JOURNAL CLUB: Holocene dwarf mammoths from Wrangel Island in the Siberian Arctic
Maxine Clarke
Monday, 17 March 2008 09:24 UTC
Holocene dwarf mammoths from Wrangel Island in the Siberian Arctic
S. L. Vartanyan, V. E. Garutt† & A. V. Sher‡
Nature 362, 337 – 340 (25 March 1993); doi:10.1038/362337a0
Wrangel Island State Reserve, 686870 Ushakovskoye, Magadan Region, Russia
†Zoological Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, 1 Universitetskaya naberezhnaya, 199034 St Petersburg, Russia
‡Severtsov Institute of Evolutionary Animal Morphology and Ecology, Russian Academy of Sciences, 33 Leninskiy Prospect, 117071 Moscow, Russia
THE cause of extinction of the woolly mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius (Blumenbach), is still debated. A major environmental change at the Pleistocene–Holocene boundary, hunting by early man, or both together are among the main explanations that have been suggested. But hardly anyone has doubted that mammoths had become extinct everywhere by around 9,500 years before present (BP). We report here new discoveries on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean that force this view to be revised. Along with normal-sized mammoth fossils dating to the end of the Pleistocene, numerous teeth of dwarf mammoth dated 7,000–4,000 yr BP have been found there. The island is thought to have become separated from the mainland by 12,000 yr BP. Survival of a mammoth population may be explained by local topography and climatic features, which permitted relictual preservation of communities of steppe plants. We interpret the dwarfing of the Wrangel mammoths as a result of the insularity effect, combined with a response to the general trend towards unfavourable environment in the Holocene.
A PDF of the entire paper can be downloaded here (as I cannot work out how to upload a PDF into Nature Network).
Updated 17 March 2008 10:52 UTC
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Replies
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“Holocene dwarf mammoths from Wrangel Island”
Sounds like a bad 50s horror movie.I see what Henry means about the writing – the style is simple and direct, and tells the story clearly.
I would comment more, but the Neogene Giant Feline from Melbourne, Australia is demanding attention. And no, I’m not going to measure its teeth.
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It must be a well-written paper if I can understand it without great dificulty, which I do. This is even more surprising (or maybe not) because the authors don’t speak English as their first language. But I have two questions: Could the title be more informative rather than descriptive? For example:
Dwarfed Mammoth survived until the Holocene in the Siberian Arctic
And what does the following mean?
Although oppressed and dwarfed, woolly mammoth could exist on Wrangel Island until at least 3,700 years ago.
Henry briefly talked about the “oppresed” part in the original blog entry. Does this relate to the climate and vegetation, or is this a little joke betwen the lines?
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A couple of further thoughts (the Beast is curled up with some translated Welsh literature, so I’m free to type).
Firstly, the authors do thank a colleague for help with the English. I’m curious to know what the manuscript was like when he received it. I do quite a bit of language checking, mainly from Finnish speakers. Finglish can be a hard language to read, because the grammars are so different. I don’t know Russian, and it could be that Russian English is simpler grammatically. Are there any Russian speakers who could comment?
My other thought is that this paper is less technical than many. Imagine a similar paper in cell biology, or some weird area of physics. There can be a necessity to include so many technical details that the message gets lost. Papers about the gene Wan2 and its effect on the release of calcium can sometimes have titles that are impossible to understand.
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The mammoth paper is the sort of paper that I do want to read in such general journals as Nature and Science. I don’t usually make it very far with the physics papers, but sometimes with other disciplines (math, astronomy) depending on my interest and will to persevere. Language helps a lot with that resolve.
I also help translate a lot of French papers. (The authors often think it’s just a re-read, but a well-placed comma can change meaning entirely.) It’s a lesson in humility when the authors get the paper back with a comment to the effect that they should get a native English speaker to re-read it. Double-blind reviewing could help a little to reduce the frequency of this sort of comment. After all, it’s still pretty clear with the quote that Bob cited, that our Russian mammoth authors are not native speakers. They still get their message across effectively.
I’m going to post another paper but it’s from Science; I hope no one takes exception here to my transgression.
(yes, I know multisyllabic words ending in -tion are anathema, but not among friends?)
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Heather,
we have not set up any format rules for this Journal Club. I would suggest the following informal rules for the right paper to present in this Journal Club:
- A well-written science paper in English language
- the full text of this paper is accessible with reasonable effort
This is definitely not intended as a Journal Club only for Nature papers. And I guess we are still discussing whether we should also include examples of poorly written papers. I personally would not include those. As you can see from the first few examples, we are also fairly liberal on when the paper was published, or what the paper is about.
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