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Frozen Fauna of the Mammoth Steppe: The Story of Blue Babe
Frozen mammals of the Ice Age, preserved for millennia in the tundra, have been a source of fascination and mystery since their first discovery over two centuries ago. These mummies, their ecology, and their preservation are the subject of this compelling book by paleontologist Dale Guthrie. The 1979 find of a frozen, extinct steppe bison in an Alaskan gold mine allowed him to undertake the first scientific excavation of an Ice Age mummy in North America and to test theories about these enigmatic frozen fauna.The 36,000-year-old bison mummy, coated with blue mineral crystals, was dubbed "Blue Babe." Guthrie conveys the excitement of its excavation and shows how he made use of evidence from living animals, other Pleistocene mummies, Paleolithic art, and geological data. With photographs and scores of detailed drawings, he takes the reader through the excavation and subsequent detective work, analyzing the animal's carcass and its surroundings, the circumstances of its death, its appearance in life, the landscape it inhabited, and the processes of preservation by freezing. His examination shows that Blue Babe died in early winter, falling prey to lions that inhabited the Arctic during the Pleistocene era.Guthrie uses information gleaned from his study of Blue Babe to provide a broad picture of bison evolutionary history and ecology, including speculations on the interactions of bison and Ice Age peoples. His description of the Mammoth Steppe as a cold, dry, grassy plain is based on an entirely new way of reading the fossil record.
- GenresPalaeontologyGeology
456 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 15, 1989
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October 1, 2025
This book was written by a paleontologist at the University of Alaska, and is simultaneously very specific in nature -- the story of the remains of one 36,000 year old steppe bison christened "Blue Babe" found near Fairbanks, Alaska; and very wide-ranging, surveying the history of frozen steppe "mummies" in general and addressing many different aspects of the environment this particular bison was thought to have lived in.
I read this work from the point of view of a Catastrophist looking for evidence, and I think I might have found some. Blue Babe would have lived
> "The bison skin collagen was dated at 36,425 +2575/ − 1974 B.P. (QC-891). A piece of wood taken from above the bison was dated at 30,890 +890/"
right around the 36 kyr BP time period when evidence of a major magnetic excursion has been detected.
The author goes into a great deal of detail explaining how the environment of 36,000 kyr BP Alaska must have been a very dry short grass steppe with minimal winter snow accumulation, because grazers like bison and wooly mammoths are not equipped to survive a long winter with deep snow. (As opposed to moose and caribou, for instance, who are "browsers" who can eat above-snow-level brush / leaves / twigs -- bison cannot digest this stuff.) In fact, bison are now not normally found in Alaska, the wet summers and deep-snow winters do not suit them. There are a few small herds in very particularly favorable areas, and most are fed in winter by humans.
The author spent years studying every cubic inch of soil around the scene of the bison's death, determining that the bison was killed by two or three lions (in the subarctic?? a lion's tooth embedded in Blue Babe's skin!!) in the early winter, with the remainder of the carcass buried by sediment and frozen before the spring thaw, since their were zero traces of decay or carrion insects detected. Frozen under a massive slide of "silt"(!?!) (remember, the ground is frozen solid to a great depth in winter time). He waves his hand and says, I paraphrase, "the water must have come from a sudden spring thaw of the existing snow cover". But where did the silt come from, really? The ground underneath the snow is frozen solid and could only thaw after the snow was gone already. On top of this:
> "Pleistocene sediments moving downslope from one side of the valley can push a stream to the opposite side. Continued downcutting of the new stream channel leaves the gravel of the older channel behind on a gravel bench covered with sediment. Such was the case in the locality where Blue Babe was found (fig. 2.12). The stream channel was once near his carcass, but asymmetric movement of silt at right angles to the channel pushed the stream across the valley, leaving Blue Babe on a high bench under a thick deposit of silt."
The silt did not come from upstream. It came from upslope on the side of the valley, at right angles to the stream bed. We are not talking mountains and deep valleys here, the crude topographical map provided in the book shows the nearest hill topping out at 830m above sea level, and Blue Babe's final resting place looks to be about half-way down that slope in a small valley. Emphasis on the word "small". In an environment where large snow accumulations are not considered a possibility. And Alaska winter temperatures get down below 50 degrees below, so the gound is frozen very, very hard.
No, the silt deposition that preserved Blue Babe's remains was a very rare event. Remember, it's a small valley, and this event was 36 thousand years ago. If this sort of thing happened even once every thousand years the whole valley would be buried under silt. The last 12,000 year magnetic excursion was the end of the last ice age, when N.America (among other things) was the scene of massive flooding that seems to have progressed from north to south. 36,000 years ago was two major magnetic excursion cycles before that, and thus directly comparable to 12,000 years ago (assuming the poles flip back and forth between the same locations in alternate cycles). Was Blue Babe buried with a little help from what we now call the Arctic Ocean?
I have some personal color to add to this. As it happens, I grew up in a very dry (near desert) very cold (in winter time) short grass steppe region near 48 degrees N. latitude just east of the Rocky Mountains. Just because the annual precipitation is only 10" per year does not mean that snow does not accumulate in winter time. To the contrary. Winters are very long, and very cold, and many winters the snow can, by spring, accumulate to a meter or more. This is not unusual, it is quite normal. Some winters more. Cattle and sheep (grazers) must be fed or they die. Bison are more hardy, but it is my understanding that, before they were almost exterminated, the North American bison migrated south for the winter.
Would it not make more sense to place Alaska much nearer the equator in the subtropics 36,000 years ago, where the lions (repeat, lions!!) killed Blue Babe and ate most of him, when their feast was disturbed by a pole flip, followed by a tsunami that buried Blue Babe under silt, where he was quickly frozen solid at his new location in the subarctic? The one sticky issue is that from this point of view Blue Babe's remains would have again found their way back to the subtropics during the period 24,000 - 12,000 yr BP, and he would have had to have somehow remained under a glacier to remain frozen through that period. Permafrost is not going to stay frozen for 12,000 years in the subtropics without some help.
I read this work from the point of view of a Catastrophist looking for evidence, and I think I might have found some. Blue Babe would have lived
> "The bison skin collagen was dated at 36,425 +2575/ − 1974 B.P. (QC-891). A piece of wood taken from above the bison was dated at 30,890 +890/"
right around the 36 kyr BP time period when evidence of a major magnetic excursion has been detected.
The author goes into a great deal of detail explaining how the environment of 36,000 kyr BP Alaska must have been a very dry short grass steppe with minimal winter snow accumulation, because grazers like bison and wooly mammoths are not equipped to survive a long winter with deep snow. (As opposed to moose and caribou, for instance, who are "browsers" who can eat above-snow-level brush / leaves / twigs -- bison cannot digest this stuff.) In fact, bison are now not normally found in Alaska, the wet summers and deep-snow winters do not suit them. There are a few small herds in very particularly favorable areas, and most are fed in winter by humans.
The author spent years studying every cubic inch of soil around the scene of the bison's death, determining that the bison was killed by two or three lions (in the subarctic?? a lion's tooth embedded in Blue Babe's skin!!) in the early winter, with the remainder of the carcass buried by sediment and frozen before the spring thaw, since their were zero traces of decay or carrion insects detected. Frozen under a massive slide of "silt"(!?!) (remember, the ground is frozen solid to a great depth in winter time). He waves his hand and says, I paraphrase, "the water must have come from a sudden spring thaw of the existing snow cover". But where did the silt come from, really? The ground underneath the snow is frozen solid and could only thaw after the snow was gone already. On top of this:
> "Pleistocene sediments moving downslope from one side of the valley can push a stream to the opposite side. Continued downcutting of the new stream channel leaves the gravel of the older channel behind on a gravel bench covered with sediment. Such was the case in the locality where Blue Babe was found (fig. 2.12). The stream channel was once near his carcass, but asymmetric movement of silt at right angles to the channel pushed the stream across the valley, leaving Blue Babe on a high bench under a thick deposit of silt."
The silt did not come from upstream. It came from upslope on the side of the valley, at right angles to the stream bed. We are not talking mountains and deep valleys here, the crude topographical map provided in the book shows the nearest hill topping out at 830m above sea level, and Blue Babe's final resting place looks to be about half-way down that slope in a small valley. Emphasis on the word "small". In an environment where large snow accumulations are not considered a possibility. And Alaska winter temperatures get down below 50 degrees below, so the gound is frozen very, very hard.
No, the silt deposition that preserved Blue Babe's remains was a very rare event. Remember, it's a small valley, and this event was 36 thousand years ago. If this sort of thing happened even once every thousand years the whole valley would be buried under silt. The last 12,000 year magnetic excursion was the end of the last ice age, when N.America (among other things) was the scene of massive flooding that seems to have progressed from north to south. 36,000 years ago was two major magnetic excursion cycles before that, and thus directly comparable to 12,000 years ago (assuming the poles flip back and forth between the same locations in alternate cycles). Was Blue Babe buried with a little help from what we now call the Arctic Ocean?
I have some personal color to add to this. As it happens, I grew up in a very dry (near desert) very cold (in winter time) short grass steppe region near 48 degrees N. latitude just east of the Rocky Mountains. Just because the annual precipitation is only 10" per year does not mean that snow does not accumulate in winter time. To the contrary. Winters are very long, and very cold, and many winters the snow can, by spring, accumulate to a meter or more. This is not unusual, it is quite normal. Some winters more. Cattle and sheep (grazers) must be fed or they die. Bison are more hardy, but it is my understanding that, before they were almost exterminated, the North American bison migrated south for the winter.
Would it not make more sense to place Alaska much nearer the equator in the subtropics 36,000 years ago, where the lions (repeat, lions!!) killed Blue Babe and ate most of him, when their feast was disturbed by a pole flip, followed by a tsunami that buried Blue Babe under silt, where he was quickly frozen solid at his new location in the subarctic? The one sticky issue is that from this point of view Blue Babe's remains would have again found their way back to the subtropics during the period 24,000 - 12,000 yr BP, and he would have had to have somehow remained under a glacier to remain frozen through that period. Permafrost is not going to stay frozen for 12,000 years in the subtropics without some help.
April 18, 2023
Guthrie describes the finds of "frozen" large animals which have been discovered in the north. These finds are not many and he describes each. Many of the finds have been associated with gold mining operations. The book reads as a nonfictional detective story as it is amazing what can be discovered through analysis of such remains.
The book focuses on "Blue Babe", a 36,000 year old mummified Steppe Bison that was discovered in Alaska.
Claw marks show that Blue Babe died at an age of eight in early to mid winter, before his large reserves of fat were significantly reduced. He was killed and partially eaten by one or more lions, which fed for several days until the carcass was frozen. The carcass probably thawed the first summer, but remained bedded on frozen ground and covered by cold silt. He was refrozen in subsequent winters and, as silt accumulated year after year, was gradually interred beneath the lower reaches of annual thaw within permafrost.
Lions have large, contrastingly colored manes where males compete for large numbers of females. In African lion populations where prides are quite small (Tsavo Flats), males normally are maneless. Paintings of Pleistocene lion species show males without a large, contrastingly colored mane. It is likely that the northern lions were more solitary in their social behavior than are most lions today.
Neural processes, or spines on vertebrae rise higher in bison than in any other mammal, making a bison skeleton appear almost like the Permian reptile Dimetrodon. The author believes that the most important role of shoulder humps is increasing the efficiency of the gallop.
The long neural spines of a bison’s hump are also important as girders or struts for the attachment of the elastic neck ligament. This is a thick elastic yellow cable which allows energy to be stored as the head is lowered by gravity (for example, when the animal grazes). Stretch ligaments make it less costly to return the head to its natural position.
Steppe bison seem to have held their heads higher, at rest, than do American plains bison — more like fossil and recent European bison.
Monocotyledons and non-woody forbs were relatively rich and abundant during the short summer, but each fall, as growth stopped, these plants moved most nutrients to their roots, leaving poorer quality dead tissue above ground. Pleistocene bison depending on this low-nutrient winter forage required a large rumen to incubate quantities of the high-fiber, poor-quality food.
Holocene bison of Europe inhabited parkland openings in a forested landscape and probably experienced selection pressures for homogeneity of color and reduced display organs. The reverse is true of American plains bison on expanding Holocene grasslands. These grasslands had no counterpart in Holocene Eurasia. American plains bison developed extreme display paraphernalia, weapon morphology (short stubby upward-oriented horns), and fighting styles (head clashing).
Many grasses have evolved concurrently with large herbivores, such as bison, and actually use herbivores as their seed dispersers. Steppe bison lived in a habitat characterized by plants adapted to large grazers, and vice versa. Today vegetation in these same regions is comprised of plants that virtually exclude large herbivores.
The tundra and boreal forest landscape is not simply a product of average annual rainfall and degree days. Vegetation itself affects soil character.
Today we have very few grassy steppes in the far north to serve as an analogue to the Mammoth Steppe. The steppes in central Asia are the closest thing remaining to the Pleistocene Mammoth Steppe. Horses, hemiones (wild asses), saiga antelope, ferrets, and lions, which became extinct in Alaska, continued to live and thrive in the Asian steppes until the latter part of the Holocene.
Guthrie notes that the far north is an inhospitable place, and life there requires advanced technologies such as well-insulated housing, tailored clothing, efficient heat sources, and a suite of tools. He believes that no one lived in the far north in either Eurasia or North America during the height of the last glacial event. After the last glacial, trees again entered the north around 12,000–13,000 years ago, and people came north with the new trees.
Several paleo-ecologists have argued that humans were instrumental in causing extinctions of the megafauna. However, the actual causes of extinctions in the far north are difficult to reconstruct because climate and vegetation were changing dramatically at the same time. There are many problems with the “overkill” explanations of mammalian extinctions in Alaska; for example, it is unlikely that the demise of saigas, badgers, and black-footed ferrets can be explained directly by the incursion of human hunters.
Guthrie describes the process of mounting Blue Babe. While long and involved, a break was taken to sample the meat. "A small part of the mummy’s neck was diced and simmered in a pot of stock and vegetables. We had Blue Babe for dinner. The meat was well aged but still a little tough, and it gave the stew a strong Pleistocene aroma, but nobody there would have dared miss it.'
The book focuses on "Blue Babe", a 36,000 year old mummified Steppe Bison that was discovered in Alaska.
Claw marks show that Blue Babe died at an age of eight in early to mid winter, before his large reserves of fat were significantly reduced. He was killed and partially eaten by one or more lions, which fed for several days until the carcass was frozen. The carcass probably thawed the first summer, but remained bedded on frozen ground and covered by cold silt. He was refrozen in subsequent winters and, as silt accumulated year after year, was gradually interred beneath the lower reaches of annual thaw within permafrost.
Lions have large, contrastingly colored manes where males compete for large numbers of females. In African lion populations where prides are quite small (Tsavo Flats), males normally are maneless. Paintings of Pleistocene lion species show males without a large, contrastingly colored mane. It is likely that the northern lions were more solitary in their social behavior than are most lions today.
Neural processes, or spines on vertebrae rise higher in bison than in any other mammal, making a bison skeleton appear almost like the Permian reptile Dimetrodon. The author believes that the most important role of shoulder humps is increasing the efficiency of the gallop.
The long neural spines of a bison’s hump are also important as girders or struts for the attachment of the elastic neck ligament. This is a thick elastic yellow cable which allows energy to be stored as the head is lowered by gravity (for example, when the animal grazes). Stretch ligaments make it less costly to return the head to its natural position.
Steppe bison seem to have held their heads higher, at rest, than do American plains bison — more like fossil and recent European bison.
Monocotyledons and non-woody forbs were relatively rich and abundant during the short summer, but each fall, as growth stopped, these plants moved most nutrients to their roots, leaving poorer quality dead tissue above ground. Pleistocene bison depending on this low-nutrient winter forage required a large rumen to incubate quantities of the high-fiber, poor-quality food.
Holocene bison of Europe inhabited parkland openings in a forested landscape and probably experienced selection pressures for homogeneity of color and reduced display organs. The reverse is true of American plains bison on expanding Holocene grasslands. These grasslands had no counterpart in Holocene Eurasia. American plains bison developed extreme display paraphernalia, weapon morphology (short stubby upward-oriented horns), and fighting styles (head clashing).
Many grasses have evolved concurrently with large herbivores, such as bison, and actually use herbivores as their seed dispersers. Steppe bison lived in a habitat characterized by plants adapted to large grazers, and vice versa. Today vegetation in these same regions is comprised of plants that virtually exclude large herbivores.
The tundra and boreal forest landscape is not simply a product of average annual rainfall and degree days. Vegetation itself affects soil character.
Today we have very few grassy steppes in the far north to serve as an analogue to the Mammoth Steppe. The steppes in central Asia are the closest thing remaining to the Pleistocene Mammoth Steppe. Horses, hemiones (wild asses), saiga antelope, ferrets, and lions, which became extinct in Alaska, continued to live and thrive in the Asian steppes until the latter part of the Holocene.
Guthrie notes that the far north is an inhospitable place, and life there requires advanced technologies such as well-insulated housing, tailored clothing, efficient heat sources, and a suite of tools. He believes that no one lived in the far north in either Eurasia or North America during the height of the last glacial event. After the last glacial, trees again entered the north around 12,000–13,000 years ago, and people came north with the new trees.
Several paleo-ecologists have argued that humans were instrumental in causing extinctions of the megafauna. However, the actual causes of extinctions in the far north are difficult to reconstruct because climate and vegetation were changing dramatically at the same time. There are many problems with the “overkill” explanations of mammalian extinctions in Alaska; for example, it is unlikely that the demise of saigas, badgers, and black-footed ferrets can be explained directly by the incursion of human hunters.
Guthrie describes the process of mounting Blue Babe. While long and involved, a break was taken to sample the meat. "A small part of the mummy’s neck was diced and simmered in a pot of stock and vegetables. We had Blue Babe for dinner. The meat was well aged but still a little tough, and it gave the stew a strong Pleistocene aroma, but nobody there would have dared miss it.'
September 4, 2016
Dry in parts, but ultimately an engrossing story of both the bison discovery in 1979 near Fairbanks and the analysis around its life and times. Definitely an academic book, in that several sections are devoted to arguing with other scientists over different aspects of the "Mammoth Steppe". Given the timeframe of the author's career (book written in 1989), it is fun to see a look into an academic field that involved intensive US-Soviet interaction during the Cold War.
Good enough to make me want to visit both the museum in Fairbanks with the titular bison and the natural history museum in St Petersburg (then Leningrad), which the author talks about extensively.
Good enough to make me want to visit both the museum in Fairbanks with the titular bison and the natural history museum in St Petersburg (then Leningrad), which the author talks about extensively.
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May 17, 2013this book was very thriller like it was about the mamoths that were found in ice i think its allsome how you kan find a spicies like this i gues thats why i was so in to it it was reallly just about the encouter ments and to see how these hudge animals survived back then we new ther body type big and sculpterde and that they will have thik hair because it was so cold there good edventure book
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