Lyuba, Emissary of the Ice Age

Lyuba is an exceptionally well-preserved, 42,000-year-old woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) calf. She travels the world as a key attraction in natural history museum exhibits devoted to the Ice Age. Her presence tends to generate enthusiastic reviews and media interest. Perched serenely behind glass, Lyuba bridges the wide geological and conceptual gaps between the Pleistocene and the Anthropocene.

She was found by a young Nenet reindeer herder in 2007. This indigenous tribe, which has ancient roots in the Yamal Peninsula of the Arctic Circle, believes that such specimens have escaped from the world of the dead to haunt the living. Lyuba is one in a long line of woolly mammoth specters that first came to light in the Victorian era and now oscillate between environmentalism and entertainment. Her identity as a species of the Pleistocene era remains fixed, but the fact of Lyuba can be framed in multiples ways that serve the interests of both science and spectacle.

Mammoths, Mastodons, and Museums

Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in November 1859. His work built upon that of other gentleman scholars such as Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) and Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859). Yet Darwin’s singular genius was his ability to synthesize separate facets of scientific inquiry into a clear and compelling explanation of evolutionary change across time. The publication of the book galvanized the scientific community and introduced a relatively broad literate public to disruptive ideas that continue to shape not only our scientific but cultural world.

Nineteenth-century debates about evolution and extinction converged with the rise of the modern natural history museum. The American artist and entrepreneur Charles Wilson Peale created what was, in effect, the first public natural history museum in the United States in 1784, upon discovery of the fossils of a mastodon. (The mastodon is an evolutionary cousin of the woolly mammoth that lived approximately thirty million years ago and also went extinct during the Pleistocene era).

Spectacular museum displays of ancient beasts cannily reconciled the need to attract paying audiences with the expectation that these civic institutions should educate the public. The appearance of mammoths and mastodons in these exhibits normalized revolutionary ideas about deep time and cast the story of Earth (and by association, humankind) in a fascinating new light. While these displays were often both edifying and entertaining, they also tacitly suggested that time was not a story of linear progress so much as it was one of chaos, uncertainty, climate swings, and even catastrophes.

The James Watt design for the steam engine—the invention that Paul Crutzen will much later decree is the precipitating event of the Anthropocene—also appeared in 1784, contemporaneous with Peale’s Museum. In hindsight, this is apt. Where mammoths and mastodons stood for deep time in the Victorian era, today specimens like Lyuba are routinely used to signify our era of rapid climate change. 

In this new epoch, the reigning geological narrative foregrounds the damaging influence of mankind’s carbon-based activities on the Earth’s ecosystem. The rapid melting of the permafrost, which is largely attributable to anthropocentric global warming, has had the ironic effect of bringing many specimens like Lyuba to our attention. The Arctic tundra today is a palimpsest of climate change, the layers slowly peeling back to reveal the evidence, as we try and solve this puzzle before it is too late.

Time Breaking Down

Today’s digital and biotechnologies increasingly elide the past, present and future into one malleable algorithmic clay. Lyuba fits right into this jumbling of time, as she can skip from the past to the present, the present to the future, the future to the past, depending on the work any given exhibit is expected to do in a museum context. She is not only an effective emissary for her species and her epoch but is able to bridge time and connect our strange fascination with the Ice Age to our current trepidation in the Carbon Age.

Lyuba also puts an enticing frame around a geological narrative that is extraordinarily complex scientifically, but which needs to be readily understood by a broad public. Alan Mikhail argues that the concept of the Anthropocene encompasses not only capitalism and the climate crisis, but the Enlightenment, industrialization, global citizenship, the nation-state and beyond. He acknowledges that this “is quite a lot of analytical weight for a single concept to bear.” I would add extinction and biodiversity to his list. This is also a lot of weight for one woolly mammoth specimen to carry, but Lyuba does so, remarkably.