Who wouldn’t want their own little baby mammoth?
Lyuba, the baby woolly found lost in a bacteria-friendly pit three years ago, is now on display in Chicago, a strange if presumably monetary choice for a beast found in Russian ground.
One day hopefully she will return through Moscow, but for now anyone wishing to have his or her own mammoth can make do with the dozens of mammoth teeth and tusks up for sale. There are plenty of ads, although not so many that you begin to see the product being sold by what are possibly the descendents of mammoths in any and every underpass — a regular sign of market saturation.
Tatyana is selling a 12-kilogram mammoth tooth, discovered minus body. Her dad found it in a river in a small town in Tatarstan.
“What does your dad do?”
“Hey, what does Dad do?” she asked someone close by in Naberezhniye Chelny, her husband or possibly her brother. Something to do with sand, she discovered, sand in the river, and he hit upon a tooth. A big tooth.
“It’s in good condition,” she insisted. “It’s not even old.”
“But it’s got to be old, hasn’t it,” I said. “It’s from a mammoth, after all.” Even the most optimistic accounts say the woolly mammoth died out at about 1650 B.C., and that was only a few left over on Wrangel Island in Siberia.
Anyway, the tooth is in good condition, she insisted, and not black like other teeth on sale, presumably from sweeter-toothed woolly mammoths. She wants 10,000 rubles ($340), but she sounded willing to bargain. How much a mammoth tooth costs is a subject that has involved many a brain for many a year and that is just judging by those on the web sites of collectors who throw around figures of $100 to $5,000 per kilogram.
In the old days, finding a giant tooth made you immediately think that a giant, with no health insurance, had wandered past. But just try and dig a hole in Siberia without coming across a bit of a mammoth these days. Or those days — as from 1887 to 1893 up to 1,700 tusks were sold at a market in Yakutsk.
Mammoths have a steady appeal for collectors, and who knows how many more Lyubas and their bits are now locked away in small glass boxes. One of the more disturbing events of my year was finding an erotic collection made out of mammoth teeth, although I suspect that it was really tusks. It is enough to say that one of the miniature statuettes was called Mr. Penishead — the rest can be left to your already vivid imaginations.
Thankfully, Lyuba was saved from such indignities.
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