Glancing into the 50-metre-deep hole the two tusk hunters smiled. Together, they heaved out a caramel-coloured mammoth tusk from the soil where it had been frozen for at least 10,000 years. Their dog, too, seemed to be interested in the find. “Because it’s been locked in the ice for that long it still smelled of the meat, it still smelled of the animal,” says Amos Chapple, who spent three weeks photographing mammoth tusk hunters at work in the Siberian region of Yakutia.

The tusk hunters cleaned their find with dry grass and quickly wrapped it in cling film to keep it moist and preserve valuable weight that would push up its price when it came to selling it. Then the precious cargo, along with two other tusks, went on a winding five hour speedboat journey down a river in northeastern Siberia. The 65kg relic was later sold for $34,000 (£26,800) to a Chinese dealer waiting in the tusk hunters’ village, earning them a total of around $100,000 (£77,000) in just eight days. Everything they left behind – mammoth skulls and bones – was consumed by the elements.

The frozen land of Siberia is rapidly thawing. Parts of it are warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. The permafrost – soil that remains frozen year-round – is protected by a surface layer of dirt and sediment that thaws in summer and refreezes in winter. But in 2018, some parts of this layer did not freeze at all, leaving the permafrost exposed to even warmer temperatures than usual. For decades, residents of this frozen land, where temperatures regularly dip below minus 30 degrees Celsius, would often stumble upon the remnants of woolly mammoths that died out 10,000 years ago. But as the ground thaws, Siberia is revealing its ancient treasure hoard faster than ever. Now, fuelled by Chinese demand for ivory, tusk hunters are racing to retrieve so-called “ice ivory” from the Siberian permafrost.


An estimated 80 per cent of Siberian mammoth tusks end up in mainland China, via Hong Kong, where they are carved and turned into elaborate sculptures and trinkets. Russia exported 72 tonnes of mammoth tusk in 2017 but exports have dropped off as a growing underground trade in tusks appears to be eating into the official trade. While collectors can obtain licences, they increasingly complain of pressure from the authorities who confiscate their finds and demand high tariffs. To avoid losing business, many are sidestepping existing regulations and selling their tusks quickly but for less money to Chinese dealers who come to buy them directly. Some see the legal mammoth trade as a relief valve that gives consumers an alternative to elephant ivory. But is the shadowy trade in the extinct species putting even more pressure on one of the world’s most endangered animals?

Tusk hunters use fire hoses to blast away the mud surrounding mammoth skeletons Amos Chapple / Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty

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Mammoth hunting is an enticing profession for the daring or desperate residents of Yakutia. All of the tusk hunters Chapple encountered in the isolated camp were local to the area, but each one had a different motivation that brought them to search beneath the permafrost. One was a self-made millionaire through the mammoth tusk trade, some had full-time jobs during the rest of the year, and others broke into the business more recently after watching viral videos that made the excavations look like a quick win. Everybody knows the drill: pick a spot and blast away. “A lot of these guys are in quite desperate situations,” says Chapple. Many take out bank loans to finance the petrol needed for the pumps. “If they can just get one of these tusks, it can change their lives.”

Some use powerful firefighter pumps to melt away the ice and bore deep underground. Others burrow labyrinthine caverns under the ground and navigate below the dripping mud with huge chunks of ice hanging over them. “All it takes is a roof collapse and they’re entombed forever,” says Chapple, who photographed the “mammoth hunt” for Radio Free Europe, a US government-funded broadcaster in Eastern Europe. It’s dangerous but lucrative work where a lucky few could strike it rich. For most collectors in this impoverished region, though, an entire season of backbreaking labour in the mud will end up losing them money.


Along this 120km stretch of river, the only movement interrupting the excavations are occasional patrol boats with environmental protection officers accompanied by police looking for hunters who don’t have a licence to sell their finds legally. If word gets out that a boat is approaching, “they throw camouflage netting over the equipment and melt away far into the forest like Chechen guerrillas,” says Chapple.

Although the trade is still not fully regulated, searching for and selling mammoth tusks is completely legal in Russia as long as collectors obtain a licence. Alexei – a licensed dealer who asked to be identified by a pseudonym – has been exporting mammoth tusks for seven years. In the past two years, his business has been struggling as the black market really started taking off. With Russian authorities slowing down the legal trade, his Chinese customers are starting to turn to smugglers for their supply of mammoth ivory instead. “We suffer big losses,” he says. “Almost two tonnes of legally mined material were taken from me for inspection. A year-and-a-half has passed and the tusks are still being examined.”

Confiscating ivory from licensed collectors and dragging out checks for years may be an attempt to better control the trade, says Alexei, but it risks achieving quite the opposite. “It kills the legal market in Yakutia and pushes people to do illegal business.” Due to the nature of the business, it is difficult to estimate how many tusks are exported illegally, but Alexei believes it could be as much as 50 per cent today, compared with 20 per cent in 2016. These underhand deals not only make it impossible for authorities to keep the trade in check, there is one other beneficiary that misses out on the ancient treasures: science.

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Since the 1990s, the Academy of Sciences of the Sakha (Yakutia) Republic (ASSR) has received many rare specimens from licensed ivory collectors that it could not otherwise afford, including carcasses of woolly mammoth, woolly rhino and cave lion cubs. Where collectors might have left the skulls and bones of prehistoric megafauna scattered around excavation sites in the past, they now know their value and hand them over to scientists for free. “We have an agreement with these guys,” says Valerii Plotnikov, a senior researcher at the ASSR. A collector remains the owner and receives a cut of the profits when the specimens are exhibited abroad.


Last year, a Yakutia resident unearthed a severed wolf head estimated to be around 40,000 years old. With a full head of hair, fangs, tongue and even brain tissue largely intact, Plotnikov’s team could use DNA analysis and CT scanners – a tool that uses x-rays to create a 360-degree image of internal organs and tissues – to study this ancient predator and compare the genetic information to that of modern wolves.

As an adviser to the Russian Ministry of Culture, Plotnikov takes photos and measurements of the mammoth tusks the collectors bring into Yakutsk in order to estimate their age, size and weight – and determine their cultural value. This allows collectors and dealers to request a licence to export the tusks from Moscow to China. It’s a months-long process that has now become even more complex. Three months ago airport police in Yakutsk confiscated several tonnes of tusks from a licensed collector and are still holding them. The slow checks end up losing collectors money. As a result, many start selling their goods on the black market, and the long-established trading companies that used to buy tusks in bulk and sell them on to China are now being undercut by illegal traffickers. “If the whole business becomes illegal, scientists will not have a chance to take measurements of these tusks,” says Plotnikov. “It’s terrible, but what can we do?”

A single tusk can sell for tens of thousands of pounds Amos Chapple / Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty

Lucy Vigne is a very different kind of ivory hunter. Determined to combat ivory smuggling and elephant poaching, Vigne has spent years investigating the global ivory trade with her late colleague Esmond Martin. When the pair last visited the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, they primarily came across mammoth ivory in specialty shops. In 2011, the independent researchers counted and photographed 6,541 items in 30 outlets – some of them with posters in the windows advertising their mammoth wares. Because of the brown outer layer, large cracks and stains, the mammoth ivory available for purchase was mostly carved into sculptures and figures, some priced at £7,800, rather than mass produced into jewellery and chopsticks as was the case with elephant tusks.

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Mammoth ivory has steadily gained popularity since the early 2000s but, when China banned the import and sales of elephant ivory in 2017 to solve the poaching crisis, ivory carvers and vendors started switching to the ancient material en masse. “The carvers in China are some of the best in the world and have great expertise in carving all sorts of materials, so they are willingly adapting to it,” says Vigne.

Vigne, who was raised in England and now lives in Kenya, returned to the port city in late 2018 to find the number of mammoth ivory items for sale had soared. Guangzhou is just two hours away from Hong Kong so bringing in mammoth tusks in bulk is simple and profitable. With a wealthier population interested in luxury goods, buyers in Guangzhou – a city famous for both its ivory carving factories and shops – seem to have accepted the elephants’ long-extinct ancestors as an authentic substitute. While Russian “ice ivory” was sold as an exclusive collector’s good in the past, smaller items such as pendants, bangles and beaded bracelets have become affordable substitutes for the mass market. A small pendant, for instance, can sell for as little as 250 yuan (£27) in the market areas for jade stones, jewellery and antiques. Retailers in the new shopping centres and airport gift shops charge several times that price.

When elephant ivory was legally and widely available in mainland China, some vendors struggled to persuade consumers into buying mammoth items and ended up closing their outlets due to low sales. Those specialising in mammoth ivory and catering to a wealthier clientele were already doing better when Vigne and Martin visited in 2011. With lower imports and rising prices, these specialist vendors believed, the limited commodity would eventually become a profitable investment.

For the average buyer, Vigne says, the fact that their ivory trinket started life attached to a woolly mammoth doesn’t make it any less attractive. With an estimated ten million mammoths still buried in Siberia’s permafrost, the ancient animal outnumbers the 350,000 African elephants by far. Chinese consumers will happily buy mammoth ivory as long as it resembles the white ivory they are used to. Traditional ivory carving goes back to the 14th century and, historically, was the preserve of emperors, scholars and the upper-class. Today, ivory is still a status symbol for the new middle class, often cherished for its aesthetic. “Although people aspire to own ‘ivory’, in reality, many would be unable to distinguish between elephant and mammoth ivory or even ivory substitutes,” says a spokesperson from TRAFFIC, a wildlife trade monitoring group working in the region.

But the strong similarities between the two makes telling the difference between legal mammoth ivory and illegal elephant ivory difficult. When mammoth tusks are traded in their entirety, they are relatively easy to identify because, unlike those of elephants, they have a brown, outer peel and tend to be larger and twisted. To identify the origin of a piece of tusk or carved sculpture, dealers and vendors have to resort to a photocopier or scanner and take a photo of the stacked chevron-like pattern visible in a cross-section of ivory. Closest to the root of the tusk, which is essentially an elongated tooth, it’s easy to discern these intersecting lines. If the angle these lines meet at is less than 90 degrees, the tusk belongs to a mammoth. If it is over 90 degrees, it is that of an elephant. It is not a fool-proof system, though, especially if the pieces are small, painted and carved upon.

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“It's easier to mix smaller items of elephant and mammoth ivory. That does happen, either accidentally or because a vendor is not experienced since they used to be sold in the same shops,” says Vigne. When scouring the market areas and shops of southern China before the ban, she would ask to see both mammoth and elephant ivory in shops. “If one is looking at several on a counter, it's very difficult for the shopkeeper to remember which pendant came from where because they can look identical,” says Vigne.

While elephant ivory was banned from mainland China in 2017, it will be available in Hong Kong until 2021. This left a four year window to potentially smuggle ivory purchased legally in Hong Kong into southern China. It is not clear how much mammoth ivory ends up in mainland China every year, but customs data shows that on average 36 tonnes of raw tusks and unworked tusk pieces are brought into Hong Kong every year as there is no import tax. Of that, 29 tonnes of mammoth tusks are re-exported to mainland China.

Recent investigations by TRAFFIC suggest that a few shops in China, Hong Kong and even the US have labelled elephant ivory as “mammoth” or “bone”. Since law enforcement officials are unable to check every single item sold in a store, vendors might sell elephant ivory illegally, under the guise of it being mammoth ivory. The state of New York prohibits the domestic sale of elephant ivory since 2014 and mammoth ivory since 2016 and convicted a Manhattan-based antiques vendor in 2017 of intentionally mislabelling elephant as mammoth ivory during the transition period. Mammoth ivory is also banned in India. There is no comprehensive assessment that demonstrates how widespread the practice is in China and where on the trade route the laundering may be happening, because mammoth comes from Russia and elephant from Africa. “What we've got to remember is that raw [elephant] tusks are being smuggled off the African continent hidden in large shipments by criminal networks,” says Vigne. “They're not laundering elephant ivory. It would look rather odd if tusks came out of Africa and are labelled as mammoth ivory.” Those wanting to crack down on the illegal elephant ivory trade and potential mammoth laundering will have to map out the marketplace first.

The density of animal remains in this region suggest that it was once a swamp or bog that trapped animals Amos Chapple / Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty

Mammoth ivory has been touted as an “ethical” alternative for the continuing illegal ivory trade that is threatening an entire living species with extinction, but at what cost? Earlier this year, economists from Texas A&M University and the University of Calgary investigated how the supply of unearthed mammoth ivory affected the poaching of wild elephants between 2010 and 2012. They estimated that the 80 tonnes of mammoth ivory that were exported from Russia in an average year reduced poaching from 55,000 elephants per year to 34,000.

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Conservationists and campaigners, on the other hand, see the mammoth ivory trade as a way of sustaining a criminal industry and fear it could provide a loophole for intentional mislabelling and laundering. In August, delegates taking part in CITES, the world’s biggest conference on wildlife trade, debated whether woolly mammoths should become the first extinct species to be listed as endangered in an attempt to regulate the trade and clamp down on ivory smuggling. As the trade in mammoth ivory is almost unregulated and undocumented today, the rationale behind the proposal put forward by Israel was to remove any loopholes that could facilitate mislabelling and laundering of illegal elephant ivory. With all the complexities trade regulations entail, would a total ban on mammoth ivory stop the trade altogether?

Douglas MacMillan, a University of Kent professor focusing on the economics of conservation, isn’t convinced. “A mammoth ivory ban would drive prices for elephant ivory higher and therefore increase the incentive to poach them,” he says, adding that demand and prices for elephant ivory have been falling rapidly in China in the last five years – as a result, many ivory carving factories had shut down by the time the ban on elephant ivory came into force in 2017.

And it appears that demand for ivory might be dwindling anyway. In September, a WWF-funded survey of 2,000 people in China found that 73 per cent of respondents would not buy ivory, compared to 57 per cent in 2017 before the domestic ban on elephant ivory went into effect. Respondents cited concerns about the extinction of elephants and the cruelty related to ivory trade. Most consumers are aware that elephant ivory is illegal, which seems to have rubbed off onto mammoth ivory. “Most ordinary people do not understand the difference between a mammoth and an elephant, and since the ban on elephant ivory, they simply are afraid to buy anything,” says Russian dealer Alexei.

Israel ended up withdrawing its motion to regulate the trade in long-extinct woolly mammoths, pending further research into the extent of laundering and mislabelling. But there are still major question marks around what stockpiles exist, where manufacturing and sales takes place and how laundering of elephant ivory could be prevented. With a supply chain stretching out across three continents, if not more, the true scale of the mammoth ivory trade will remain in the dark unless traders and governments are willing to publicly release their export and import figures. Until then, any possible solutions will have to be put on ice.

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