The Climate of Siberia in the Mammoth Age

Abstract

A SHORT time ago I was discussing with my friend Mr. Henry Seebohm the various problems connected with the distribution and migration of birds in Siberia, about which he has collected so many facts. One fact which he mentioned to me seemed to have a much wider interest than a merely ornithological one, and to illustrate from an unexpected quarter a conclusion which you have allowed me to urge in your columns, and which forms a notable postulate in my recent work on “The Mammoth and the Flood.” I mean in reference to the climate of Siberia during the Mammoth age. The views I have advanced on this subject are not my own. I have merely followed in the footsteps of almost every recent Continental authority, especially the authorities with the greatest claims to attention—namely, the Russian naturalists who have visited Northern Siberia. They maintain—and I think the position is unassailable—that during the Mammoth period that district which is now a bare tundra, on which neither in summer nor winter could herds of pachyderms find food or shelter, was marked by a temperate climate, and was probably occupied by forests to the very borders of the Arctic Ocean.