Nenets

And then suddenly over the sound of the whistling wind, I heard this faint buzzing and it got louder and louder until eventually in the sort of medium distance out of the whiteness appeared this little black speck and it came, drove right up to us.

And it was two men sitting on a snowmobile and they were of the Nenets group, the Nenets ethnicity who live around the Northern Ural mountains, both sides of the mountains.

And they were just totally calm, at leisure, not hurried.

They didn't have any sense of that rising panic that you feel when you're really, really cold.

Some of the most famous mammoth finds have their own names, their own stories, their own small places in the history of paleontology.

Lyuba, a baby mammoth found in 2007 by a Nenets reindeer herder on the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia, preserved so completely that her eyes were still intact, her trunk still flexible, her stomach still containing traces of her mother's milk.

She was approximately one month old when she died, probably by drowning in mud.

and the permafrost took her and held her for forty one thousand eight hundred years the yuccagea mammoth found in two thousand two with its head and trunk largely intact its tusks still in their sockets its skin dried but recognizable the Berylyok Mammoth Cemetery in northeastern Siberia, where the remains of dozens of mammoths have been found concentrated in a single area, possibly a mass die-off event or a natural accumulation site where carcasses washed together and were preserved en masse.

I was working for that project also and all together over the years we had over 70 different events in the Arctic and beyond.

And what's special about ELU is that it was led by indigenous youth themselves, the youth from across the Arctic, from Sami, Evenki, Nenets, Inuit, and others.

And youth were documenting traditional knowledge of their communities about the food.

They were talking to elders, they shared stories, they prepared traditional foods, and they learned directly from the land.