Other experts are urging caution before chalking the new mammoth up as an Ice Age kill site. “It is fairly common to find mastodons and less commonly, mammoths, in lake or bog sediments dating to this time period,” Widga says.
In the absence of other lines of evidence such as cut marks on bones, there are other explanations for scattered elephant skeletons in the remnants of ancient lakes and bogs throughout the Midwest, such as the way bodies “blot and float” before gradually falling apart. “We can’t truly evaluate it until it is adequately investigated and published,” he adds.
Definitive evidence that humans hunted or scavenged mammoths is fairly rare, says University of Washington zooarchaeologist Donald Grayson. In a paper released earlier this year with Southern Methodist University colleague David Meltzer, Grayson notes that of 76 proposed Ice Age mammal kill sites, only 12 in the whole of North America suggest human hunting. That, the authors write, suggests that humans were not the primary drivers of North America’s Ice Age extinctions.
Climate may have been key to the recent catastrophe. At the same time humans were moving onto the continent, the global climate was rapidly changing, moving from cold and dry to warm and wet.
This changing climate rapidly winnowed away the cool, arid grasslands that woolly mammoths preferred. Combined with other ecological changes, such as the arrival of bison from Eurasia and forests springing up where “mammoth steppe” once spread, mammoths were squeezed out of their former range. The very last of the woolly mammoths, isolated on Wrangel Island off northern Siberia, perished about 4,000 years ago.
Extinction is rarely the outcome of a single cause, however, and the reason the last member of a species went extinct may not be the same reason that it became vulnerable in the first place.
Perhaps, as the Chelsea mammoth slowly yields its secrets, it will add a little more to the continuing discussion over life and death at the edge of the Ice Age.
Read Brian Switek's blog Laelaps at National Geographic. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Other experts are urging caution before chalking the new mammoth up as an Ice Age kill site. “It is fairly common to find mastodons and less commonly, mammoths, in lake or bog sediments dating to this time period,” Widga says.In the absence of other lines of evidence such as cut marks on bones, there are other explanations for scattered elephant skeletons in the remnants of ancient lakes and bogs throughout the Midwest, such as the way bodies “blot and float” before gradually falling apart. “We can’t truly evaluate it until it is adequately investigated and published,” he adds.Definitive evidence that humans hunted or scavenged mammoths is fairly rare, says University of Washington zooarchaeologist Donald Grayson. In a paper released earlier this year with Southern Methodist University colleague David Meltzer, Grayson notes that of 76 proposed Ice Age mammal kill sites, only 12 in the whole of North America suggest human hunting. That, the authors write, suggests that humans were not the primary drivers of North America’s Ice Age extinctions.Climate may have been key to the recent catastrophe. At the same time humans were moving onto the continent, the global climate was rapidly changing, moving from cold and dry to warm and wet.This changing climate rapidly winnowed away the cool, arid grasslands that woolly mammoths preferred. Combined with other ecological changes, such as the arrival of bison from Eurasia and forests springing up where “mammoth steppe” once spread, mammoths were squeezed out of their former range. The very last of the woolly mammoths, isolated on Wrangel Island off northern Siberia, perished about 4,000 years ago.Extinction is rarely the outcome of a single cause, however, and the reason the last member of a species went extinct may not be the same reason that it became vulnerable in the first place.
Perhaps, as the Chelsea mammoth slowly yields its secrets, it will add a little more to the continuing discussion over life and death at the edge of the Ice Age.
Read Brian Switek's blog Laelaps at National Geographic. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
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