The extinction of woolly mammoths, viewed hazily by the public as sometime back there with dinosaurs, is so recent that it’s possible to eat woolly mammoth meat retrieved from the snow, as science writer Richard Stone witnessed one Russian comrade do on a trip to Siberia. “Even after a few shots of vodka, he said, ‘It was awful. It tasted like meat left too long in the freezer.’” Spread across eastern Europe and Russia are the scattered remains of settlements featuring houses constructed entirely from mammoth bones, including the Ukraine’s stunning Mezhyrich site, which includes the bones from
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