How old did you say?

Over the last decade, native Alaskan hunters have found ancient ivory harpoon-heads tipped with metal or slate, like this one, deeply embedded in bowhead whales that they have killed. Anthropologists say that harpoons of this kind have not been used in the last 100 years, suggesting that some of the whales alive today were swimming in the cold waters of the Arctic more than 100 years ago.

This great age has now been confirmed by chemical analysis of the rates at which aspartic acid, an amino acid in the eye-lens of whales, changes from one isomer to another. A total of 48 lenses have been analysed by Canadian scientists, with spectacular results; most of the whales were between 20 and 60 years old when they died, but five males were much older. One was 91, one was 135, one 159, one 172, and the oldest was 211 years old at the time of his death! Even allowing for a possible 16% error in the aging technique, these results indicate that bowheads are the longest-lived mammals in the world.

Today, Aberdeen, Peterhead and Dundee are all heavily involved in the high technology of the offshore North Sea oil industry. When those old bowheads were mere youngsters Scotland was at the centre of an earlier oil boom, based not on petroleum but on whale and seal oil.