Give back our 20,000-year-old woolly mammoth bones

Russia is examining taking legal action to repatriate a woolly mammoth skeletons sold in the United Kingdom at an auction two years ago.

Russia’s prosecutor general Igor Krasnov has taken the unusual case under his ‘personal control’, said his spokesman Andrey Ivanov.

Palaeontologists allege the bones were illegally dug up in Tomsk region.

They believe the remains are likely to be 20,000 years old, not 10,000 as the auctioneers claimed.

The extinct beast’s ‘complete skeleton’ was bought by an anonymous buyer in an ‘evolution sale’ in November 2018 at Summers Place Auctions in Billingshurst, Sussex alongside 22-million-year-old amber and a 200-year-old whale jaw.

The male mammoth died in a ‘natural disaster’ at a site Krasnoyarskaya Kurya close to modern-day Teguldet village on the River Chulym in the Tomsk region of Siberia. 

Tomsk experts insist the mammoth bones have ‘scientific value’ in Russia and were dug from the ground without permission. 

Originally four lots of mammoth bones were offered as a mammoth family for £400,000 but in the event the other three were sold separately for lesser amounts. These three are also wanted back.

Auctioneers said the bones of the £115,000 mammoth belonged to a beast that perished ‘in some kind of natural disaster’ some 10,000 years ago. 

‘Certainly, there was no evidence that the hand of man had had anything to do with the deaths.’

Lawyer Ekaterina Lizunova said 'the bones were extracted illegally' and she  submitted a formal demand to the Russian Prosecutor General's Office to begin moves to trace and return the relic. 

‘We are eager to bring this skeleton back to Russia,’  she said. 

Since the case came to light in Russia, the company responsible for digging the mammoth from the ground - Trias Geo - has claimed it created a false ‘legend’ for the bones.

They were not a complete skeleton but constructed from bones obtained in  different Siberian sites, said its deputy head Pavel Boiko.

‘This was just a pile of bones in ten sacks,'  he claimed. 

The tusks came from a different source 2,800 miles away, he said, claiming the other three mammoths were sold for between £20,000 and £50,000.

‘This material is not of cultural, scientific nor museum value,’ he said. 

Leading mammoth expert Dr Sergey Leshchinsky alleged Boiko is ‘lying’.

Boiko had published a scientific paper in Russia relating to three of the four mammoth skeletons, he said. 

Lizunova said that if Boiko’s account was true then it meant he 'has confessed to fraud' by creating a false account about the bones.

Her clients Tomsk State University believe an export licence was secured under false pretences because it was dug from the ground by Trias Geo which had permission for archeological but not palaeontological digging.

‘This is a sore subject for Russia,’ said Dr Leshchinsky.

‘Since the skeletons were stolen, it is the law enforcement agencies, not palaeontologists, who should now deal with this, and return them.’

Boiko said: ‘No-one caught us there, no-one saw us. 

‘The driver of excavator passed literally 5 or 10 bags of bones. And there was nothing more from there. How can they prove that these are their mammoths?’