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You're listening to shortwave from NPR.

Lately, Audrey Rowe has been a bit preoccupied with a girl named Elma.

Well, Elma is her nickname, short for...

Elma Yujaia? It's a name given to her by the Healy Lake Village Council, the Mendis Chague people, a tribe native to Interior Alaska.

The way that they translate it is Hella Lookin.

It's a name that's given affectionately towards things that are

interesting looking but not necessarily beautiful.

So it's like a name for your ugly pet dog, for example.

How do you know my dog's ugly and hell a look at it?

Oops.

It's true. Audrey's a paleoecologist and PhD candidate at the University of Alaska Fairbanks,

and she's been studying Elma's tusk,

because Elma is a woolly mammoth.

So Elma lives about 14,000 years ago and her tusk was found at one of the oldest, if not the oldest, uncontroversial archaeological sites in Alaska.

Uncontroversial, because there's no dispute that humans were present there too. The site is littered with human tools. And this is interesting because as far

as we know, humans only overlapped with woolly mammoths in Interior Alaska for about a thousand years.

Somewhere in that 1,000 year period, Elma lived and died.

Audrey's now studying data from Elma's tusk to track the massive 1,000

kilometer journey she and her herd took through Alaska and

...