Yet another frozen baby mammoth

Rubecula wrote: »

There have been a few bog bodies found, so why not a Neanderthal?

A few things at a guess. First you're gonna have to find a bog that's been stable for at least 30,000 years, or a once bog where the acid levels remained high enough over that time to preserve the soft tissue. Not that much a stretch as the earliest wooden spears and indeed earliest man made wooden objects were found in an "ex bog" brown coal mining area in Germany. 300,000 years old.

Bones were also found but no flesh sadly. Indeed the acid level required to preserve soft tissues melts away the bone so it needs very specific criteria.

Second the bog bodies are sacrificial victims. Specifically placed in deep pools of bog water and pinned or weighed down. It would require a neandertal to be completely alone and fall in and drown and be somehow kept underwater away from scavengers.

Then there are the numbers involved. They were the apex predator and apex predators are nearly always small in number in the ecosystem. Hence yu find lots of hadrosaurs but precious few T Rex in the record. Ditto for those guys. There would have been vast herds of mammoths roaming the landscape so a massively higher chance of one being found.

Then the environment the mammoths moved in. Yes Neandertals were cold adapted, but not as cold adapted as mammoths and were at their most northerly tundra forest peoples, not Eskimos on the ice kinda thing.

One might find an Otzi the iceman type though. A neandertal driven from the group who sought escape over an alpine type pass who died of exposure/earlier injury.

I have no idea but if it ever happened it would be of interest.

If one is found you'll see a subsequent article in the papers reporting how a Dublin man was found to have died from fapping exhaustion...