Equally indicative of the cataclysmic change that took place at the onset of the great cold in Siberia is the food the extinct animals were eating when they perished: ‘The mammoths died suddenly, in intense cold, and in great numbers. Death came so quickly that the swallowed vegetation is yet undigested … Grasses, bluebells, buttercups, tender sedges, and wild beans have been found, yet identifiable and undeteriorated, in their mouths and stomachs.’22 Needless to say, such flora does not grow anywhere in Siberia today. Its presence there in the eleventh millennium BC compels us to accept that
...more
