EVOLUTION, THE MAMMOTH, and THE FLOOD

Adapted from articles by

Captain Bernard Acworth

Used with the kind permission of the Creation Science Movement, 50 Brecon Avenue, Cosham, Portsmouth, England, P06 2AW.

Charles Darwin's theory of biological evolution, first published in 1859, needed the endless time that geologist Sir Charles Lyell provided with his theory of inorganic evolution some thirty years earlier. Lyell had hypothesized that the history of the earth was characterized by infinite gradualness and unbroken continuity. Darwin himself admitted, indeed emphasized, the dependence of his theory upon the validity of Lyell's ideas. But there is strong evidence that the almost universally accepted geological speculations of Lyell and the biological conjectures of Darwin are both false.

Unlikely as it may seem, the mammoth and other ancient animals offer an important clue as to how many of the earth's geological features were formed, and how life from an earlier age came to the buried and fossilized. Evidence against the theories of Lyell and Darwin is provided by those hapless beasts that in their tens of thousands were buried in the frozen wastes of Siberia and Canada. A few of these animals have been found so well preserved that their meat was almost good enough to eat.

The Beresovka Mammoth

In 1901, taxidermist E.W. Pfizenmayer was sent on an expedition by the Academy of Science in St. Petersburg to exhume the body of the now-famous Beresovka Mammoth. He was to bring back the skeleton and flesh of the extinct creature that had been reported to be in a perfect state of preservation.

A hut with two stoves was erected over the buried mammoth to thaw out the carcass while the excavation was in progress. The huge skull projected above the ground and had to be removed from the body to accommodate the warming hut. In the course of excavating the mammoth, every part of the body was carefully removed. The only part missing was the trunk, presumably eaten by local scavengers when the skull first became exposed, prior to the arrival of the expedition. (In 1908, another carcass yielded a trunk that was still frozen and intact. The trunk proved to be identical with those of modern-day elephants.)

The first parts to be unearthed where the feet. The right foot was doubled up, and the left stretched forward, suggesting that the creature had struggled in vain to rise before perishing. Several bones in the legs had been broken. The researchers determined that the mammoth suffocated under the tons of earth that had fallen onto it. Death must have come quickly because the partially chewed food between its back teeth and its tongue was still in good condition. During the exhumation, 32 pounds (14.5 kg) of half-digested food was recovered from the stomach and a 330-pound (150 kg) section of hide was removed from the belly and rump. Underneath, were found the tail, the anus, and the penis - all well preserved. The skeleton and other salvageable body parts were then transported thousands of miles on sleds and trains to their final destination, the St. Petersburg Museum.

Evidence of Catastrophe

The Beresovka Mammoth was the first of a long list of similar discoveries. Since then, many additional finds of ancient frozen animals have been made in Siberia, Alaska and the far north of Canada. All of these point to the conclusion that temperatures in the north must have dropped precipitously sometime in the past, and the cold has persisted ever since.

Even Sir Charles Lyell admitted in his Principles of Geology: “It is certain that from the moment when the carcasses both of the rhinoceros and elephant were buried in Siberia, Lat. 64? and 70? N, the soil must have remained frozen, and the atmosphere as cold as it is today.” He added: “One thing is clear, that the ice or congealed mud in which the bodies of such quadrupeds were enveloped has never once been melted from the day they perished, so as to allow the free percolation of water through the matrix; for had this been the case, the soft parts could not have remained undecomposed.”

In defending uniformitarianism, desperate attempts have been made to account for the well-preserved state in which these frozen beasts have been found. Lyell favoured one suggesting the carcasses were floated north by rivers and became entrapped in the ice. But this seems unlikely since the bodies would have decomposed and suffered scavenging both en route and during the short Siberian summers, when the river ice melts. Moreover, the bodies were found in frozen earth and gravel, not ice.

Another speculation was that the animals migrated with the change in seasons and were caught by the sudden onset of winter. This is absurd, as they would hardly leave ample food supplies in the south for the frugal fare of the Far North. Nor does the hypothesis account for their having become buried in the permanently frozen tundra.

Yet another conjecture was that the creatures had adapted to arctic life and were simply unlucky in having become entrapped in earth softened by the warmth of the brief Arctic summer. But H. Neuville, writing on the extinction of the mammoth in the Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution (1919), notes that with hides no thicker than present-day elephants, mammoths were no more suited to an arctic climate than the big tuskers of today.

Moreover, the hair of the woolly mammoth lacked erector muscles and waterproofing sebaceous glands, two features one would expect to find in a large arctic animal. That the mammoths lived in a temperate climate is supported by the fact that the stomach contents included temperate zone sedges, herbs, grasses, and mosses.

It is not unreasonable to conclude that these mammoths, along with herds of Siberian rhinoceroses, musk oxen, wild horses, and other animals, were living and thriving across a whole continent when the cataclysm of global magnitude engulfed and extinguished them. The catastrophe must have been so colossal as to cause a rapid drop in temperature, transforming a once genial environment into an arctic wasteland.

Darwin's Dilemma

Darwin sought in vain for a plausible explanation of the wholesale extermination of so many creatures on the American continent. “The greater number, if not all, of these extinct quadrupeds,” he wrote, “lived at a period and were contemporaries of the existing sea shells” - among which their remains are often found. He continued:

Since they lived, no very great change in the form of the land can have taken place. What then, has exterminated so many species and whole genera? The mind is at first irresistibly hurried into the belief of some great catastrophe; but thus to destroy animals, both large and small, in Southern Patagonia, in Brazil, on the Cordillera of Peru, in North America, and up the Behring Straits [and throughout Europe and Asia too, he might well have added], we must shake the entire framework of the globe.

An admission that the entire earth may have undergone a sudden and cataclysmic upheaval, like the Flood of Genesis 6 and 7, rending the earth's crust to such an extent that vast amounts of animal life were destroyed and buried would severely undermine the theory of evolution. Darwin preferred to leave the dilemma unresolved.

Earth's Axial Tilt

If the earth's axis were perpendicular to the plane of its orbit around the sun, there would be no seasonal changes in the weather and much less variation in climate and vegetation over the globe than there is today. This seems to have been the way it was long ago when what is now Siberia and northern Canada were covered in luxuriant vegetation. A rapid tilting of the earth's axis - either by some convulsion within the earth that shifted its centre of gravity or by a massive astronomical influence - is the most likely explanation for how the climate of the world could be suddenly transformed from one of an equable nature to one characterized by wide temperature fluctuations outside the tropics and permanent ice in the polar regions.

The changes from such a cataclysm would probably involve reshaping the earth's crust as well. Everyone is familiar with the effects of momentum - the tendency of moving bodies to continue on their original course when the direction of travel is suddenly changed. A sudden change the angle of rotation of the earth would set up enormous stresses and strains near the surface of the planet, resulting in massive crustal movements. Huge tidal waves would sweep over the land, taking with them vast numbers of plants and animals and immense amounts of earth and rock, only to deposit them a short time later in a new location - in some cases, the quick-frozen regions of the globe.

Bones in Caves

Further evidence of a worldwide flood is found in caves and fissures all over the world. There is an indiscriminate mixing of the bones of animals that would not normally congregate together. A remarkable example of this is the bone deposit in a fissure at Soutenay, France, described by M. Gaudry in the bulletin of the French Geographical Society. The remains include wolves, bears, rhinoceroses, horses, elephants, reindeer, hyaenas, mammoths, and other animals. Gaudry asks why so many and such varied creatures ascended a 300 metres (984 ft.) up a mountain with precipitous sides, and whence came the vast body of water necessary to wash them into the crevice and deposit the carbonate of lime that surrounds them. Blinkered by the dogma of uniformitarianism, he proposed that a flood caused by a glacier in the Rhone Valley holding back glacier meltwaters forced all manner of animals to leave the low country and seek refuge on the isolated mountain.

Caves also hold conglomerations of fossilized bones, some of extant species. To allege, as some have, that these were merely the lairs of carnivores with the remains of their victims is foolishness, for several different kinds of predators would hardly occupy a single cave at one time. Moreover, not all the bones were those of classic predation victims. The hippopotamus, for example, is not the quarry of any modern-day predator. We are not even sure the allegedly predacious lions and bears of ancient times were cave dwellers.

Conclusion

This short examination of the deductions to be drawn from the frozen mammoths of the Siberian tundra shows that the earth has been subjected to more than the infinitely slow and uniform natural processes we see today. It has also undergone at least one sudden, devastating cataclysm, like the one recorded in the Bible. Anyone inclined to reject the accounts of the Creation and the Flood found in Genesis should first examine the facts.

NOTES

Although the tilt of the earth's axis is thought by many creationists to be the likely cause of the mammoths having been frozen, there is debate as to whether the catastrophe corresponded to the Flood or to the division of the earth in the days of Peleg.

Mammoths were not adopted to cold climes. Like African elephants, their skins lacked oil secreting glands. Each animal needed to eat some 180 kg (397 lbs.) Of vegetation every day to survive, a tall order in a cold climate. The stomach contents were like those found in mild climes in mid-summer. Prehistoric cave paintings show mammoths together with animals that are typically found in temperate climates.

Experts in the quick-freezing of meat conservatively estimate that the mammoths were subjected to a sudden temperature drop, reaching at least - 100?C (-180?F) within half an hour of their last meal on a summer's day. This conjecture is based on the state of preservation of the meat of these massive carcasses and upon the undecomposed contents of their stomachs, which would have deteriorated within a few hours immersed in digestive juices at body temperature.

* from Siberian Man and Mammoth (1939) by E.W. Pfizenmayer.