When the last ice age was coming to an end, about 13,000 years ago, more than three-quarters of the animals that thrived in the ice age died out because the changing climate was too harsh for them. Mammoths – giant mammals belonging to the elephant family – are believed to have died out then, but the exact period of their extinction is a subject of heavy debate in zoology. Now, a new study published October 20 in Nature uses a new method in a new attempt to settle the debate. According to the study, mammoths stick around longer than scientists thought. Using the method of environmental DNA sequencing, scientists found that mammoths were living in the Siberian mainland about 3,900 years ago. This was at a time when the Great Pyramid of Giza was already built in Egypt.
According to scientists, the mammoths living in mainland Siberia were a small population that survived the transition from the Ice Age to the warm interglacial period. Another Ice Age animal that survived later than the first was the woolly rhinoceros, which was believed to have died out about 14,000 years ago, but analysis of environmental DNA showed that they lived about 9,800 years ago. lived outside the Arctic. To conduct the analysis, the scientists collected 535 samples from various sites in Canada, Siberia, Alaska and Scandinavia.
The research also answers another hotly debated question of whether humans were responsible for the mammoth’s extinction. It was believed that the hunting of mammoths by humans played an important role in their extinction. However, the study absolves mankind of this guilt.
“We have finally been able to prove that it was not only climate change that was the problem, but that its speed was the final nail in the coffin,” study lead researcher Eske Willerslev said in a statement. . Willerslev says that because the mammoths could not keep pace with the pace of the changing seasons, they went extinct.
According to Tory Herridge, a zoologist who is not part of the study, the researchers argued that the rare presence of human remains indicates that humans were not around the mammoth, but to better understand whether humans and mammoths were around. The populations actually overlap, “it’s the kind of high-resolution data we need to isolate the true dynamics of the woolly mammoth’s extinction,” Herridge told CNN.
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