THE AGE OF MAMMOTH FAUNA ON THE LOWER OB

Abstract

The results of absolute dating of mineral organic remains on Ob along the Polar Circle are presented. The most interesting data in the range 25-15.5 thousand years for the first time demonstrate that in the period of so-called 'the last glacial maximum' sub-arctic Zaural'e was not a glacial desert but represented a pasture land for the typical Upper-Paleolithic community of big animals including not only mammoths, wooly rhinoceros, ox, northern deer but also horses. Such fauna together with loess-like appearance of the rocks of the same age corresponds to landscapes of dry, poor-snow, windy but fairly inhabited frozen steppe in the second half of Late Pleistocene. The reported results in combination with the previous data imply that such landscapes stretched over all Siberian Arctic.