Feb 09 2012
A Living Mammoth?
This story is a classic of cryptozoology. A paranormal researcher claims to have come into possession of a video of an alleged living woolly mammoth. Immediately, skeptical red flags should be flying, but let’s take a deep breath and look more closely at the story.
First, it is always good to go into any exploration or investigation with an open but informed mind. Too often people equate “open mind” with a mind empty of all relevant information. Before scientists embark on a new line of research they typically will first see everything that has already been researched on the topic, to see if the idea has already been answered, or if it is even plausible.
In this case we may or may not be able to come up with a definitive answer, but we can start by considering the plausibility of the claim (what some might call “armchair skepticism”, but should not be denigrated). Mammoths largely died out about 10,000 years ago. Recent fossil evidence suggests that a population of dwarf woolly mammoths survived on Wrangel island, off the coast of Siberia, up until as recently at 4,000 years ago. It is not entirely implausible that a small population of even large mammals could survive in the remote wilderness without being detected.
The probability is fairly small, however. Even dwarf mammoths are large creatures. A sustainable breeding population would require at least 2000 individuals, and large animals would have to range fairly widely to find food. There would also be 4,000 years of frozen or fossilized mammoths to find, if they were alive for this entire time. So while the probability is not zero, it is small. In skeptical terms, this means that we can be convinced that living woolly mammoths are lurking in the Siberian wilderness, but we would need convincing evidence.
That last bit is what we never seem to get. The world of cryptozoology deals largely with those creatures that are unknown to science – which means we have no specimens, either living or dead. There are no articulated skeletons, or even just skulls, in museums. Sometimes cryptozoology deals with creatures that are known to have lived once but are believed (with good reason) to be extinct.
What really keeps cryptozoology on the fringe, however, are their methods. Proponents of bigfoot or Nessie offer consistently ambiguous evidence. Often we get nothing more than anecdotes – some guy’s second or third hand testimony about what they saw. The typical photo or video is usually just at the edge of detection, so that we can see a provocative suggestion of the alleged creature, but not enough details to make a positive ID. Is that bigfoot or a person in a costume? Pictures and videos seem almost designed to not offer a definitive answer. Sometimes the image is just visual noise, which some humorously call “blobsquatch” (at least in reference to bigfoot). Such images are not evidence – they are little more than pareidolia and wishful thinking.
Now let’s take a look at these current images: video of a large furry mammal slowly strolling across a windy river (I guess it could be a lake). We have no reference for objective scale, so there is a wide range of sizes it could be. The image is out of focus, too distant to make out detail, and the environment appears misty. In other words – it’s perfect for a horror movie when you don’t want the audience to get a clear look at the monster. You want the audience to fill in the details with their imagination, and so does the promoter of this film. When it is suggested to you that the video is of a mammoth, then that is how your brain constructs the image.
I showed the video to my 12 year-old daughter, without any explanation, and just asked her what she was looking at. Without hesitation or doubt she said it was a bear. That, in my opinion, is the likely answer. The animal can be within the size range of a large bear. Bears are known to walk across lakes and rivers hunting for fish. What might be interpreted as a trunk can easily be a fish in the bear’s mouth. If you look at the video thinking that it is a video of a bear with a fish in its mouth, then that is what you see.
There is nothing in the video to make one suspect that it is a woolly mammoth, or that can rule out a bear eating a fish. Between the two possibilities, Occam’s razor strongly favors the bear – because then we don’t have to introduce the new element of a surviving population of mammoths.
35 Responses to “A Living Mammoth?”
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In the picture, which has obviously been chosen to make the creature look as much like a mammoth as possible, it looks a bit elephant-like as it appears to have a trunk. The only problem being that the trunk is too thin.
When you watch the video it looks a lot less like an elephant and a lot more like a very woolly bear (it gets cold in Siberia, you know!) with a long stick in it’s mouth!
Another suggestive thing is the length of the video clip. The original video is undouobtably much longer, but we are only shown the very short bit where the animal looks most like what the presenter wants us to believe. I expect that the full video is far more revealing. Also, we need first hand testimony. What did the person who took the video day it was? We are not told.
Exactly – that is also a typical feature of suggestive or hoaxed videos. We are given just one choice piece. Let’s see the whole raw video.
Great summary of the situation again, Steve. Waiting for a similar take-down of the Icelandic Nessie.
My discontent against tabloid journalists has been steadily growing now for a while, to a point where I think that they are one of the main purveyors of woo and uncritical thinking – and reason seems to have little if no correlation with sales figures, and that seems to be what matters.
(Un)fortunately we don’t have a large creationist, homeopathic, or anti-vax movement where I live.
Why is it, that the quick-fix and “difficult subject boiled down to a slogan with a pun” is considered better than actually taking the time to read up on a subject and getting your own informed opinion. Is western civilization doomed by the ever hastening pace to get immediate gratification, and losing the ability to think?
Is there anything that could/should be done in a co-ordinated fashion to try and get the tabloids to stop spewing out nonsense? There’s plenty of headline material in the real world. Unfortunately, I’m guessing – no.
Mammoths had large tusks. This image has none.
Elephants are social animals with females in herds along with young. A solitary mammoth would likely be male. In Asian elephants it is males that have the largest tusks.
Geez why cant these paranormal researcher’s get a decent video camera. My 10 year old mobile phone takes better footage. Yet another barely recognisable piece of footage from the world of cryptozoology.
From an extremely amateur level knowledge of photography,a few points to consider:
The farther away something is, the easier it is to get in focus, as it approaches the effective focal distance of infinity.
The narrower the aperture (numerically higher f stop), the easier it is to get the subject in focus. Outdoors photography, even in overcast conditions, requires a fairly narrow aperture.
Taking photos/ video of a subject outdoors in daylight (even in overcast conditions) at a distance and not having the subject in relatively clear focus, is a tiny bit suspect, but still plausible.
The editing is very suspect. It’s fairly obvious that what is in the video is not the totality of what was filmed. In order to take any such video remotely seriously, one must have the full, uncut/uncensored original footage, even if it means having to sit through 45+ minutes of two people putting up a tent (or humping) in the wilderness to get to the subject of interest.
Once the video gets to the second, zoomed half, it looks to me like a bear carrying a large fish in its mouth. It certainly doesn’t look much like a trunk in the second half. Based on the height of the waves and whitecaps, the subject doesn’t look mammoth sized to me.
If it is a mammoth, it’s a tusk-less one. I thought all adult mammoths were supposed to have tusks. Obviously they have evolved to lose the tusks in modern times.
Form a perspective of photographic analysis, even with the limited footage, experts might be able to make some conclusions. A good estimate of size might be possible based on the behavior of the water (motion and heights of the waves/ whitecaps, etc). A zoologist might be able to analyze the basic structure of the creature to determine if it is consistent with elephant, mammoth, bear, etc. The article, of course, makes no mention of seeking expert analysis of any kind; I’m not surprised.
Is it just me, or does the first half of the video also seem to be slowed down (to about two-thirds or three-quarters speed)? If so, it seems deliberate to give the blob a more lumbering sort of gait.
cjablonski,
Expert analysis of the behavior of the water should be able to determine that, especially if the first half were slowed down relative to the second half.
Dr. Novella,
Your analysis of the video is all wrong. There’s no way that could possibly be a lake!
I don’t think that any expert would think it worth his while to debunk this hoax.
BillyJoe7,
Perhaps not, but it could be a nice exercise in debunking and public communication, maybe for a relatively new/ low profile expert trying try establish themselves in the public arena.
Sometimes the process of debunking is at least as valuable as the debunking itself.
What makes something worth debunking is often not the quality of material, but it’s popularity and how widely disseminated it is. This is now on the main page of Yahoo.
Silence can often speak volumes to some people who might otherwise listen to debunking.
“I don’t think that any expert would think it worth his while to debunk this hoax.”
Because experts don’t deign to educate the ignorant?
Just from searching Wikipedia, there are at least two subspecies of brown bears in Siberia, one being the Kamchatka brown bear, which lives near water in the Kamchatka peninsula and nearby islands, and preys on fish like the Salmon Trout and Humpback Salmon all year round.
Coupled with the observations that this clip seems to be edited, this doesn’t even come close to meeting the burden of proof.
Karl Withakay
“it could be a nice exercise in debunking and public communication, maybe for a relatively new/ low profile expert trying try establish themselves in the public arena.”
Fair enough.
“What makes something worth debunking is often not the quality of material, but it’s popularity and how widely disseminated it is. This is now on the main page of Yahoo.”
I would agree with that as well.
I hadn’t realised, and I am surprised, that it has achieved some popularity.
I don’t think it would take an expert to debunk this hoax though. That was my point.
Enhance.
The photo caption ‘Shock footage … “woolly mammoth’ crossing river” should perhaps be:
“Shock footage … ‘blurry blob of pixels’ crossing river”
Steve, I tried your experiment and showed the video to my 6 year old daughter. At first she said ‘it’s a baby mammoth’, though that was when the word mammoth was overlaid on the video. Then the picture cut to the close-up, straight away she said ‘oh no it isn’t, it’s a bear with a fish in it’s mouth’
First time i saw it, i just assumed it was an elephant. It didn’t look particularly big, no tusks and this looks like any old river. But you’re right, it’s so easy to see it as a bear.
Noticeably the “trunk” is barely attached to the animal at the top when it swings.
BillyJoe7: “I don’t think that any expert would think it worth his while to debunk this hoax.”
I tend to agree.
It might also be counterprodutive. Attaching the name of a high profile naturalist to this story, even to debunk it, could give it undue prominance.
thequiet1 – thanks for sharing. I was worried about the words on the video also, but my daughter didn’t notice them, probably because she was focusing on the animal. I guess you could crop it or blur out the words – but that’s work.
May I offer another theory?
I looked at the video before I read any of the comments here, and I noticed that only the forelegs seemed to be walking. From the shoulders backward it appeared the rest of the animal was just floating along behind.
I will look again in a moment and try to see the bear, but my guess was a hoax, a man wearing a mammoth suit, his legs making up the forelegs of the animal, and the rest of the mammoth literally floating behind him, a very light framework mounted on some sort of floats.
If so, I want to see the blooper reel, with the papier mache pachyderm falling over in the stream, front legs thrashing in the air as it goes over. Should earn the hoaxters some real money on the Funniest Home Videos!
Noni
But I bet you all missed the gorilla that walked past the ‘mammoth’ half way through the video.
On an iPhone screen, the freeze at the end of the video shows the “trunk” as a shiny silver color (one might call it piscean), in contrast to ursine brown of the body.
tmac57,
I bet you missed the fact that the water isn’t really moving. The optical illusion of water motion goes away if you focus on one spot and don’t move your eyes.
If you read the story, it says that “its hair matches samples recovered from mammoth remains regularly dug up from the permafrost in frozen Russia.” I would buy it if they had actual hair samples from the thing, but likely they are just talking about the grainy, unfocussed video hair.
Listen, if I was this guy and I saw a real woolly mammoth walking across a river, I would get super excited and follow the thing as far as I could. Forget the stupid survey he was paid to work on. This discovery could have made him extremely famous (and maybe rich) if it turned out to be legitimate.
Woolly mammoths probably had gigantic poo and pooed a lot (as do elephants), since they only eat high fiber foods – like trees – and it would be easy to follow the trail of a creature like this if it was travelling through the forest or along the beach to get a sample. Think of how giant their foot prints would be! You’d think that some sort of sample of hair or poo would be fairly easy to find from a creature that big trundling through the forest. That video was allegedly taken in SiberiaThat video was allegedly taken in Siberia in the summer. If so, that mammoth would be dropping hair like it was going out of style (i.e. molting).
Also, woolly mammoths probably lived in tundra and minimally forested area, not thickly forested areas like the one pictured. Think of trying to get around in a forest with a giant set of tusks!
That’s my 60 cents. I’m just saying.
Karl- Ok you got me! But on the 2nd and 3rd run through,I did spot what looks like a kayak in the far background.
Kawarthajon,
“Listen, if I was this guy and I saw a real woolly mammoth walking across a river, I would get super excited and follow the thing as far as I could. Forget the stupid survey he was paid to work on. This discovery could have made him extremely famous (and maybe rich) if it turned out to be legitimate. ”
What you are saying is that you think this is a hoax.
I thought that was a given.
At the very least he would have focussed the camera and kept it rolling till the bear got his fish out of the water.
…wait…what?…he did?
Optical illusions, don’t ya love them!
When I watched it, I was curious, and thought “wow”, but then some doubt crept into my mind. The first thing I noticed was the “thin” trunk and wondered why it was so. I’ll admit the “bear with something in it’s mouth” didn’t even occur to me, but once I noticed the comments here about a bear, it all fell into place.
I’m not categorically saying that’s what it is, I’d love it to be a mammoth as much as anyone…but it is far more likely that a bear with something in it’s mouth (or, possibly, added later digitally) is a more reasonable explanation.
As it happens, this video is totally faked. The original videographer has been identified as well as the original footage (with no mammoth, or any animal in that shot). The original videographer has nothing to do with the fake – someone took and altered his footage. http://www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/2159-woolly-mammoth-video-hoax.html
To add to what kikyo posted,I discovered this video by Lou Petho,who claims to have filmed the background footage for what he considers the faked mammoth video.He is not happy,and is wanting to possibly pursue legal action against the perpetrator of the hoax:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ijg5F-5sdI&list=UUQVubtX1QR6-dbZh75pxYPQ&index=1&feature=plcp
The Reality Check podcast just covered this video and they had they best comment I’ve heard so far. “Mammoth claims require mammoth evidence.”