Teenage mammoth found in Siberia, but DNA is damaged [View all]

[JRLeft]

MOSCOW — A teenage mammoth that once roamed the Siberian tundra in search of fodder and females might have been killed by an Ice Age man on a summer day tens of thousands of years ago, a Russian scientist said Friday.

Professor Alexei Tikhonov of the Zoology Institute in St. Petersburg announced the discovery of the mammoth, which was excavated from the Siberian permafrost in late September near the Sopochnaya Karga cape, 3,500 kilometers (2,200 miles) northeast of Moscow.

The 16-year-old mammoth has been named Jenya, after the 11-year-old Russian boy who found the animal's limbs sticking out of the frozen mud. The mammoth was 2 meters (6 feet 6 inches) tall and weighed 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds).

"He was pretty small for his age," Tikhonov told The Associated Press.

What killed Jenya was not his size but a missing left tusk that made him unfit for fights with other mammoths or human hunters who were settling the Siberian marshes and swamps 20,000 to 30,000 years ago, Tikhonov said.