Now there’s a phrase you don’t hear every day. And it gets weirder fast because “Frozen squirrel poop from Yukon is a treasure trove of woolly mammoth, horse DNA”. And one struggles to imagine squirrels eating woolly mammoths, or indeed the reverse, as both are herbivores. Right? No. In addition to all their other sins, squirrels are “opportunistic omnivores” who will, for instance, eat birds or mice given a chance. Boo. Don’t give them a chance. (Although come to think of it they’re welcome to the mice.) Still, asking us to imagine them swallowing an elephant seems to ask us to swallow a camel. But evidently if they came across a dead one they’d nibble it. Or a horse. Or horse or mammoth poop. Yuck. They’re also opportunistic nesters and in days of very yore they’d line nests in what is now Canada’s Yukon territory with mammoth fur if they could get it. And, France 24 reports of this AFP story, “over time, rising permafrost permanently sealed off some of the burrows in the Yukon, creating a perfectly preserved time capsule.” But the point here, other than to pile up disgusting improbabilities, is that all this excitement depends on what was once grassland now being tundra. Meaning it got, what’s that word? Oh yeah. Colder.
A number of outlets enthused about the story in various ways, and it is cool. Including the Jurassic Park angle that just possibly we’ll get enough of a mammoth gene sequence to bring them back from the grave… or the dung burrow. We support such a project. But they all overlooked the obvious taboo thing: rising permafrost turning a burrow into an icehouse.
Or worse. Canada’s public broadcaster (though nowadays virtually all Canadian media are in the pocket of the state) spins it backwards, citing lead study author Tyler Murchie of the Hakai Institute in Campbell River, BC in this wise:
“Murchie said studying the way ecosystems evolved with climatic changes like this in the past could help scientists figure out what will happen to animals living in the Arctic as the climate changes today. But climate change also means scientists are running out of time to preserve these ancient archives – one site where researchers collected squirrel poop for this study has now thawed, slumped and washed into the river, Murchie said. ‘These sites are thawing so fast.’”
It gets worse. As such things tend to:
“Overall, the study showed that the kinds of plants and animals found on the dry mammoth steppe grasslands in eastern Beringia were relatively stable over 700,000 years, during the Pleistocene epoch – but completely different from plants and animals found in the wetter boreal forest ecosystem of of [sic] the area today. The researchers verified this by looking at the DNA found in a snowshoe hare coprolite from our current Holocene epoch, which included trees such as spruce and alder and none of the big mammals found in the ground squirrel poop.”
Right. Well, the fate of the big mammals seems to be that humans exterminated them, also taboo unless the villains are European which they weren’t. As Wikipedia puts it delicately:
“Scientists are divided over whether hunting or climate change, which led to the shrinkage of its habitat, was the main factor that contributed to the extinction of the woolly mammoth, or whether it was due to a combination of the two.”
But the main point is that the reason “Beringia” was relatively stable is that for most of the Pleistocene it has been glaciated.
Beringia, by the way, is a region extending from the Lena River in Russia (of “Lenin” fame) to the Mackenzie and from 72˚N to the Kamchatka Peninsula. And much of it that is now water was land during the various glaciations which (drum roll please) came and went for reasons unconnected to CO2. And sometimes during the warmer interglacials squirrels dug holes and filled them with revolting gunk that is to say fascinating paleological evidence that then got frozen when it got colder.
As the study admits, while cataloging various revolting behaviours of these bushy-tailed rats including scavenging walrus blubber and “infanticide/cannibalism” and eating rotting whale scraps:
“Arctic ground squirrels (U. parryii) are the extant circumpolar species found within Beringia today (Fig. 2). They live in areas where the active layer is sufficiently thick (~1 metre) as permafrost impedes their burrowing.”
Thus when the permafrost rose they went away, driven off by, ahem, colder conditions.
According to the France 24 version:
“The DNA found deep inside sealed-off burrows is between 3,000 and 700,000 years old, offering a rare window into how life has changed over the millennia.”
Which is noteworthy not just for the 700,000 years, which takes us back to Glacials 7 and 8 with a failed warm period between, but for the 3,000, which means we’re talking in some cases post-glacial Holocene evidence. (The CBC, incidentally, claims that the burrows contained rubbish “that the squirrels collected between 30,000 and 700,000 years ago” but actually does link to the study which confirms that some of it is Holocene as per the France 24 version.) But as you know, though they don’t, the warmest part of the Holocene was not the “Anthropocene” or some such nonsense, but the Holocene Climatic Optimum from approximately 9,500 to 5,500 years ago. Since woolly mammoths only finally perished in their last stronghold on Wrangel Island around 4,000 years ago, they actually outlasted the HCO. Then a squirrel ate them. Sic transit and all that.
Even Wikipedia, whose editors do not love the HCO, have to admit that there was “a thermal maximum around 8000 years BP… followed by a gradual decline, of about 0.1 to 0.3 °C per millennium, until about two centuries ago.” And while they valiantly insist that today it’s warmer than it was then, which is not even true, they admit that in the Northern Hemisphere it’s still cooler today.
All of which means scientists found proof of natural climate variation and warmer conditions in the past than now, and journalists said it meant the exact opposite. As usual.
