Ice Age Mammoth Tusks - Matched Pair

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Exceptional Antiquities | Ethnographic Art

By Artemis Gallery

Oct 11, 2018

Set Reminder 2018-10-11 10:00:00 2018-10-11 10:00:00 America/New_York Bidsquare Bidsquare : Exceptional Antiquities | Ethnographic Art https://www.bidsquare.com/auctions/artemis-gallery/exceptional-antiquities-ethnographic-art-3500
An important one-day auction featuring museum-worthy examples of classical antiquities, ancient and ethnographic art from cultures encompassing the globe. Artemis Gallery info@artemisgallery.com

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• Lot Description
  Central Asia, Russia / Siberia, Pleistocene epoch (Ice Age), ca. 35,000 years ago. An incredible matched pair of mammoth tusks with incredible mahogany coloration streaked with rich beige and dark coffee-colored areas. Each is fully present from root to tip, with a strong, twisting curve, and both are mounted on custom stands that mirror the position they would have had on a living animal. Size: 3.15" W x 41" from tip to tip (8 cm x 104.1 cm); 14" H (35.6 cm) on included custom stand.
  
  While mammoths survived until ca. 5600 years ago on remote Alaskan islands, those animals had begun to shrink in size as the climate warmed from the end of the Ice Age ca. 10,000 years ago. A pair of tusks of this size comes from deep within the Pleistocene, when the northern hemisphere was dominated by massive ice sheets drained by enormous glacial rivers and lakes. Imagine encountering this animal on an Ice Age steppe, towering up to 13 feet at the shoulder and weighing up to 12 tons, with these tusks rising in an upward curve from their jaw. Imagine the strength the animal's neck must have had just to hold up these massive teeth!
  
  Also imagine walking in a modern Arctic or sub-Arctic landscape like Alaska, northern Canada, or Siberia and finding a tusk like this rising from the ground - the name mammoth comes from a Siberian word used to describe the tusks found there by native people, like the Khanty of the Irtysh River basin, and traded to Europe and China. Their occasional finds of massive tusks and even preserved mammoth bodies in the permafrost - often eroding out of the sides of river banks - led to their folkloric belief that mammoths were like huge rodents, dwelling underground, dying when they accidentally surfaced. With the invention of science as a discipline, massive tusks like this one continued to capture imaginations all over the world - for example, Thomas Jefferson, who was fascinated by paleontology, is credited with introducing the use of the word mammoth as an adjective to describe something very large.
  
  Please note that fossilized ivory tusks from any species cannot be shipped to the US States of California, Hawaii, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, and Washington State. As of 2019, they will not be able to be shipped to Illinois.
  
  Provenance: ex-GeoDecor, Tucson, Arizona, USA
  
  All items legal to buy/sell under U.S. Statute covering cultural patrimony Code 2600, CHAPTER 14, and are guaranteed to be as described or your money back.
  
  A Certificate of Authenticity will accompany all winning bids.
  
  We ship worldwide and handle all shipping in-house for your convenience.
  
  #139159

  Condition

  Both are intact. Light wear on surface commensurate with age.
• Shipping Info

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