Whitehorse Star

Friday, April 23, 1954

Yukon cave may hold data of the past

FAIRBANKS, Alaska - A rich record of prehistoric life in Arctic North America may be uncovered in a remote cavern in the Yukon this summer.

The huge cave, something of a rarity in the Arctic Northwest, was found last year by Prof. Otto W.Geist of the University of Alaska. He hopes to find in it the remains of Alaskan and

Yukon residents of as 48,000 B.C. These prehistoric occupants of the far north included the mastadon, the huge giant beaver, the Arctotherium (cave bear) and the monstrous Fairbanks lion.

Geist even voices a wistful hope that he may find the remains of a man who lived among the ancient wild animals when he goes back this summer. so far the oldest alaskan to leave his bones where they could be found was a mere 2,000-year-old modern man.

Geist himself discovered these bones, but he's sure the Arctic attracted prehistoric man. To him, his cave seems the best place to look for more-ancient human traces.

The professor found his cave after investigating rumors of its existence. He was led to the mouth of the cavern by a 70-year-old Indian, John Nukon, who helped kill two grizzly bears inside the cavern in 1900.

The cave is in the headwaters country of the Porcupine River, about 100 miles north of the village of Old Crow in the Yukon. Geist says the cave has three chambers extending 600 feet into a mountain.

Geist is no newcomer to the Porcupine River country. He worked his way p the Old Crow River last year, finding prehistoric traces all the way.

"Mammoth material is strewn all over the area,” he says. "Every bar on the river furnished bones.”

When old Nukon led the scientist to the cave last summer, Geist found a thick layer of ice covering the cavern floor. Ice stalagmites reach as high as six feet toward the ceiling.

The professor could see saplings resting on the cave floor beneath the clear ice, and Nukon identified them as sticks used by his hunting party to retrieve their grizzlies from the cave.

Geist reasons that an earthquake since 1900 opened air passages in the cave ceiling, letting water drip through to freeze into ice inside the cavern. The ice is so crystal clear he could read is watch numerals' through a three foot thickness.

The explorer figures there's a fourth cavern extending back into the mountain, its entrance blocked by a large stone shaken down by the same earthquake that admitted the ice.

"I took along a shovel on my trip,” he says. "I should have had a bulldozer.”

Geist already has some clues as to what bones he might find in the depths of his case. He has the skull of the cave bear, a tremendous animal twice as large as the Alaskan brown bear or Kodiak bear which is today's largest carnivorous animal.

Geist and Dr. Olaus J. Muries, president of the Wilderness Society, have identified the tooth of a giant beaver. The ancient beaver as large as today's black bear, built dams which Geist says would rival the engineering works of modern man.

The Fairbanks lion, larger than his modern African cousin, is known to have occupied the Yukon and Alaska in prehistoric times along with the sabre-toothed tiger.

Recent excavations south of Cairo, Egypt, unearthed a wooden coffin at least 3,800 years old entombed in a pyramid said to be 6,000 years old.