20 Ancient Finds In Canada's Ice That Don't Make Sense

On the twenty-first of June 2022, a miner at Eureka Creek in the Klondike stopped his machine with a woolly mammoth calf in the bucket — skin, hair, trunk and toenails intact, about a month old when she died. Six weeks earlier a water cannon at Last Chance Creek had washed a frozen wolf pup out of a wall, fifty-seven thousand years old and raised on fish. And out of a Yukon ice patch has come a throwing dart as old as the ice that held it. What's beneath YOUR town? Personalized 15-page report — the rock, the name, the vanished places, your town's oldest map → https://hiddenprovinces.com Twenty things coming out of Canada's alpine ice and permafrost, counted down, each with a laboratory date and an argument still open. Eight thousand years of frozen caribou dung above Kusawa Lake and the herds that vanished from it. A nine-thousand-year-old dart from the Aishihik patches. Two knots in a strip of Jasper leather with three published ages and no published measurement. Sinew still wrapped around a stone point in the Mackenzie Mountains. A bow of coastal maple and the abrupt switch from dart to arrow. A seven-hundred-year-old virus rebuilt in a laboratory. A stitched hide boot from Mount Edziza. Ice-age seeds from ground squirrel nests at Quartz Creek. A blond-maned horse, half a caribou, the mammoth calf Nun cho ga and the wolf pup Zhùr from the Klondike. Ghost ranges in Klondike sediment DNA. The seven-hundred-thousand-year-old horse genome from Thistle Creek. A beaver dam and a camel on Ellesmere Island. The mummified forest of Axel Heiberg. Dead moss on Baffin Island older than forty thousand years. And Kwäday Dän Ts'ìnchį, the man from the Samuel Glacier, named, studied and returned by Champagne and Aishihik First Nations. Yukon, Northwest Territories, British Columbia, Alberta, Nunavut. Figures come from the Yukon Archaeology Programme and the Government of Yukon, the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre, the Archaeological Survey of Alberta and Parks Canada, the Royal British Columbia Museum, the Canadian Museum of Nature, the Canadian Conservation Institute, and papers in Arctic, Nature, Nature Communications, Current Biology, PNAS, Molecular Ecology, American Antiquity, the Journal of Field Archaeology and Geophysical Research Letters. Where two laboratories disagree, both figures are given on air. Where a number is a ceiling rather than a measurement, the narration says so. Subscribe to The Hidden Provinces — beneath the map.