Receding Permafrost is a Bone-Hunters' Bounty
CHERSKY, Russia - One day, climate change could cost the earth. For now, it is a nice little earner for Russian hunter Alexander Vatagin.
In Siberia's northernmost reaches, high up in the Arctic Circle, the changing temperature is thawing out the permafrost to reveal the bones of prehistoric animals like mammoths, woolly rhinos and lions that have been buried for thousands of years.
Private collectors and scientific institutes will pay huge sums for the right specimen, and bone-prospectors like Vatagin have turned this region, eight time zones from Moscow, into a paleontological Klondyke.
"Last year someone was paid 800,000 roubles (US$31,000) for a mammoth head with two tusks in great condition," said Vatagin.
A brawny 45-year-old, he has a network of helpers: the fishermen and reindeer-herders of the tiny Yukagir ethnic group, whose numbers have dwindled to about 800 people.
"I must have earned the respect of the Yukagir," he said. "Their shamans convened a council and decided to name me a Yukagir," he added. He is now Yukagir No. 456.
These tribesmen are his 'finders', fanning out across the vast emptiness of the tundra seeking valuable artefacts.
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