A Conversation between Marguerite Humeau and Bernard Buigues

Marguerite Humeau: How did you feel when you discovered the mammoths Jarkov and Lyuba?

When we first met, you told me about the smell and the fact of being face to face with an actual, physical being, albeit coming from another era. This idea really struck a chord with me. In my work, I try to create the physical experience of other worlds and to imagine the feeling of being confronted by animals from elsewhere, either from a different space or time.

Bernard Buigues: I carried out the exhumation of Jarkov in the middle of the tundra at the end of a polar winter. The temperature never rose above -15°C. I spent more than three weeks by his side, digging up pieces of his skeleton every two hours. During the winter, the tundra is an aseptic world; there are no odours because of the low temperatures. The immediate environment was frozen, covered with snow and ice. This created a very clear contrast with what I was doing, gradually uncovering the pieces of a mammoth with my hair-dryer. Obviously, there was the smell of a wild animal that emerged from the parts which I’d warmed up, but there was also his coat with its incredible colours, from brown to red, including layers of blond hairs. The most magical discoveries were the shreds of grass in his coat, and a small red flower that had kept all of its brightness. I hid this little flower so thoroughly that I can’t find it anymore. This remains an extremely personal, intimate memory! As for Lyuba, there was no excavation. She was found beside a river. In this case, the magic was in her general state of conservation and the fact that all of her organs were intact. Her autopsy was an unforgettable experience.

Lyuba was not even a month old when she died and, as with baby elephants, she was being breastfed, while also feeding on her mother’s dung. So that her digestive system could adapt to the local diet, she needed a whole bacterial environment that she didn’t have when she was born, and which she prepared in this way, with what her mother left her. In her stomach, we found some mother’s milk, and in her small intestine some of her mother’s dung, as well as a few scraps of lemming, which her mother must have consumed along with the 180 kilos of grass and leaves that she needed every day.

MH: Listening to you immediately makes me want to try and imagine the circumstances of this drama. Did her mother understand that Lyuba’s body was now lifeless? How long did she stay by her side before understanding? Did she abandon her at once?

BB: At the present state of our observations, anything can be imagined. Many mammals are aware of death, but we should avoid introducing any personal empathy into these observations.

MH: Can you imagine the final instants in these mammoths’ lives? What are your immediate thoughts?

BB: Trying to understand why these “individuals” died is one of the important questions we deal with in our research. Firstly, it should not be forgotten that there were several thousand mammoths in the territory of Siberia, over a period of at least 40,000 years. The animals we have found all died in extremely specific circumstances. The bodies of those that had “natural deaths” were eaten by local predators: bears, sabre-toothed tigers, wolverines, wolves and foxes. Jarkov’s autopsy revealed that he died at the age of 47. He seemed to be in good health. He must have died by accidentally falling into a marshy pit towards the end of the summer, then a sudden cold wave must have frozen him and protected him from predators. This was 20,400 years ago. When it comes to Lyuba, her passing must have been even more dramatic, especially as her mother must have been by her side. By scanning her trunk and respiratory tracts, we discovered that she had breathed in mud and so must have choked to death, while her mother had been incapable of saving her. I can’t really imagine how terrible this must have been for the mother.

MH: Have you ever tried to imagine what happened to the last mammoth?

BB: I think that mammoths lived until recent times, or at least longer than has been attested by the oldest fossils found in Northern Siberia.

Now that we can interpret DNA more easily than we could twenty years ago, I wouldn’t be surprised if one day we found traces of mammoth DNA dating back from less than 1,000 years in some areas of Eurasia or Europe. The climate started to heat up 10,000 years ago. This was at the end of the Pleistocene; a new epoch then began, the Holocene, which has lasted until now, and which is more favourable to mankind but more hostile to the megafauna of the period. The dry, cold but abundant steppes gave way to a biotope that was marshy in summer, and too poor in winter. Mammoths must have tried to migrate southwards, where there were forests and men. I might also add that there must have been quite a few “last mammoths.” I think that they must have become extinct after spending a long time living in isolation, weakened and stressed by the environment and human activity. Mammoths were peaceful creatures that could not cohabit with prehistoric man, whose only thoughts were feeding themselves.

MH: I recently read Collapse (2006) by Jared Diamond. In it, he asks the following question: “What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last tree say while he was doing it?” I always wonder what happens at the precise moment(s) when things shift irreversibly. Phenomena like extinction are often thought of as being very slow, and this makes them abstract. That’s why I think it’s important to play back particular moments that took place in a very (or overly) distant past, the better to face up to them.

BB: In one sense, our species is extremely handicapped. We need all kinds of prosthetics so as to be able to deal with the world, to see further, to hear better, to move quicker. I don’t think that the person who cuts down the last tree realises that it is the last one. He is quite simply disconnected from any overall approach through a lack of knowledge, but above all he reroutes everything through his intellect and focuses on his immediate interests. I don’t think that morality has anything to do with how things turn out. The point that really strikes me is that mankind has no intuition of time or space. Humans apprehend the world using instruments or concepts.

MH: In your opinion, did mammoths have funerary rituals, just like elephants do?

BB: It’s hard to say. If they’re as close to elephants as the scientific community thinks, then that seems possible. They lived in small matriarchal herds, and it’s obvious that they had codes.

MH: In the distant future, might elephants develop even more complex rituals?

BB: Animals are in constant evolution, just like us. I think that they also observe us, and that we influence their evolution to a certain degree.

MH: I wonder if they talk to each other about humans. In your opinion, what relation do elephants have with the Other?

BB: Elephants’ development, both individually and as part of a group, occurs thanks to the extremely elaborate relationships they have with each other. It’s a real shame that we have not been able to decipher their language or communicate with them directly. In a way, they are more highly evolved than us– not intellectually, they haven’t had their “cognitive revolution” like humans did about 70,000 years ago. But they know how to live in a community, often in a hostile environment. Furthermore, they aren’t predators, as opposed to mankind.

MH: It is said that elephants can hear the movement of the clouds. Do you think they feel amazement, joy, love, or else can be melancholic?

BB: Absolutely.

MH: I also often wonder about our emotions. Are they just biological phenomena?

BB: No, there are several steps in this process but, at a given stage, the whole thing is deciphered chemically in our brains, and what we feel, especially when it comes to emotions, results from the chemical and hormonal activity of our organisms.

MH: In Beyond Words (2015), Carl Safina reports Lyall Watson’s testimony of the communication between two matriarchs of different species, an elephant and a whale. This is what he says: “The largest animal in the ocean and the largest living land animal were no more than a hundred yards apart, and I was convinced that they were communicating! In infrasound, in concert, sharing big brains and long lives, understanding the pain of high investment in a few precious offspring, aware of the importance and the pleasure of complex sociality, these rare and lovely great ladies were commiserating over the back fence of this rocky Cape shore, woman to woman, matriarch to matriarch, almost the last of their kind. I turned, blinking away the tears, and left them to it. This was no place for a mere man…”

BB: That’s extremely moving and poetic. There’s nothing I can add to the subject, except that certain tales told by the peoples of North Siberia refer to whales and mammoths as belonging to the same family. This must come from observing beached whales and mammoth carcasses emerging from the permafrost. Whales live in the water and mammoths in the earth; they both “die” on reaching open air.

MH: It seems complicated really to understand other animal species, other than from our own viewpoint, as men. What do you think about this challenge?

BB: We need to develop further and study more, so as to be able to understand their universes, but also that of vegetation (not to mention the world of minerals). We do not have time on our side, because we are destroying everything in our path. Our markers are mere epiphenomena in the history of the Earth and, even more so, in that of the universe.

MH: I have read, in particular in Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee (1991), that a mutation of a gene had set off a major change in the structure of a chimpanzee’s larynx, which was later to allow our ancestors to develop the articulated language that is at the origin of humanity, as we know it. If such a phenomenon had occurred in mammoths, how do you think it would have altered the Proboscidian evolution? In my show at the Palais de Tokyo and Nottingham Contemporary, I imagine that the trigger event is the death of a matriarch elephant, which leads to the emergence of consciousness (and above all of its evolution) among elephants. I’d like you to imagine how the Proboscidea might have then evolved physically and mentally.

BB: Some elephants evolved in an extraordinary way during their migration, especially 200,000 years ago. For example, one species of dwarf elephants (as big as a small donkey) appeared on the large Mediterranean islands, and in particular Crete.

Thanks to the absence of predators and abundant food, it was no longer necessary for them to be imposingly large. This evolution was quite quick, because it occurred over just a few hundred years. So the Proboscidea have a real capacity for evolving and adapting. It shouldn’t be forgotten that the mammoth is a “cousin” of an elephant that migrated from Africa to the North. When the mammoth left the continent of Africa, it was no hairier than an elephant. It took it just 600,000 to 700,000 years to become smaller, learn to live in a colder habitat and distrust mankind. It seems to me interesting to note that, when we try to understand what has happened over the past 700,000 years, the migration of the mammoths always came before that of men. It’s as if mammoths were showing the direction to take, or else as if mankind saw the mammoth as a kind of guide pointing out where new resources were available. The Proboscidae, both mammoths and elephants, can decipher the environment better than we can. My intuition is that mankind follows certain animals, to eat them, of course, but also because they open up a path for their own development. I think that mankind has a self-interested attachment to these animals, which have a more highly developed sensorial perception of the universe that guide and reassure us. So, to imagine what they could, or might have become, comes down to imagining them without us, without the stress that we have been inflicting on them for millennia. We have put them in a situation of extreme survival. And it is not the reservations in Africa or zoos that will solve this problem. I think that what we need to do is to learn to talk to the clouds – after all, trees can do it!

Translated by Ian Monk

Bernard Buigues is a French explorer. He has organised numerous expeditions to the North Pole and Siberia. He is the founder of Mammuthus, a scientific program aimed at constructing a record of paleobiodiversity through the collection and preservation of fossils throughout the Siberian Arctic. He defines himself as “a mammoth hunter without weapon.”