Woolly Mammoths Might Not Have Been Hunted to Extinction
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Early man has been vindicated of the charge that he caused the extinction of wooly mammoths. The true enemy of the giant beast, it turns out, was its own genetic blueprints. Every schoolchild is familiar with what the giant beasts looked like: shaggy hair up to twenty inches in length covering its massive body, curved tusks extending to sixteen feet in some cases—basically, giant, furry elephants to the eyes of a child, or anyone who’s seen the Ice Age movies.
It was previously thought that ancient human beings hunted the mammoths into oblivion, but new research challenges this conclusion. The American mastodon, a close relation of the woolly mammoth, might have been done in by a comet—or tuberculosis.
The mammoth’s DNA, taken from fossilized bones, tusks, and teeth, has revealed that the giant’s extinction was not unexpected and sudden. Rather, it may have come about over thousands of years, due to loss of genetic diversity. It was known that the species thrived for tens of thousands of years before being wiped off the face of the earth, around 12,000 years ago. This date would coincide with the end of the last ice age, roughly.
University of London evolutionary biologist Ian Barnes suggests that these findings might have relevance for modern elephant populations. He thinks that with mammoths maintaining such constant population size for such a prolonged period of time “could be interpreted as having implications for modern elephant conservation. Perhaps all the elephant family are able to exist for long periods with low genetic diversity and at a constant population size.” He warns though, that there is not enough data to theorize in such a line of thinking, that modern elephants are facing a much larger threat from man than their ancestors did, which affects their numbers in other ways.
I love technology. We can basically extrapolate almost anything. And now that technology has cleared early man of hunting the wooly mammoth, well I feel like I could do anything!... except hunt a wooly mammoth of course, because that would be wrong.
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