"Mammoth Discoveries"

An artist's depiction of a woolly mammoth. Mammoths likely roamed the Kenai Peninsula between the last two ice ages.

MAMMOTH DISCOVERIES

SEPTEMBER 2011

Author’s note: Since this story was written nearly four years ago, more data are likely available, more research has likely been done, and more discoveries may have been made or reported. At some point, I will attempt to update and revise my information. For now, however, please read this with the time gap in mind.

If the dog hadn’t been so annoying, the 2010 discovery might never have occurred.

Kasilof resident Kevin Culhane and his friend, Tim Oliver, had spent several hours of this summer day beachcombing unsuccessfully for fossils along a stretch of sand and gravel south of Clam Gulch. They had walked a considerable distance down the beach and were back within sight of their truck when the trouble began.

Ava, Oliver’s excitable yellow lab, “got all agitated,” Culhane said. “She started jumping up, trying to knock us down.” Irritated, Culhane told the dog to leave them alone. “Go find a fossil!” he hollered. And about 10 minutes later, she did.

Behind the two men, Ava had located something enticing. “I heard rocks clanking together, and I looked right where we just walked, looked behind us about 75 to 80 feet back, and this dog was chasing a rock around,” Culhane said. “So I walked back there and picked up the rock and thought, ‘Oh, that’s a cool-looking rock,’ and threw it in the backpack with the other rocks and didn’t think about it. The next day I dumped out the rock pile and showed my dad (Jim Culhane), and he goes, ‘Holy shit, that looks like a mammoth tooth!’”

More precisely, it was about one-third of a complete mammoth molar, which can be about the size of a woman’s hiking boot. “You can see the fractured edge where it broke apart over the years,” Culhane said. “What was more amazing was that a dog was interested in it,” he said. “It was just laying on top of the beach, and the dog was excited about it, but she couldn’t fit it in her mouth.”

Jim Culhane’s own excitement over his son’s find was later tempered by concern: “He brought that thing home, and the next day we coated it with concrete sealer ’cause it started cracking right away,” he said.

Such deterioration is common as fossils adjust from a moist, sometimes saltwater environment to the relative dryness of most modern homes. While applying a protectant to fossils may help preserve them and keep them from breaking apart, however, the chemicals in sealants or lacquers may also contaminate the fossils and make it difficult or even impossible to effectively calculate their age through radiocarbon dating.

A few months later, someone very concerned with radiocarbon dating and determining the age of items such as the mammoth molar contacted Kevin Culhane.

That someone was Homer historian and field archaeologist Janet Klein, whose 2008 book, Kachemak Communities: Their Histories, Their Mysteries, contained a four-page section entitled “A Mammoth Mystery.” Based on the appearance at that time of five separate mammoth fossils discovered between the Homer Spit and the Anchor River, Klein posed a hopeful notion: Mammoths may have once roamed the Kenai Peninsula.

Then in early 2011, after consulting with Soldotna geologist Dick Reger, and with even more fossil evidence in hand, Klein took her intriguing idea one step further: She approached Homer News staff writer McKibben Jackinsky to see if she would be interested in writing about the idea. Jackinsky’s first article, “Woolly mammoth evidence increases,” appeared on March 3, 2011.

Among the improved evidence were two radiocarbon dates that seemed to point to mammoths living on the peninsula during the warm period before the last ice age, which is believed to have begun about 30,000 years ago and ended about 11,000 years ago.



From a fossilized mammoth molar, a Homer dentist helps to remove a sample
so it can be sent to a lab for radiocarbon testing.

“Although we know that finding these eroded bones does not prove that mammoths lived on the Kenai,” Klein said in the article, “ it strongly suggests that they did and, as such, might encourage others to be more aware of this very fascinating environment and the many stories it has to reveal to us.”

Those turned out to be prophetic words.

After reading Jackinsky’s article, Tim Klingbeil of Homer came forward with information about a mammoth molar that his brother, Jack, had found in the late 1950s. Klingbeil’s announcement led to another Jackinsky article, “More mammoth remains surface,” on March 16.

The second article led to a standing-room-only, brown-bag luncheon, featuring a presentation by Klein and Reger, at the Alaska Islands and Ocean Visitor Center on April 14, which is when Kevin Culhane reentered the picture.

Culhane, a 2008 graduate of Skyview High School, had heard about Klein’s investigation into the mammoth mystery, and he called Jackinsky at the Homer News to announce what he had found and see if he could learn more. Jackinsky took his telephone number and passed it on to Klein, who called Culhane and then stopped in at his Kasilof home to see the fossil. She had him relate the details of the discovery, including its precise location, and then she invited Culhane to the luncheon.

Meanwhile, the number of fossil finds rose to 12, and the story continued to grow.

Klein herself, who had found a fossilized mammoth ankle bone on Bishop’s Beach in 1991, discovered a tusk fragment this June near Diamond Creek. She also learned that several years ago a horn core believed to have belonged to a now-extinct steppe bison—a contemporary of the woolly mammoth—was also discovered near Diamond Creek.

The most important discovery so far, however, has been the only fossil not found on or near a beach. In 2003, Klein learned, Phil Gordon of Homer was fishing with a friend when he discovered a mammoth tusk fragment four or five miles up Deep Creek, just above its confluence with Silver Salmon Creek.

The location of this fossil, which Gordon found on a gravel bar created by a recent flood, is the best indication of the fossil’s origin—probably the nearby Caribou Hills. “It was this piece that convinced me that we had a story,” Reger said. Before that—although the idea of mammoths on the Kenai was tantalizing—Reger said that the scientific side of him wouldn’t allow him to let go of other possibilities, no matter how unlikely.

The beach fossils, Klein once speculated, could have been transported to Kachemak Bay from far away by glacial action. (Reger deemed this idea almost impossible. Since fossils are not rocks, they would soon have been ground to dust by glaciers.) The fossils could also be the discarded pieces of a collection gathered in another area. They could have been traded to local Natives by Natives from, say, the Bristol Bay area. Or they could even be part of an elaborate hoax.

But the Deep Creek find made those remote possibilities even more remote.

Spurred on by these finds and others, Klein and Reger arranged for four more samples to be sent to an Outside lab for radiocarbon analysis, and they are currently awaiting the results of those tests.

Chasing a Hypothesis

Dick Reger is quick to point out that what he and Janet Klein believe about the possibility of woolly mammoths once roaming the Kenai Peninsula is a hypothesis and not a theory.

“The magnitude of evidence that we have is pretty damn small, compared to what we need to have to make it a theory,” Reger said. “It may never be a theory—probably won’t—and that’s okay. That’s the way science works. That’s the fun of it.”

The Random House Webster’s College Dictionary defines hypothesis as a “provisional theory set forth to explain some class of phenomena, either accepted as a guide to future investigation (working hypothesis) or assumed for the sake of argument and testing.”

Both Reger and Klein have stated that they believe that mammoths were once here, but they want to know when, they want to know where, and they want to be sure.

To solidify their evidence—11 mammoth fossils so far, plus one steppe bison fossil, all found between Clam Gulch and the Homer Spit—they want to perform more radiocarbon dating. They also want to find more fossils, or have others find them. And they really, really want to find a fossil in situ, a Latin term meaning literally “in place,” or, more specifically,

Artist's depiction of a steppe bison.

“situated in its original or natural place or position.”

Their notion of the ideal discovery would involve another fossilized mammoth tusk or bone or tooth still buried in sediment—along the cut bank of a stream, for instance. Such a find, Reger said, could provide stratigraphic context and allow for pollen samples from the site to help determine the vegetation extant during the animal’s existence. As Reger stated in a Homer News article on April 20, “We could date not just the bones but other datable things like wood or charcoal or whatever. It would give us a further fix on the age of them.”

As of early September, Klein and Reger had only two radiocarbon dates to go on—and one of them was inconclusive. A tusk fragment found four years ago about three miles west of Bishop’s Beach was analyzed by a lab at the University of California Irvine and determined to be 27,040 years old.

A fossilized mammoth ankle bone found 20 years ago on Bishop’s Beach was also analyzed at UC Irvine but came back with an indeterminate response because its age exceeded the 48,500-year limit of the analytical method. The ankle bone could be only a few hundred years older than the limit or even a few thousand years older, or more.

The good news was that both dates fit neatly into what is believed to be the Middle Wisconsin interstade, the name given to the approximately 30,000-year warm, wet period between the last two ice ages. If mammoths lived on the peninsula between 30,000 and 60,000 years ago, the conditions for their survival should have been quite favorable. Mammoths liked to dine on the kind of tough, silica-rich grasses and other low plants that may have thrived in the open peninsula country below the mountains.

Still, this good news opens the door to more questions:

First, how did the mammoths—shaggy, ruddy-colored grazing mammals, some of which may have stood more than 10 feet tall, weighed as much as six tons, and had tusks more than 15 feet in length—get to the Kenai Peninsula in the first place, and when did they arrive?

Second, beside mammoths and steppe bison, what other mammals inherent to the Pleistocene Epoch lived with them in this area? Was the peninsula also home to prehistoric horses, the scimitar cat, the mastodon, the short-faced bear, the antelope, and the yak, among many others?

Third—and perhaps most important at this stage in the ongoing research—if the last ice age, which caused a worldwide glaciation that may have lasted nearly 20,000 years, produced massive sheets of ice flowing over the land and filling Cook Inlet and Kachemak Bay, how could mammoth fossils survive the pulverizing power of the ice?

While the answer to the first question lies in evidence collected by scientists from around the world, and the answer to the second question relies on new discoveries, the key to answering the final question seems to be ground solidly in geology, Reger’s life work.

In 2007, the State of Alaska’s Division of Geological & Geophysical Surveys published A Guide to the Late Quaternary History of Northern and Western Kenai Peninsula, Alaska, which was researched and written by Reger and three other Alaskan experts in geology. The guide traces, among other things, the movement of glacial ice during the last three ice ages, dating back perhaps 150,000 years.

Each major glaciation reshapes the landscape through which it travels, and those new shapes are the result of mass and pressure, direction of travel, and rate of retreat, among other forces. Valleys are carved, lakes are created, and new drainages are formed as the ground is scoured by the weight of slabs of glacial ice over 1,000 feet thick.

The evidence for these movements includes the observation of glacial moraines, ancient lake beds, abandoned drainages, and rock scarring high in the mountains.

Part of Reger's investigation of Alaska's geologic past.

Interestingly, each of the last two glaciations has been less extensive than the one that preceded it, meaning that the ice did not fill the landscape as completely as it had in the previous ice age. Evidence suggests that during the most recent glaciation—although the Kenai Mountains were nearly buried in snow, the inlet was full of ice year round, and a giant freshwater lake was wedged between the frozen inlet and the highlands—a 510-square-mile section of high country between the Kenai Mountains and the sea was probably left untouched.

This “untouched” land lay in what is now known as the Caribou Hills, and this refugium (as such places that escape the rigors of change occurring elsewhere are called) may be the reason that the citizens of the southern peninsula are finding any remains at all.

Fossils deposited anywhere else have likely been crushed by the passage of ice, but fossils from the Caribou Hills seem to have been spared and are just now, more than 10,000 years after the end of the last ice age, being discovered.

Reger speculates that the fossils have traveled downhill slowly, drawn by the forces of water and gravity, from the high country to the sea.

“I realized that they had to be carried from where they were laid down,” Reger said. “They had to be brought from there (in the Caribou Hills) down to the beach after the last ice age. They wouldn’t have survived the last ice age down there in Homer (where the glacial ice was thick). They were up there in the surface sediments up on the Caribou Hills and were brought down the creeks and down the scarps and slopes by mass-movement processes that could carry them—debris flows  made up of mud and carrying trees, brush, and chunks of coal and rocks—but it was a less rigorous, less active, less damaging medium to carry them in than a stream flood would have been, with boulders that would have hammered  the fossils  and crushed  them.”

Such movement, he said, occurs infrequently—maybe once every 50 or 100 or even 200 years—making the fossils’ journeys seem almost imperceptible.

The lone fossil found away from the ocean—Phil Gordon’s 2003 discovery, after one of these major flooding events—helped convince Reger. Because the gravel bar upon the fossil lay was located above the confluence of Deep Creek and Silver Salmon Creek but just below the rocky canyon walls at that part of the drainage, Reger could infer that the fossil must have traveled down Deep Creek from the nearby high country.

The upper Deep Creek drainage in the Caribou Hills.

Reger and Klein decided to have Gordon’s tusk fragment and two other fossils radiocarbon dated, this time at the renowned Beta Analytic lab in Florida.

As to the question of how the mammoths arrived on the peninsula, Reger said that the evidence suggests that mammoths likely came to Alaska from Siberia over the Bering Land Bridge and eventually spread southward and eastward across a wide range of North America.

From the Interior, mammoths appear to have moved south through passes in the Alaska Range and entered  the Kenai Peninsula during the Middle Wisconsin interstade. Reger said that it is possible that mammoths populated much of the peninsula lowlands during this time, but no fossil record is known to exist outside the unglaciated  Caribou Hills refugium. Elsewhere, the Late Wisconsin glaciation would likely have destroyed or buried any fossils, including mammoth remains.

As the glaciation developed, mammoths living on the Kenai were likely squeezed into a smaller and smaller habitable environment and eventually perished, even in the Caribou Hills.

“I don’t believe that a viable mammoth population could have survived in the Caribou Hills refugium during the last major glaciation,” Reger said. “The Caribou Hills refugium covered only about 500 square miles, which sounds like a lot but really isn’t when you consider how many large mammals had to live there to be a viable population and how depauperate (underdeveloped in impoverished conditions) the flora must have been. There simply was probably not enough to eat.”

Meanwhile, the research continues, with both Klein and Reger appreciative of the skills and knowledge that each of them has brought to this broadening investigation.

“Janet Klein has been an absolute key point, a lightning rod, for this whole thing,” Reger said. “None of this would have happened without her interest and her effort and the trust that the people in the Homer area have in her.”

Klein deflects the praise toward Reger and the individuals coming forward with specimens and observations. “This project exemplifies the value of citizen science wherein many people found and shared information and ancient mammal remains with others so that all of us can better understand the Kenai Peninsula,” she said. “These mammoth and bison remains are becoming truly significant primarily because Dick Reger is giving his time and expertise to ground them in the geology of the peninsula. Without geologic context, the specimens would simply be wonderful and exotic objects.”

 

Good Fortune and Good Science

The flood changed everything, revealing what has thus far been the most important piece in an intriguing archaeological and geological puzzle.

Prior to the flood, Phil Gordon of Homer had been “putzing around” up Deep Creek for years, fighting through a mass of vegetation that he referred to as “a stinking jungle, all full of bears and brush and barely passable.” After the flood, however, the whole lower Deep Creek area opened up. “It changed the river and topography enormously,” Gordon said. “It was a veritable freeway.”

Usually Gordon trekked upstream with a friend, typically on a fishing excursion, and such was the case in the late summer of 2003.

A segment of fossilized mammoth tusk.

“My buddy and I were fishing for dollies,” Gordon said. “He is a great fisherman, but I am sort of an indifferent fisherman. It’s a good excuse to go, but if I don’t catch anything it can be every bit as good. He’s busy casting and fishing and changing lures and trying flies, and I’m busy seeing what I can see.”

Gordon said he found “a variety of bear bones, a number of moose antlers, and a huge variety of things that had been unearthed by that enormous flood,” and he delighted in the search at the expense of the fishing.

“I was just happy, happy, happy,” he said. “I walked across a bit of a sandbar, and there was just about four inches of the mid-part of the tusk showing. It’s brownish and it looks like wood, but there was something about it that arrested my gaze, so I stopped and walked back. I often do this. I’m not great at making miles and miles and miles. I used to run everywhere, but these days I spend a lot more time just looking around. So I dug it out. It’s not a monster. It’s not the whole tusk, certainly not the whole mammoth, but it was a hoot to find because I had a pretty good idea what it was.”

The heavy tusk fragment was about 16 inches long, he said, about four inches in diameter, and with nearly the same specific gravity as basalt. When the radiocarbon date came back on it from the Beta Analytic lab earlier this month, Gordon learned that his piece of the past was approximately 31,740 years old. During that same week, Elaine Brown of Homer also learned of a radiocarbon date. In 2008, Brown had found a mammoth molar on Bishop’s Beach in Homer, and Beta Analytic announced that it was 40,080 years old.

Reger and Klein were cheered by the new data. They announced the new radiocarbon dates publicly at a standing-room-only mammoth presentation in a meeting room at the Aspen Hotel in Soldotna. They also informed the audience in the packed room that the new dates fit perfectly into their working hypothesis.

Klein also encouraged the audience at the presentation to come forward with any discoveries, but “if and only if they were found on the Kenai Peninsula” and they know the location of the discovery. “If found in situ, the specimen should be left in place, should not be disturbed,” she said. “The finder should photograph it in the context of the surroundings, take a GPS reading or other means of relocating the object, and report it to Dick or me or whomever might be the land owner.”

In most cases, Klein said, the collection of such items is not illegal. It is, however, against the law to remove fossils from private property.

So the search goes on in a project that Klein says has relied so heavily on citizen contributions. And citizens such as Phil Gordon can keep looking and continue to place more pieces into an intriguing puzzle. Gordon has, in fact, continued searching since his big discovery almost a decade ago. “I do believe it was an enormous fluke to find it, certainly finding it in the condition that it was, mostly buried in mud and sand,” he said. “It was certainly a surprise, and I don’t anticipate that I’ll find another one, but I love to look.”

Reger indicates a sampling site on a fossilized mammoth molar.

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A TIMELINE OF MAMMOTH-RELATED FOSSIL DISCOVERIES

[Note: Some individuals who have found fossils prefer to keep their identities private.]

 

Mid-1950s—According to recent testimony from a Ninilchik woman, a mammoth molar was uncovered by a slide along the bluff above the beach about two miles south of Clam Gulch.

1958 or 1959—Teen-ager Jack Klingbeil of Homer found the fossilized molar of a woolly mammoth on the beach near Bidarka Creek. He sold the tooth for $10 to Hazel Heath, owner of Alaska Wild Berry Products in town. Heath exhibited the tooth on a shelf in the store, and a later owner of the store placed it and some other objects into a glass exhibit case about 15 years ago. The molar is still there, although it has dried over the years and split into several pieces.

1976—Homer resident Judy Winn found a tusk fragment on the beach on the Spit.

1989—Harold Shafer found a fossilized mammoth molar on the beach a few miles south of the Anchor River mouth.

1991—Janet Klein of Homer found a mammoth astragalus (anklebone) on Bishop’s Beach. Later, radiocarbon dating could not accurately determine its age because it exceeded the 48,500-year limit of such testing.

1993—Klein and others verified the identification of a mammoth molar found by a Homer resident just east of Bidarka Creek. The fossilized tooth was eventually given to family members overseas.

Five to 10 years ago—A Homer nurse found what was believed to be a steppe bison horn core on the beach near Diamond Creek. Unfortunately, the core, which is composed of fairly porous material, had been contaminated by some sort of natural or synthetic acid, perhaps petroleum-based chemicals transported by wave action onto the beach. This horn core is, thus far, the only non-mammoth fossil discovered.

2003—Phil Gordon of Homer discovered a mammoth tusk fragment on a gravel bar about 4-5 miles upstream from the mouth on Deep Creek. Because of its location far away from the beach—and theoretically closest to its origin—this fossil is considered one of the most important finds. Radiocarbon testing indicated that the fragment was 31,740 years old.

2007—Mike Lettis of Anchor Point found a tusk fragment on the beach about three miles west of Bishop’s Beach in Homer. Later, radiocarbon dating indicated an age of about 27,040 years—placing it near the ending of the last worldwide warming period and near the beginning of the last ice age.

About 2008—Elaine Browne of Homer found a mammoth molar on Bishop’s Beach in Homer. Radiocarbon testing indicated that the fragment was 40,080 years old.

2010—Kasilof resident Kevin Culhane found a fragment of a mammoth molar on the beach near Corea Creek, south of Clam Gulch.

June 2011—Janet Klein found a tusk fragment on the beach near Diamond Creek. The tusk fragment became the 12th“element” found that appears to support the idea that mammoths and other fauna of that time period once lived on the Kenai Peninsula.