World-renowned Siberian writer, Gennady Markovich Prashkevich, whom we met several times in Academgorodok, the huge “science city” upriver from Novosibirsk, told us about his personal relationships with Ivan Antonovich YefTemov, the Russian paleontologist and writer who coined the term taphonomy and developed the theory behind the term.
For us, working on an anthropologically oriented taphonomic project of prehistoric animal remains, it was of special interest to learn about the life, work, and personality of Yefremov, who was a kind of mentor to Prashkevich. Traditional obituary summaries of Yefremov’s life lack many of the details that follow. The senior author of this book could not help but think about strange points of intersection between Yefremov and our back-in-time-traveling odyssey into Ice Age Siberia.
One of these intersections was meeting Prashkevich, a famous Russian writer and poet, whose scientific interests include paleontology and archaeology. His relationship with Yefremov began in the 1950s when he wrote to the renowned paleontologist on behalf of himself, then 16 years old, and some Taiga Village school children interested in fossils. Yefremov replied from Moscow on April 23, 1957, explaining in much detail how fossils and the study of paleontology were related, and encouraged the students to seek out the remains of a small parrot-beaked dinosaur known from a fossil locality 150 km from Taiga (about a two-hour drive). A small expedition was formed and travelled to the fossil locality, but no dinosaurs were found because the locality was inundated by the adjacent Kiya River, then in flood stage. Despite this disappointment, Prashkevich continued his correspondence with Yefremov, and in the course of time visited him in Moscow.
In our dinner conversations with Prashkevich and his geophysicist wife, Dr. Lydia Kiseleva, there emerged undertones of a possible duplicitous side to Yefremov’s life, possibly even serving as an English or Russian government spy. Moreover, there seems to be some mystery surrounding his death.
On this subject, Prashkevich (2002:n. p.) wrote:
“What could be in common between the author of the famous ‘Robinson Crusoe, ’ Daniel Defoe, and the great science fiction writer, Ivan Yefremov?” asked the popular [Russian] newspaper Agrumenty i Fakty.
And its rhetorical response was: “the former created the English intelligence service, and the latter, probably has been its agent... the sudden death of Ivan Yefremov that had happened in an hour after receiving a strange letter from abroad gave some grounds for this version. The letter could have been treated with some special chemicals, inhaling of which could cause death.” This element of intrigue should be weighed against the fact that Yefremov was in poor health at the time. Prashkevich included the above in his book, Novel on Numerous Perfect Things. Prashkevich also wrote a piece in 2000 simply entitled “Ivan Antonovich YefTemov.” In this biographical review, Prashkevich notes that Yefremov was born on April 22, 1908, in the village Vyritsa, near St. Petersburg. He served and engaged in military action with the Red Army from 1919 to 1921. In 1923 he met Professor and Academician P. P. Sushkin, Director of the Reptile Gallery in the Geological Museum (then Leningrad). In 1925, after taking courses in biology, Yefremov became an assistant to Sushkin. His duties included extracting fossils from rock and carrying out fieldwork in search of fossils. He moved up in rank and carried out extensive fieldwork for the rest of his professional career. In 1935 he defended his candidate dissertation and in 1941 defended his doctoral dissertation. He spent several years working on Mongolian fossil reptile deposits, making taphonomic interpretations in the overlap area between biology and geology. His 1935 paper, which spelled out his basic ideas of taphonomy, was entitled “Falling out of transitional forms in the conditions of burial of the oldest quadruped.” In this regard, Prashkevich (2000) wrote:
Taphonomy, as Yefremov called a new branch of science, is the knowledge about regularities of burying organic remains, in other words, the knowledge about those regularities (processes) that promote the transition of organic remains from the biosphere to the lithosphere. The main objective of taphonomy is to work out sufficiently exact concepts, corresponding to reality, a part of the organic world of past geological epoches, that fell out of the geological record, and to define the limits of precision of theoretical constructions in paleontology.
Of special importance to Yefremov were “transitional life forms.” He believed that these forms existed only briefly and in limited numbers, explaining their absence or rarity in the geological record. In addition to the fossils themselves, Yefremov felt that the fossil localities were of equal importance as “windows into the past.” He offered numerous contextual inferences regarding preservation, with the following being necessary: large numbers of living individuals; total collapse of a rich fauna under unfavorable circumstances; occurrence of specific conditions that concentrated skeletal remains; total fossilization; rapid burial; preservation of bone-bearing deposits in the lithosphere; and their subsequent exposure.
Due to heart disease that began with an intense fever in the early 1940s, Yefremov retired in 1957 from professional paleontological work, for which he received the Russian Academy of Sciences Presidium award for his “Taphonomy and the Geological Record,” and the 1952 State Prize. His retirement years were spent writing novels and stories of adventure and science fiction. He died in Moscow on October 5, 1972.
World History
