Russia-The Ghost Lands

The Lyakhovsky Islands are home to a high concentration of mammoth remains, drawing tusk hunters and palaeontologists to their icy, barren shores

- Jean Francois Lagrot

​​​​Amongst a bed of thick, pitch-black seaweed, Pavel Nikolskiy, a palaeontologist and senior researcher at the Moscow Geological Institute, is crouched down, searching for artefacts from the Pleistocene period. Above him, a grey, icy cliff is splintering and falling apart, cascading down in small pieces, and falling into the Laptev Sea.

Suddenly, Pavel jumps up abruptly, like a tightly wound spring that has been released. He proudly exhibits a cave lion’s molar – a remain from the Pleistocene period – in very good condition. The team is thrilled with the discovery.

Pavel is a member of a crew of 14 scientists on an expedition sponsored by the Russian Geographical Society, organised by the Mammoth Museum in Yakutsk. The team aims to find evidence of the presence of Palaeolithic hunters on this lost piece of land amongst the remote Lyakhovsky Islands, some 70 kilometres offthe Siberian coast.

Their mission is guided by a set of questions: Why – and how – did the mammoth disappear some 10,000 years ago? The collective of Russian, Yakutian, Moldavian, Korean and Dutch scientists hope to get decisive answers to these questions on this expedition in far northern Russia.