the Klondike--
spurred on this like
global gold rush.
As soon as those gold
miners started digging
through that frozen ground,
they were shafting tunnels
from above and they started
finding the remains of Ice Age
animals-- so bones of woolly
mammoths and bison and horses.
And one of the
things that always
strikes me is seeing these
awesome black and white
photographs of gold miners,
and they look like they're
just exhausted, because
they've been mining underground
all winter and then
they're standing there
with their woolly mammoth tusk.
TONY BEETS: Well, how the
way the way I got into mining
is that when we came to
Canada 35 years ago, you know,
we started out on the farm.
And they-- it didn't take very
long you hear people talking,
oh, people in the north,
they make 1,000 bucks a week.
I thought, well s***--
milking cows, 1,000
bucks a month;
up north, 1,000 bucks
a week-- if people
get that, I'll get some too.
Took an instant liking to
it and basically never left.
For the summers in the Yukon,
yeah, that was it for me.
So I kind of found
my place, you know?
I so I'm kind of, yeah--
here.
We have a lot of permafrost,
and we mine a lot of the pups,
and then in the pups--
like in the draws--
we do find a lot of
bones and a lot of crap.
GRANT ZAZULA: The site that
Tony mines at on Paradise Hill
has always been really
important to us,
because it's one of the
few sites in the Klondike
that we know that has middle
Pleistocene sediment, so it's
very old.
We know of him because he's
got this incredible boisterous
personality.
But he's also one of our--
kind of our biggest
supporters out there too.
ELIZABETH HALL: There
is part of this--
I think it's right
somewhere in here.
SUSAN HEWITSON: This
is all right here.
No, it's not going to fit.
That's why I wondered
if we want a blanket.
To lie it in a blanket.
You've got--
ELIZABETH HALL: Here.
Here.
SUSAN HEWITSON: Let's see
how this is going to go.
OK, stay together, honey.
Oh, wow.
That's just cool!
GRANT ZAZULA: It turned out
to be, after close inspection,
it's a mummified carcass or
partial carcass of an Ice Age
caribou calf.
So it's a baby caribou,
and from the base--
like the torso, the
front limbs, the head
are all preserved--
the skin and hair
and you can see the
little antler buds.
And the first thing
I wanted to do
is to get out of the
Paradise Hill locality
and there was a good chance
we could find something
like a volcanic
ash bed that would
help us be able to determine
how old this animal is.
SUSAN HEWITSON: I wonder
when he actually gets
that monitor going, if he's
like blasting it at this,
this like--
GRANT ZAZULA: Oh-- you got it?
SUSAN HEWITSON: That was it.
GRANT ZAZULA: Just
a little wisp?
SUSAN HEWITSON: Yeah.
ELIZABETH HALL: Will
you pass me that?
GRANT ZAZULA: Nice!
This is gold here.
Lo and behold, we found
a volcanic ash bed,
right where the carcass had
emerged from the ground.
So this is everything, you know?
To find a carcass is
one thing, but to be
able to put it in
geological context
is huge-- that's the
massive part of the story.
When we learned that it
was 80,000 years old,
it was definitely
really exciting,
because most Pleistocene
mummified carcasses
are actually quite young.
They're usually 25,000 or
30,000 to 35,000 years old.
But around 80,000 years ago was
a real period of transition.
We had a lot of
really strange animals
that aren't the typical
Ice Age animals.
Short-faced bears were there,
we had probably a few mastodons,
a few ground sloths, maybe a few
woolly mammoths, maybe a couple
lions or scimitar cats.
Earth's climate started
to cool substantially,
and by about 80,000
years ago, it's
sort of a transition between
really warm conditions
and entering into
a new glaciation.
To have a confident
age assignment because
of the volcanic ash really
makes this caribou specimen
very unique.
So it could be the
oldest mummified Ice Age
carcass in the world.
TONY BEETS: For the
paleontologists,
it would be a lot harder
to come across that stuff
if it wasn't for us monitoring.
And when we really
find a good species is
it's not when we use
all the big equipment,
it is when we really use the
water cannons and the water
to do the work for us, that's
when a lot of that stuff
gets saved.
We have to move the dirt anyway.
If something shows up,
yeah, work together.
I think so.
GRANT ZAZULA: If there was no
gold mining or if gold miners
stopped caring
about paleontology
and paleontologists stopped
caring about gold miners,
a lot of scientists, a lot
of labs around the world
would have to go elsewhere to
try to do some of this work.
There's people from
all continents that
are working on Yukon
specimens and doing
different types of
analyzes and none of them
have been to the Yukon
or have met a gold miner
or driven a gravel road
and got stuck in the muck.
But those are the parts of the
piece that make that happen,
and I love being a part of that.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
