Woolly mammoth

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The woolly mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius, still walked on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean around 4,000 years ago, close to 2000 BCE. That was centuries after the dawn of human civilization and the building of the Great Pyramid and Sphinx of ancient Egypt. Most people picture this species as a creature of the deep ice age, a shaggy giant roughly the size of a modern African elephant. Yet a small band of survivors outlasted the ice age by thousands of years. How did a species that once spread across northern Eurasia and North America dwindle to a single island? Why do researchers know more about its fur, its stomach contents, and even its dung than about almost any other prehistoric animal? And how did the name of an extinct elephant become a word for anything enormous? The answers lie in frozen carcasses, ancient DNA, cave walls, and a few stubbornly misplaced teeth.

  4392939798

• 2. Naming the Mammoth

  ›

  Long before any European scientist took notice, native Siberians and Native Americans were finding mammoth remains and explaining them in their own ways. Remains also reached other parts of Asia and Europe, where people read them in various ways, often as the bones of legendary creatures.

  The first scientific look came in 1728, when the British physician Hans Sloane examined fossilised teeth and tusks from Siberia. He was the first to recognise that they belonged to elephants. That raised an awkward puzzle, because elephants do not belong in the Arctic. Sloane turned to the Bible, asserting that the animals had been buried in the Great Flood and that Siberia had once been tropical. Others read him differently and suggested the flood had carried elephants north from the tropics. His paper rested on travellers' descriptions and a few scattered bones collected in Siberia and Britain.

  In 1738, the German zoologist Johann Philipp Breyne argued that mammoth fossils came from some kind of elephant. He could not explain why a tropical animal would turn up in such a cold place, and he also proposed that the Great Flood had carried them there.

  The break came in 1796. The French biologist Georges Cuvier declared that the bones were not modern elephants carried to the Arctic but an entirely new species. He argued that it had gone extinct, an idea that was not widely accepted at the time. In 1799, the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach gave the animal the scientific name Elephas primigenius, Latin for 'the first-born elephant', and placed it in the same genus as the Asian elephant. Cuvier coined Elephas mammonteus a few months later, but Blumenbach's name was the one that came into use. In 1828, the British naturalist Joshua Brookes put some fossils from his collection up for sale under the name Mammuthus borealis, which created a new genus name.

  The word mammoth has an uncertain birth. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it comes from an old Vogul word, mēmoŋt, meaning 'earth-horn'. It may instead be a version of mehemot, the Arabic form of the biblical behemoth. Another suggestion is Estonian, where maa means 'earth' and mutt means 'mole'. Europeans first used the word in the early 17th century for maimanto tusks found in Siberia. President Thomas Jefferson, a keen student of palaeontology, was partly responsible for turning it from a noun into an adjective. The first recorded adjective use described a wheel of cheese given to Jefferson in 1802, the Cheshire Mammoth Cheese.

  By the early 20th century, the classification of extinct elephants was tangled. In 1942, the American palaeontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn's posthumous monograph on the Proboscidea revived older proposed names. He replaced Mammuthus with Mammonteus, believing the former had been invalidly published. From the 1970s onward, researchers simplified the picture. They kept every species in Mammuthus and treated many supposed differences as variation within a single species.

  Osborn also fixed which physical specimens define the woolly mammoth. Because holotype designation was not practised in Blumenbach's time, he chose two molars from Blumenbach's collection at Göttingen University, one found in Siberia and one at Osterode. One of the specimens Blumenbach had described turned out to belong to an unrelated animal, the straight-tusked elephant Palaeoloxodon antiquus. The Soviet palaeontologist Vera Gromova proposed that one molar serve as the main reference specimen and the other as a secondary one. By the 1980s both molars were thought lost. In 1990, the more complete Taimyr mammoth, found in Siberia in 1948, was proposed as a replacement reference specimen. Then the secondary molar, catalogued as GZG.V.010.018, turned up in the Göttingen collection. Researchers identified it by comparing it with Osborn's illustration of a cast.

  235612

• 3. Frozen Finds

  ›

  More than 8,000 bones from at least 140 mammoths have been found in a single spot beside the Byoryolyokh River in Yakutia, apparently swept there by the current. Such bone beds are one way mammoths reach us. Most woolly mammoth fossils are fragmentary and carry no soft tissue. They turn up in former rivers and lakes and in Doggerland, a stretch of the North Sea that was dry at times during the ice age. Piles of modern elephant bones were once called elephants' graveyards, in the mistaken belief that old elephants went there to die. Mammoth piles seem to have a plainer cause. Individuals died near rivers over thousands of years, and streams gradually gathered their bones. Some piles may be herds that died together, perhaps in a flood, and natural traps such as kettle holes, sinkholes, and mud caught mammoths in separate events.

  Soft tissue is far rarer. Apart from frozen remains, the only known example comes from a specimen preserved in a petroleum seep at Starunia, Poland. Frozen carcasses come mostly from northern Siberia and Alaska, with far fewer in Alaska, and mostly from above the Arctic Circle in permafrost. Soft tissue seems less likely to survive from between 30,000 and 15,000 years ago, perhaps because the climate was milder then. Natural mummification required fast burial in silt, mud, or icy water that then froze. Undigested food in stomachs and seed pods still in mouths argue against starvation or exposure. The maturity of that vegetation points to death in autumn rather than spring. Some animals may have fallen through ice into small ponds or potholes, and many were certainly killed in rivers, perhaps swept away by floods.

  Between 1692 and 1806, a handful of reports of frozen mammoths with soft tissue reached Europe, though nobody collected a specimen. The first fully documented carcass was discovered in 1799 near the delta of the Lena River by Ossip Schumachov, a Siberian hunter. In 1806, Michael Friedrich Adams heard about it while in Yakutsk. He recovered the entire skeleton apart from the tusks, which Schumachov had already sold, along with one foreleg, most of the skin, and nearly 18 kg of hair. On his return voyage he bought a pair of tusks that he believed were the ones Schumachov had sold. Adams delivered everything to the Zoological Museum of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

  Wilhelm Gottlieb Tilesius was given the task of mounting the skeleton, one of the first attempts to rebuild the skeleton of an extinct animal. Most of the reconstruction was correct. But Tilesius placed each tusk in the opposite socket, so they curved outward instead of inward. The error was not corrected until 1899, and the correct placement was still debated into the 20th century.

  The 1901 excavation of the Berezovka mammoth is the best documented of the early finds. A dog noticed its smell beside the Siberian Berezovka River, and the Russian authorities paid for the dig. The expedition lasted 10 months, and the carcass had to be cut into pieces before it could be carried to St. Petersburg. Predators had scavenged most of the skin on the head and the trunk, and most of the internal organs had rotted away. It was a male of 35 to 40 years that had died 35,000 years ago. Grass still lay between its teeth and on its tongue.

  7891014

• 4. Family Tree

  ›

  The genus Mammuthus began in Africa, with M. subplanifrons in the Pliocene and M. africanavus in the Pleistocene. The former is thought to be the ancestor of the later forms. Mammoths entered Europe around 3 million years ago. The earliest European one, M. rumanus, is known only from molars, each showing just 8 to 10 enamel ridges. It spread across Europe and China.

  Those ridge counts are how researchers sort the genus. Primitive species had few ridges, and the number climbed gradually as new species evolved to feed on rougher food. Tooth crowns grew deeper and skulls grew taller. At the same time, skulls became shorter from front to back, which lightened the head. The short, tall skulls of the woolly and Columbian mammoths were the end point of this trend.

  A population with 12 to 14 ridges split off and replaced M. rumanus, becoming the southern mammoth, M. meridionalis, about 2 to 1.7 million years ago. That species gave way to the steppe mammoth, M. trogontherii, with 18 to 20 ridges, which evolved in eastern Asia around 1 million years ago. The woolly mammoth began to diverge from the steppe mammoth about 800,000 years ago in Siberia. By 400,000 years ago, descendants of the steppe mammoth had molars with 26 ridges. The earliest identified woolly forms date to the Middle Pleistocene. About 100,000 years ago, woolly mammoths crossed the Bering Strait into North America.

  The boundaries between these species blur. Individuals and populations with transitional shapes are known, and primitive and advanced species coexisted until the primitive one vanished. Researchers call these lineages 'chronospecies'. Many in-between forms have been proposed, from M. intermedius to M. p. alaskensis, but their validity is uncertain. Sorting them out has been called one of the most long-lasting and complicated problems in Quaternary palaeontology.

  Further back, the earliest known members of the Proboscidea, the group containing modern elephants, lived about 55 million years ago around the Tethys Sea. Their closest relatives are the sirenians, meaning dugongs and manatees, and the hyraxes, a group of small, plant-eating mammals. The family Elephantidae, which holds modern elephants and mammoths, existed 6 million years ago in Africa. The mastodon is only a distant cousin. It belongs to a separate family, Mammutidae, which diverged 25 million years before mammoths evolved.

  DNA confirmed which living elephant is the nearest kin. Within six weeks between 2005 and 2006, three teams independently assembled mitochondrial genome profiles of the woolly mammoth from ancient DNA. Their work confirmed a close relationship with the Asian elephant, Elephas maximus, and a 2015 review reached the same verdict. African elephants branched away from this clade around 6 million years ago, close to the time of the split between chimpanzees and humans. A 2010 study put the split between mammoth and Asian elephant lineages at 5.8 to 7.8 million years ago, and the African lineage at 6.6 to 8.8 million years ago.

  In 2008, much of the mammoth's chromosomal DNA was mapped. The analysis found it to be 98.55% to 99.40% identical to the African elephant's. The team extracted DNA from hair follicles of a 20,000-year-old mammoth retrieved from permafrost and another that died 60,000 years ago. In 2012, proteins were confidently identified for the first time, from a 43,000-year-old mammoth.

  A 2011 genetic study found that two Columbian mammoths grouped inside a subclade of woolly mammoths. That suggested the two species interbred and produced fertile offspring. A North American type once called M. jeffersonii may be a hybrid between them. A 2015 study proposed that animals where the two ranges overlapped formed a metapopulation of hybrids with varying shapes. It suggested Eurasian woolly mammoths had a similar relationship with steppe mammoths. A 2025 study of teeth from Alberta, Canada, identified that area as a zone where the two species overlapped and hybridised.

  In 2021, DNA older than a million years was sequenced for the first time, from two Early Pleistocene mammoth teeth in eastern Siberia. A tooth from Adycha, 1 to 1.3 million years old, came from a lineage ancestral to later woolly mammoths. A tooth from Krestovka, 1.1 to 1.65 million years old, belonged to a new lineage. The study found that half of the ancestry of Columbian mammoths came from relatives of the Krestovka lineage, probably the first mammoths to colonise the Americas. The other half came from the woolly lineage, with the mixing happening more than 420,000 years ago. These findings were the first evidence of hybrid speciation from ancient DNA.

  Two Late Pleistocene molars from British Columbia, sequenced in 2025, added a twist. They belonged to mammoths of mostly woolly ancestry, yet carried 21.6 ± 0.9% and 34.6 ± 0.1% Columbian ancestry. Genes had therefore flowed in both directions where the ranges overlapped, not only from woolly mammoths into Columbian mammoths as researchers had previously thought.

  1113181922

• 5. Built for the Cold

  ›

  A male woolly mammoth stood about 2.8 to 3.15 m at the shoulder and weighed 4.5 to 6 tonnes by one estimate, comparable to the largest living elephant, the African bush elephant. Females were smaller, at 2.3 to 2.6 m and 2.8 to 4 tonnes. A newborn calf weighed about 90 kg. Size varied across the range. Adult males from Western Europe averaged 2.99 to 3.31 m and 5.2 to 6.9 tonnes, while Siberian males averaged 2.66 to 2.94 m and 3.9 to 5.2 tonnes. One of the largest recorded, the Siegsdorf specimen from Germany, was estimated at 50 years old, 3.49 m tall, and 8.2 tonnes. Few frozen specimens preserve genitals, so sex is usually read from the pelvis, where the birth canal opening is always wider in females.

  The ears were about 38 cm long and 18 to 28 cm across, far smaller than those of modern elephants. The ear of the frozen calf nicknamed Dima, aged 6 to 12 months, was under 13 cm. Small ears reduced heat loss and frostbite, and a short tail did the same. The tail of the Berezovka mammoth was only 36 cm long and held 21 vertebrae, against 28 to 33 in modern elephants. The skin was no thicker than that of present-day elephants, between 1.25 and 2.5 cm. Beneath it lay a layer of fat up to 10 cm thick.

  Cave paintings show a large, high, single-domed head and a sloping back with a high shoulder hump. The slope came from back vertebrae whose spines shortened from front to rear. Juveniles lacked these features and had convex backs, like Asian elephants.

  A frozen adult found in 1924, nicknamed the Middle Kolyma mammoth, kept its complete trunk tip and confirmed another detail from cave art. Unlike the lobes of modern elephants, the upper 'finger' had a long pointed lobe 10 cm long, while the lower 'thumb' was broader and 5 cm long. The trunk of Dima measured 76 cm, and that of the adult Liakhov mammoth 2 m. In 2015, researchers described the well-preserved trunk of a juvenile nicknamed Yuka. It had a fleshy expansion a third of the way up from the tip, ellipsoidal in cross section and double the diameter of the rest. Two other specimens of different sexes and ages showed the same feature.

  The expansion was suggested to work as a 'fur mitten'. The trunk tip had no fur and was used for foraging in winter, and it could have been warmed by curling it into the expansion. It could also have melted snow when drinking water ran short, since melting snow directly in the mouth could upset the animal's thermal balance.

  The coat had two layers. The outer guard hair was coarse and 0.5 mm thick. It measured 30 cm on the upper body and up to 90 cm on the flanks and underside. Beneath lay a denser, slightly curly under-wool up to 8 cm long and only 0.05 mm thick. Hairs on the upper leg reached 38 cm, and those on the feet were 15 cm long, reaching the toes. Coarse hairs up to 60 cm long extended the tail. The animal probably moulted seasonally, shedding its heaviest fur in spring, and frozen specimens may preserve only the winter coat. Numerous sebaceous glands secreted oils into the hair, which improved insulation, repelled water, and gave the fur a glossy sheen.

  Preserved fur is orange-brown, but that is believed to be an artefact of pigment bleached during burial. In 2006, a study sequenced the Mc1r gene, which influences hair colour in mammals, from mammoth bones. It found a dominant allele and a recessive one. A mammoth with at least one dominant copy would have had a dark coat, and one with two recessive copies a light coat. A 2011 study showed that light individuals would have been rare. A 2014 study instead found nonpigmented overhairs, bicoloured and mixed red-brown guard hairs, and nonpigmented underhairs, which would give a light overall appearance.

  The tusks were very long and more curved than those of modern elephants. The longest known male tusk measured 4.05 m along its outer curve and weighed 115.5 kg. An anecdotal report from the 1990s described a 4.3 m tusk from Chukotka in far eastern Siberia. The heaviest tusk weighed 121 kg, and was suggested to have been 125 to 130 kg when complete. A more typical male tusk was 2.4 to 2.7 m and 45 kg. Female tusks were thinner, at 1.5 to 1.8 m and about 9 kg. The record for an African bush elephant is 3.4 m.

  The tusks grew spirally in opposite directions from the base, with tips pointing towards each other and sometimes crossing. About a quarter of each tusk's length sat inside the socket. This kept most of the weight close to the skull and cut the torque compared with straight tusks. Calves grew small milk tusks a few centimetres long at six months, replaced by permanent tusks a year later. Growth continued through life at 2.5 to 15 cm a year, slowing in adulthood. Some cave paintings show mammoths with small tusks or none, but whether that reflects reality or artistic licence is unknown.

  Four functional molars worked at a time, two in the upper jaw and two in the lower. About 23 cm of each crown sat inside the jaw and 2.5 cm above it. The crown was pushed forward and up as it wore down, like a conveyor belt. Each tooth had up to 26 separate enamel ridges. A mammoth went through six sets of molars in a lifetime, replacing them five times, though a few specimens had a seventh set. The first molars were about 1.3 cm long, the third 15 cm, and the sixth about 30 cm and 1.8 kg. The woolly mammoth is considered to have had the most complex molars of any elephant.

  The cold was also written into the blood and genes. As in reindeer and musk oxen, mammoth haemoglobin carried three mutations that improved oxygen delivery and helped prevent freezing. Stores of fat in the neck and withers covered the lean months of winter. A 2015 study compared genomes from three Asian elephants and two woolly mammoths and found about 1.4 million nucleotide differences. They affected the sequence of more than 1,600 proteins. Many involved skin and hair, fat storage and metabolism, and the sensing of temperature.

  One of the heat-sensing genes encodes a protein called TRPV3, found in the skin, which affects hair growth. When inserted into human cells, the mammoth version proved less sensitive to heat than the elephant version. Mice lacking active TRPV3 spend more time in cooler parts of their cages and have wavier hair. Several circadian clock genes were also altered, perhaps to cope with the extreme polar swings in day length. Similar mutations are known in reindeer.

  The 2021 study of million-year-old DNA found that adaptations for hair growth and fat deposits were already present in the steppe mammoth lineage. A 2023 study found that a broad set of genes for skin and hair, fat storage, metabolism, and the immune system were in place when the species appeared. They kept evolving within the last 700,000 years, including a gene that gave late Quaternary mammoths their small ears.

  3436383940

• 6. Life on the Steppe

  ›

  The habitat of the woolly mammoth is known as the mammoth steppe, or tundra steppe, and it stretched across northern Asia, much of Europe, and northern North America during the last ice age. It resembled the grassy steppes of modern Russia, but its plants were more diverse, more abundant, and faster growing. Ice and snow did not dominate it, as many people believe, because these regions are thought to have been high-pressure areas at the time. The woolly rhinoceros, wild horses, and bison shared the land. The Altai-Sayan assemblages are the modern biomes most similar to it. The southernmost known mammoth, from Shandong province in China, is 33,000 years old, and the southernmost European remains, from the Depression of Granada in Spain, are of about the same age.

  Food at various stages of digestion has been found in the intestines of several mammoths, which gives a good picture of the diet. They ate forbs, grasses, and sedges, supplemented by other herbaceous plants, flowering plants, shrubs, mosses, and tree matter. A 2014 study of fossil dung from mammoths and other ice age mammals found about 63% forbs and about 27% grasses. The researchers concluded that forbs, not grasses, dominated the Arctic for much of the last 50,000 years. Only from 10,000 years ago did forbs decline and woody plants and grasses take over.

  An adult of 6 tonnes needed to eat 180 kg a day and may have foraged for as long as 20 hours. The two-fingered trunk tip was probably adapted for picking up the short plants of the ice age by wrapping around them. Modern elephants curl their trunks around the longer grass of tropical lands instead. The trunk could pull off large grass tufts, pick buds and flowers delicately, and tear leaves and branches where trees and shrubs grew. Isotope analysis shows that mammoths fed mainly on C3 plants, unlike horses and rhinos.

  The tusks served as tools for the same job. Many preserved tusks have flat, polished sections up to 30 cm long, with scratches along the outer curve where it would have met the ground. These marks suggest mammoths used their tusks as shovels to clear snow, reach buried plants, and break ice to drink. They also dug up plants and stripped bark. Chewing took power. The jaw muscles moved the lower jaw forwards to close the mouth, then backward while opening it, and the sharp enamel ridges ground food by cutting across each other. The ridges resisted wear, which let the animal chew large quantities of gritty food.

  The teeth also set the clock on a mammoth's life. When Dima died at 6 to 12 months old, it stood 90 cm tall and was about to grow its second set of molars, with the first set wearing out at 18 months. The third set lasted 10 years, and the pattern repeated until the sixth and final set emerged at about 30 years. When that set wore out, the animal could no longer chew and died of starvation. A study of North American mammoths found that they often died in winter or spring, the hardest seasons for northern animals.

  Modern elephants can reach 60 years, and woolly mammoths, of similar size, probably could too. Tusks keep a record. Counting growth rings in a cross section gives a rough age, though the tips, which hold the early years, are usually worn away. Each major line is a year, with weekly and daily lines between, and dark bands mark summers, so the season of death can be read. Growth slowed during winter, during disease, or when a male was banished from the herd, which for male elephants happens at about age 10. Tusks from the harshest part of the last glaciation, 25,000 to 20,000 years ago, show slower growth.

  Mammoths kept growing after adulthood. Unfused limb bones show that males grew until about 40 and females until about 25. Unlike other elephants, woolly mammoths are thought to have reached sexual maturity at 18 to 20 years. Preserved calves were all born in spring and summer, and a gestation of 21 to 22 months, as in modern elephants, points to a mating season from summer to autumn. Chemical analysis of the teeth of a calf nicknamed Lyuba showed that its prenatal development and gestation were similar to a modern elephant's, and that it was born in spring. Milk was found in its stomach and faecal matter in its intestines. The calf may have eaten the faecal matter to build the gut microbes needed to digest plants, as modern elephants do. Isotope analysis of mammoths from Yukon showed the young nursed for at least 3 years.

  Adults could defend themselves against predators with their tusks, trunks, and sheer size. Juveniles and weakened adults were vulnerable to pack hunters such as wolves, cave hyenas, and large cats. Tusks may have been used in fights over territory or mates, and large male tusks may have been displayed to attract females and intimidate rivals. Their curve made them poor for stabbing, but injuries on some fossil shoulder blades suggest hitting. The best-preserved head of an adult, a male nicknamed the Yukagir mammoth, shows temporal glands between the ear and the eye. That indicates that males entered musth, a period of heightened aggression, and produced a strongly scented oily substance called temporin. A 2023 study confirmed this by comparing testosterone in the tusk dentine of an African elephant with that of a male woolly mammoth.

  Trackways at the St. Mary Reservoir in Canada, left by a herd 11,300 to 11,000 years ago, show how a family group moved. Adults, subadults, and juveniles were present in almost equal numbers. The adults had a stride of 2 m, and the juveniles ran to keep up. Mammoths were likely social and lived in matriarchal, female-led family groups, like modern elephants. Enamel from Poland shows that some migrated seasonally. Shifts in oxygen and strontium chemistry in the enamel layers indicate that Polish mammoths wintered in southern Poland and grazed the Polish midlands in summer.

  The bones themselves record hardship. Osteoarthritis was the most common bone disease, found in 2% of specimens, and one Swiss specimen had several fused vertebrae because of it. The Yukagir mammoth had spondylitis in two vertebrae. Several specimens show healed fractures, so the animals had survived the injuries. An extra number of neck vertebrae turned up in 33% of specimens from the North Sea region, probably a sign of inbreeding after numbers dropped. Dima's gut held parasitic flies and protozoa. Distorted molars were the most common health problem, and teeth from Britain showed gum disease in 2% of specimens, half with decay. Some teeth had cancerous growths.

  4142454650

• 7. Ice Age Neighbors

  ›

  Rouffignac Cave in France holds 159 depictions of woolly mammoths, and some of the drawings are more than 2 m long. The mammoth is the third-most depicted animal in ice age art, after horses and bison. More than 500 depictions have been found, made between 35,000 and 11,500 years ago. They appear on the walls of 46 caves in Russia, France, and Spain, and as engravings and sculptures in ivory, antler, stone, and bone. Other notable caves are Chauvet, Les Combarelles, and Font-de-Gaume. A depiction in the Cave of El Castillo may show a straight-tusked elephant instead.

  The largest collection of portable mammoth art came from an open-air camp near Gönnersdorf in Germany, excavated in the 1960s. It held 62 depictions on 47 plaques. Mammoth pictures did not track hunting, because reindeer bones were the most common animal remains at the site. Two spear throwers shaped like woolly mammoths have been found in France. Some portable pieces may have travelled far from where they were made, moved by ancient trading.

  Science took a long time to accept that people and mammoths shared a world. William Buckland published his discovery of the Red Lady of Paviland skeleton in 1823. It lay in a cave beside mammoth bones, yet he mistakenly denied they were contemporaries. In 1864, Édouard Lartet found an engraving of a woolly mammoth on a piece of mammoth ivory in the Abri de la Madeleine cave in Dordogne, France. It was the first widely accepted evidence that humans lived alongside extinct prehistoric animals, and the first contemporary depiction of such an animal known to modern science.

  Modern humans entered Europe from Africa between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago and met woolly mammoths there. Neanderthals had already shared the land with them and used mammoth bones for tools and building materials. In some areas, human survival may have depended on the mammoth. More than 70 dwellings made with mammoth bones are known, mainly from the East European Plain. Their circular bases ranged from 8 to 24 m2, and huts stood from 1 to 20 m apart. Large bones formed the foundations, tusks framed the entrances, and skins held down by bones or tusks probably made the roofs. Some floors lay 40 cm below ground. The bones used for a single hut could differ in age by several thousand years, which suggests builders gathered the remains of long-dead animals.

  Bones were also made into tools, furniture, and musical instruments. Large bones such as shoulder blades covered dead bodies in burials. Mammoth ivory carried art. The Venus of Brassempouy and the Venus of Lespugue are among several Venus figurines carved from it. Ivory also became daggers, spears, and a boomerang. A 2019 study found that mammoth ivory was the most suitable bony material for making projectile points for big game in the Late Pleistocene. Workers had to chop, chisel, and split the large tusks into smaller pieces. Some ivory artefacts show tusks that had been straightened, and how that was done is unknown.

  Mammoths were also food for both modern humans and Neanderthals. Several specimens show breaks, cut marks, and stone tools that point to butchery. How much people relied on mammoth meat is unknown, because many other large herbivores were available, and some carcasses may have been scavenged. Some cave paintings show mammoths in structures interpreted as pitfall traps. Direct evidence of hunting is rare. A Siberian specimen has a spearhead embedded in its shoulder blade, showing a spear had been thrown with great force. At a site in southern Poland with bones from over 100 mammoths, stone spear tips lie embedded in bones, and many points were damaged on impact. That points to mammoths as the major prey there. A specimen from Italy shows spear hunting by Neanderthals.

  Yuka is the first frozen mammoth with evidence of human interaction. It appears to have been killed by a large predator and scavenged by humans soon after, and some of its bones had been removed and were found nearby. A site near the Yana River in Siberia produced several specimens with signs of hunting. They suggest the animals were not hunted intensively but perhaps mainly when ivory was needed. Two Wisconsin mammoths, the Schaefer and Hebior mammoths, show butchery by Paleo-Indians.

  A 2025 proposal described a different method for Central and Eastern Europe. Mammoths were hunted in rivers and carried downstream to settlements of mammoth-bone structures. They were butchered in the river directly below each settlement, and the meat and fat went to smokehouses for cold-smoking and fat-rendering. Sites such as Mezhyrich, Eliseevichi, and Predmosti were cited. Humans did not stop using mammoths when the animal vanished. They continued to use its ivory as a raw material, a tradition that continues today.

  4748495152

• 8. Vanishing and Revival

  ›

  Most woolly mammoth populations disappeared between 14,000 and 10,000 years ago, but they did not vanish all at once. In Britain, mammoths were still present between 14,500 and 14,000 years ago. Some of Europe's last lived in what is now Estonia, where molars from the Puurmani area have been radiocarbon dated to between 12,600 and 10,000 years ago. The youngest fossils of the mainland population come from the Kyttyk Peninsula of Siberia and are 9,650 years old. Their loss belonged to the wider Late Pleistocene extinctions, which began 40,000 years ago and peaked between 14,000 and 11,500 years ago. The woolly rhinoceros, the cave lion, reindeer, saiga, the Arctic fox, and the steppe lemming suffered extinctions or local disappearances in the same wave.

  Scientists are divided over whether hunting, or climate change that shrank the habitat, was the main cause, or whether the two combined. Tusk chemistry gives one clue. Oxygen values did not vary significantly between areas where Eurasian mammoths died out and areas where they lasted longer into the Holocene, so climate was probably not the direct cause there. Large mammals are generally more vulnerable than small ones because their populations are smaller and they reproduce slowly. From around 15,000 years ago, the mammoth steppe was gradually replaced across most of Siberia by wet tundra and by boreal and temperate forest, which mammoths would have found unfavourable. Suitable habitat fell from 7,700,000 km2 42,000 years ago to 800,000 km2 by 6,000 years ago, a decrease of roughly 90%. Yet mammoths had survived an even greater loss of habitat around 125,000 years ago.

  Humans may have tipped the balance. Eastern Beringia, modern Alaska and Yukon, lost its woolly mammoths about 13,300 years ago, roughly 1,000 years after humans first appeared there. The St. Mary trackway of 11,300 to 11,000 years ago holds far fewer juvenile tracks than a normal herd would leave, which shows a population in decline while sharing the land with people. It has been suggested that hunting pressure over thousands of years held numbers well below what they otherwise would have been and hastened the collapse of the range as the climate changed.

  The islands tell a different story. A small population survived on St. Paul Island, Alaska, until about 5,600 years ago, a date tightly constrained by direct dating of bones. Rising seas and increasing dryness reduced freshwater there, and mammoths themselves degraded the few freshwater sources. The island population apparently died out well before people arrived. On Wrangel Island, rising sea level cut the mammoths off for 5,000 years. Their population of about 300 to 1,000 individuals lost 20% to 30% of its heterozygosity and 65% of its mitochondrial DNA diversity. After that it seems to have stayed stable, which implies the end came suddenly rather than through gradual decline.

  The last islanders carried genetic baggage. Genes for olfactory receptors and urinary proteins had stopped working, possibly because they no longer served a purpose in the island environment. Some researchers saw this as a 'genomic meltdown'. Later analysis of the genomes of some of the last Wrangel mammoths contested that, finding that highly harmful mutations had been purged to lower levels than on the mainland, although moderately harmful ones were more common. A sudden disappearance may fit a catastrophe better, such as icing of the snowpack, disease, or a human hunting expedition. The first evidence of humans on the island dates to around 3,600 years ago, but some authors think the mammoths had been gone for several centuries by then.

  Other dates remain contested. Two studies in 2021, using environmental DNA, suggested mammoths survived in the Yukon until about 5,700 years ago and on the Taymyr Peninsula until 3,900 to 4,100 years ago. Ancient environmental DNA in cold places can be reworked from older sediments into younger ones, which raises doubt about those dates. Earlier, a 2008 study had found two distinct groups of woolly mammoths, one that became extinct 45,000 years ago and another that lasted until 12,000 years ago. DNA from a Siberian mammoth 44,800 years old and a Wrangel mammoth 4,300 years old pointed to two major population crashes. The first, around 280,000 years ago, was followed by recovery. The second, about 12,000 years ago, near the end of the ice age, was not.

  The completion of the mammoth genome project in 2015 sparked talk of bringing the animal back. Cloning would replace the nucleus of a female elephant's egg cell with a nucleus from mammoth tissue, but most intact mammoths hold too little usable DNA. Another idea was to fertilise an elephant egg with sperm from a frozen carcass and repeat the process over generations of hybrids. It fails because the sperm of modern mammals stays viable for 15 years at most after deep-freezing. By 2015, a team led by George Church had used the CRISPR editing technique to place some mammoth genes into the genome of an Asian elephant. They focused first on cold resistance, targeting genes for ear size, subcutaneous fat, haemoglobin, and hair.

  Objections are practical and ethical. Little suitable habitat remains for hybrids, and because mammoths were social, creating only a few would be poor. Using elephants as surrogate mothers raises concerns, since most embryos would not survive and the needs of a hybrid calf could not be known. Some critics argue the same resources should protect endangered living elephants, and others warn of introducing unknown pathogens. If any method ever worked, one suggestion was to release the hybrids at Pleistocene Park, a wildlife reserve in Siberia. In 2021, an Austin-based company raised funds with the aim of reintroducing the species in the Arctic tundra.

  5354555657