| |
Journey to Beringia
June 7, 2003
Audio Files:
Real Audio Files: Listen in real time
or download
it here.
[Available Saturday 2 hours after broadcast].
Journey
to Beringia
Listen to part one or part two
of this show in mp3 format.
Or listen to part one and part
two in ogg format.
(what's ogg?)
A
model mammoth in Whitehorse Yukon |
Click here to
see the Road to Beringia Photo Album
Host Bob McDonald and Producer Jim Lebans recently
attended the Third International Mammoth Conference in Dawson
City, Yukon.
The journey started in Whitehorse, where they boarded a school
bus and headed north. Their tourguide was Dr. Charles Schweger,
from the department of Anthropology at the University of Alberta.
Dr. Schweger explained that a large part of the northwest corner
of the Yukon and across Alaska was ice-free during the last
ice age and supported a whole range of animals, including mammoths.
Once in Dawson, Dr. John Storer a palaeontologist with
the Yukon government, and one of the organisers of the conference
opened the conference, and introduced Bob to the questions the
participants were going to address over the next few days.
Bob also joined Dr. Duane Froese, a geologist from the
University of Alberta, Grant Zazula, a paleobotanist
and graduate student from Simon Fraser University, and Beth
Shapiro from Oxford University.
Dr. Froese explained how to find fossils in the permafrost.
Grant Zazula is studying the remains of plants found in the
permafrost. He's using this to understand the vegetation of
the Pleistocene period (1.8 million to 11,000 years ago).
Beth Shapiro is collecting DNA from the fossil bones of bison.
Working with Beth Shapiro is Dr. Allan Cooper from the
Henry Wellcome Biomolecules Centre in the Department of Zoology
at Oxford University. He's recently developed a method to detect
ancient DNA from permafrost samples.
One of the big questions about mammoths is why they went extinct.
Dr. Gary Haynes is the chair of the Anthropology Department
at the University of Nevada, Reno. He thinks human hunting in
the North may have led to the mammoth's extinction. Dr. Ross
McPhee, Curator of Mammals at the American Museum of Natural
History in New York City disagrees. He thinks it could be disease
brought by humans that killed the mammoths.
Back at the conference, Dr. Dan Fisher, from the museum
of palaeontology and the geology department at the University
of Michigan was drilling into a mammoth tusk. He's using this
to understand the health and physiology of mammoths.
Related Links
[last week][next week]
|
|
