How did millions of mammoth fossils form?
Q: ‘It has been guesstimated that there are the remains of
some six million woolly mammoths in the Arctic Circle alone. My neighbour states
that it would be impossible for such a number to have multiplied in the approx.
1700 years from Creation to the Flood.’ — J.E.
A: First, six million mammoths is hugely exaggerated. There are
fewer than 50 known woolly mammoth carcasses, only about a half-dozen of which were
complete. An estimated 50,000 tusks have been found, although there may have been
a million mammoths living at one time.
Second, modern creationists think that the mammoths were not fossilized by the Flood.
Rather, they were fossilized about 700 years later by catastrophes towards the end
of the Ice Age, which was an aftermath of the Flood. This is shown by the fossil
locations — always in deposits near the surface throughout the mid and high
latitudes, mostly in river valleys, occasionally in ice wedges.1
Third, the large numbers are a problem for the sceptic only because he has not performed
the simple calculations required. Consider that the African elephant reaches breeding
age at about 14, and its gestation period averages 670 days, while the Indian elephant
matures even earlier and has a shorter gestation time.2 Thus it would
not be unrealistic to assume that a single mammoth pair could have four offspring
by the age of 25. So it is actually generous to the sceptic to assume that the population
could double four times per century (even if the parents in each generation died
soon after their offspring were weaned). The mammoths would probably have multiplied
quite quickly after the single mammoth pair3 disembarked from the Ark,
since there was less competition around. It takes only 22 population doublings to
exceed eight million, and this number could be reached in only 550 years.
References
- This is explained in the children’s book
Life in the Great Ice Age by Michael and Beverly Oard, and Michael’s more
technical book An Ice Age Caused by the
Genesis Flood. Also, Creation 19(1):42–43, 1996,
has an interview with Oard.
- ‘Elephant’, Encyclopædia Britannica, 4:441–442, 15th Ed.
1992.
- This assumes that representatives of every genus of land vertebrate were on board
the Ark — see Woodmorappe, J., Noah’s Ark: a Feasibility Study, Institute
for Creation Research, El Cajon, CA, USA, 1996. But it’s likely that mammoths,
mastodons, stegodons and modern elephants descended from a created elephantine kind.
(Available in
Finnish)
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