Mu Qi: Walk into the ancient elephant of the Yellow River in a primary school textbookJing Hao.
One day, about two million years ago, the sky was cloudless, the sun was scorching the earth, and the artemisia grass seemed to be on fire. In the distance, a few oak trees stood still, and flocks of antelopes and ostriches walked around. A small meandering river flows slowly southeast, and clusters of beautiful flowers bloom on its banks.
A herd of elephants, led by an elderly bull elephant, swooped and stomped from afar. Fatigue and thirst afflict them to the point of exhaustion. As soon as they saw a small river in front of them, they ran happily. The old elephant ran ahead and came to the river first, stretching its trunk to suck in the water. But the river was so low that it couldn't reach it. It thought how nice it would be if it stepped into the water, had a good drink, and then took a bathSo it went one step further!Unexpectedly, its right foot happened to step on an oval stone, the stone sank down, and its raised left foot didn't have time to go **, and it stepped into the mud at the bottom of the river and sank deeply. How can the rotten and soft silt withstand such a heavy old elephant?The old elephant struggled on his side, but the more he struggled, the more he sank down. It looked up and called for help, but the water immediately poured into its mouth. The elephants that followed closely behind all stopped and looked at the old elephants struggling in the mud in horror. They were so frightened that they didn't bother to drink water, and stood on the shore in a daze, unable to ......The old elephant stuck in the mud finally couldn't move anymore. As the days passed, the old elephant was covered by the alluvial sediment of the river. Its corpse was rotting, and its bones and fangs were slowly turning into something like stone. In the spring of 1983, in the fifth-grade classroom of Longmen Primary School in Lingtai County, on the banks of the Daxi River, I was reading this text called "The Elephant of the Yellow River" to the students. There is no doubt that this is a tragic and sad story, and the children are as immersed in the situation described in the text as I am. And then what?Here's what happened: "In two million years, the earth has undergone tremendous changes, the grasslands of the past have risen into plateaus, mountains have risen from the ground, and a new great river has appeared in the place where the old elephant rests, the Yellow River. I don't know how many thousands of years have passed. In the spring of 1973, several farmers in Gansu Province were digging for sand and suddenly found a section of white ivory in the sand. They immediately reported to their superiors. Later excavations were carried out under the command of archaeologists. The fossils are all exposed, and one can clearly see the skeleton of an elephant standing diagonally in the sand with its feet on the gravel. From the way it stands, you can imagine the moment it fell into the water. From the fact that its bones are interconnected, it can be inferred that it has not been moved in place since its death, so it can be preserved so intact. This text is a reproduction of the scene deduced by later people based on the excavated fossils of the Yellow River elephant. This tragic story shook the young hearts of the children at the time, and also touched me, a primary school teacher who was not deeply involved in the world. According to the article, the fossil of this elephant was named "Yellow River Elephant" because it was unearthed by the Yellow River. In fact, the place where the elephant fossils were found was not on the banks of the Yellow River, but on the banks of the Malian River in Heshui County, Qingyang City. At 11 o'clock in the morning on October 4, 2020, I inquired all the way and drove to Muqi Village, Banqiao Town, Heshui County, Qingyang City, and found the place where the fossils of ancient elephants of the Yellow River were found on a platform on the west bank of the Malian River. From the first time I learned that there were Yellow River elephant fossils, from 1983 to 2020, a full 37 years, there seems to be some kind of relationship that links us with the Yellow River elephant. Happily, the fossil of the Yellow River elephant has been excavated in its entirety and has been properly preserved: "The elephant skeleton is four meters high and eight meters long, and all but the tail vertebrae are installed from fossilized bones. At the tip is an elephant's tusk, which is more than three meters long, followed by a skull and jaw, and even the hyoid bone, which is difficult to find. Of the more than 100 phalanges, not even the three or four centimeter-long terminal phalanges were missing. Today, the elephant fossil is on display in the paleontology hall of the Beijing Museum of Natural History. The experts exclaimed: "The skeleton of the ancient Yellow River elephant can be preserved in such a complete way, which is rare in the history of elephant fossil discovery." At this moment, in front of my eyes, on the platform on the west bank of the Malian River where the Yellow River elephant fossil was found, there stands a marble Yellow River elephant stone sculpture made according to the size of the original skeleton, 4 meters high and 8 meters long, and in front of the stone carving base is five big characters written by the famous contemporary calligrapher Yang Xiaoyang: "Yellow River Elephant Fossil". Behind the pedestal is a text describing how the Yellow River elephant fossil was found here. As described in the text, the stone sculpture of the Yellow River is lifelike and "running forward with its head held high." The plateau rises about 20 meters above the riverbed, and the Malian River flows here from the far north, making a graceful arc to the west, turning to the southeast, at least 200 meters from where the Yellow River elephant fossils were found. It was noon, the sun was warm, and the Malian River, which was soaked in loess, flowed quietly into the distance like a red copper full of texture. More than 2 million years have passed, and now, we can't imagine that the moment when the elephant family suffered a disaster on the bank of the Malian River would become a precious piece of the ancient memory of the Loess Plateau. In recent years, in the Gansu Provincial Museum and the Qingyang City Museum, I have seen more than once the replica of this fossil specimen of the Yellow River, and more than once I have heard different docents tell us about the discovery process of the Yellow River ancient elephant fossils. In 2006, Heshui County allocated special funds to build a Yellow River Ancient Elephant Exhibition Hall. This time, in this exhibition hall, I heard the story of the Yellow River elephant again, and finally restored the true story of the Malian River that happened on the bank of the Malian River in Muqi Village, Banqiao Town, Heshui County in the winter of 47 years ago: After the Malian River passes through Qingcheng County, it goes 20 miles south to Banqiao Town. Banqiao Town is the confluence of the Heshui River and the Malian River, and it is also the only place to pass from Pingliang and Qingyang to Ziwuling, Yan'an and Linfen in Shanxi. Starting from Banqiao Town, 4 kilometers south along the west bank of the Malian River is Muqi Village. At the end of 1972, in order to effectively use the water of the Malian River and irrigate thousands of acres of land nearby, Heshui County planned to build the Huokou Hydropower Station, and the site was selected as the Muqi Production Team on the bank of the Malian River in Banqiao Commune. The commander-in-chief of the project was Jiang Dengpan, then director of the Heshui County Grain Bureau, a veteran revolutionary who joined the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningbo guerrillas in 1938. In accordance with the construction requirements of water conservancy experts, Jiang Dengpan, together with the leaders of Banqiao Commune, mobilized the masses and organized construction forces. At that time, engineering was a crowd of tactics, there were no modern excavators and bulldozers, and the most important earth-moving tool was a frame truck. Everyone has a farm tool, digging shoulders and picking, opening mountains and dams, fighting day and night, wind and snow are unhindered, although it is winter, but people's enthusiasm for labor is very high. In the blink of an eye, New Year's Day 1973 passed, and the project was still in full swing. At about two o'clock in the afternoon of January 20, on the construction site on the west slope of the river bank, someone suddenly shouted: "The keel has been dug up!"Jiang Dengpan, who was working with the crowd, rushed over, and what appeared in front of him was a thick bowl like a stone and a bone, very smooth and very hard. Although he didn't know what it was, he felt that it had been dug up in the public land and should be handed over to the state. Jiang Dengpan asked the production team leader who rushed to take care of the scene after hearing the news, and at the same time assigned two militiamen to rush to the county seat 15 kilometers away with a keel and report to the county cultural center. He organized the masses to plant a circle of tree branches on the spot as a sign to protect the scene. In the early morning of the next day, Xu Junchen, a staff member of the Heshui County Cultural Center, first rushed to the construction site, and after on-site inspection, he thought that it was an unknown paleontological fossil. On March 10, Xie Junyi of the Gansu Provincial Museum and Gu Zugang, a teacher of the Department of Geology and Geography of Lanzhou University, rushed to Heshui County and formed a three-person joint survey team with Xu Junchen, and on March 18 and 19, after two days of on-site investigation, it was preliminarily concluded that this was a well-preserved elephant skeleton. After the news was telegraphed to the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, on the evening of April 1, Zhao Jufa, a researcher at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, arrived in Xifeng Town. Subsequently, the excavation team was composed of Zhao Jufa of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xie Junyi of the Gansu Provincial Museum, Han Tianbao and Xu Junchen of the Qingyang Regional Cultural Center. The excavation began on April 5 and ended on May 17, taking 35 days excluding rain. Adopt the method of uncovering the top, take the exposed place of the elephant fossil as the base point, extend 2 meters on each side and 4 meters inward according to the topography of the hillside, and excavate layer by layer from top to bottom. It was a huge and arduous project, and the problems were one after another, starting with the excavation of the elephant's head. The inside of the elephant's brain is a honeycomb-like structure, and if it is dug up, the head may shatter into fragments. They decided to excavate the whole by using the box method, first making a wooden box according to the size of the elephant's head, removing the bottom cover, making grooves around the elephant's head, putting it into the wooden box, and then pouring gypsum into it, and sealing the top cover. Then the wooden box is slowly pushed down, the bottom is turned up, and then the plaster is poured to reinforce, and the bottom cover is sealed, so that the elephant head becomes a whole and is easy to transport. This is followed by weathering. The buried fossils are very loose when they are first unearthed, and they will naturally weathered and spread out if you are not careful, so they are all infiltrated and reinforced with medicinal solutions while drying. Finally, there is the transportation of fossils. According to the requirements of the Institute of Paleospine of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the fossils were to be transported to Beijing for observation and research. After sorting, the bones of various parts of the elephant were dug up and packed into 12 large boxes. To ensure the absolute integrity of the elephant bones, the experts used thick wooden planks to fix the perimeter on the spot, seal it with plaster, and cover it up and down. Although the distance from the excavation site to the road was only 500 meters, transporting the 3,000-kilogram elephant skull from the mountain trail to the road was a major challenge at the time. There is no machinery, only manpower can be used, 19 people pull with ropes, 42 people pull, still can't work. Later, he was dragged for a whole day by a 3-ton training vehicle, and only moved 5 meters. After research, it was decided that it was necessary to rely on large machinery, and in order to facilitate the operation of tractors, hundreds of people were mobilized in the prefecture, and from May 20, a simple road with a width of 3 meters and a length of 500 meters was built in three days. The county tractor station dispatched a Dongfanghong crawler tractor to carry out operations on the spot, and finally pulled the huge elephant skull to the side of the road. Changqing Oilfield dispatched two trucks to be responsible for the shipment, and when loading, a soil groove was excavated, which was the same height as the truck bed, and the truck was driven in, and 12 boxes were pushed one by one with Dongfanghong tractor. It took several days until May 28, when all the fossils were loaded onto the train, and they set off overnight on the same day, and on the 30th, they were loaded from the freight yard of Xi'an West Railway Station and transported to Beijing. After the elephant fossils arrived in Beijing, the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences formed a professional team and invested more than 30 people to repair, restore and mount the elephants. The ancient elephant is 4 meters tall, 8 meters long, and 303 meters. Its size, its early age, and its good preservation are the only ones in the world so far, and it is breathtaking. Although the fossils of ancient elephants were unearthed on the banks of the Malian River, they were named the Yellow River Elephant because the Jinghe River Basin, where the Malian River is located, can be traced back to the Yellow River system. The Yellow River elephant fossil skeleton can be preserved in such a complete way, which is very rare in the history of elephant fossil discovery in the world. It not only provides reliable data for paleontological research, but also provides a rare scientific basis for studying the ecological environment before and after the formation of the Loess Plateau in Longdong. In October 1974, the Yellow River elephant fossil was exhibited for the first time at the Beijing Museum of Natural History, causing a sensation all over the world. Later, as a friendly envoy of the Chinese people, it also crossed the ocean and exhibited in Japan and Singapore, and was warmly welcomed by friends at home and abroad. Since then, Shanghai, Tianjin, Lanzhou and other cities have also copied and exhibited the fossils of the Yellow River elephants. Later, the People's Education Publishing House's primary school textbook had that beautiful short article, "The Yellow River Elephant", and the Yellow River Elephant entered the memory of generations of Chinese. 