Instead, it was a cold, windswept steppe-tundra: grassland interrupted by wetlands and sheltered valleys, swept by winds off the ice sheets to the north and west, populated by an animal community that has since been almost entirely lost.

The mammoth was the defining animal of this landscape.

Woolly mammoths — Mammuthus primigenius — were large, cold-adapted relatives of modern elephants, covered in dense fur and underlain by thick layers of fat, equipped with curved tusks that were used for pushing away snow to reach vegetation underneath.

They were not the same as the Indian or African elephants of today; they were specifically adapted to the cold steppe environment, and they thrived in conditions that would have been lethal to their warm-adapted relatives.

For the people of Mal’ta, the mammoth was not simply an animal.