The Earth's Shifting Crust by Charles Hapgood - wire of information

THE GREAT EXTINCTIONS 239
perfect condition, were exported for the ivory trade in the
few decades preceding 1899, yet even now there is no end
in sight. According to Digby, about a quarter of all the mammoth
tusks found in Siberia are in good enough condition
for ivory turning (113:177). This means that hundreds of
thousands of individuals, not merely eighty or so, must have
been frozen immediately after death, and remained frozen.
Obviously, it is unreasonable to attempt to account for these
hundreds of thousands of individuals by the assumption of
such rare individual accidents as have been suggested above.
Some powerful general force was certainly at work. Lydekker
gives many hints of the nature of this force in the following
passage:
... In many instances, as is well known, entire carcasses of the
mammoth have been found thus buried, with the hair, skin and flesh
as fresh as in frozen New Zealand sheep in the hold of a steamer.
And sleigh dogs, as well as Yakuts themselves, have often made a
hearty meal on mammoth flesh thousands of years old. In instances
like these it is evident that mammoths must have been buried and
frozen almost immediately after death; but as the majority of the
tusks appear to be met with in an isolated condition, often heaped
one atop another, it would seem that the carcasses were often broken
up by being carried down the rivers before their final entombment.
Even then, however, the burial, or at least the freezing, must have
taken place comparatively quickly as exposure in their ordinary con-
dition would speedily deteriorate the quality of the ivory (280:363).
He continues:
How the mammoths were enabled to exist in a region where their
remains became so speedily frozen, and how such vast quantities of
them became accumulated at certain spots, are questions that do not
at present seem capable of being satisfactorily answered; and their
discussion would accordingly be useless. . . . (280:363).
Lydekker was not alone in feeling the futility of considering
these mysterious facts. For many years, in this field as in
others, there has been a tendency to put away questions that
could not be answered. However, we shall return to his state-
ment. I shall try to show later on how all the details of the
he describes can be made understandable. For
phenomena