The woolly mammoth's extinction was likely caused by a combination of factors, including climate change, habitat loss, and human activities, although the exact cause remains unclear due to the incomplete fossil record.

The warming of the climate at the end of the last ice age is considered a possible environmental factor that contributed to the extinction of the woolly mammoth.

Human activities, including possible hunting or scavenging by Neanderthals, may have contributed to the woolly mammoth's extinction, as evidenced by the discovery of a flint hand-axe and bones with potential cut marks.

The extinction of the mammoths may have been caused by a combination of factors, including human activities such as hunting or scavenging, as suggested by the discovery of cut marks on mammoth bones and the presence of flint hand-axes.

Colossal Biosciences is the company aiming to revive the woolly mammoth.

"Neanderthal hunting or scavenging may have contributed to the mammoth's extinction, as suggested by prehistoric evidence and planned research investigations."

The research results were published in Quaternary Research (QuatRes).

Climate change, specifically a cold spell during the ice age, may have contributed to the population decline of the mammoths, as evidenced by the smaller size of the mammoth individuals found at the excavation site.

Humans may have contributed to the extinction of mammoths, as they are a large mammal species and humans have played a crucial role in the extinction of many large mammals.

Climate change contributed to the woolly mammoth's extinction by reducing their range through shifting vegetation patterns, making them more vulnerable to predators, including human hunters.

"Humans interacted with woolly mammoths in the area for around 700-800 years."

Climate change may have contributed to the mammoth's extinction, as suggested by the mention of "past climate change" in the context of the mammoth graveyard findings.

The woolly mammoth's extinction was likely caused by a combination of factors, including climate change, habitat loss, and human activities, although the exact cause remains unclear due to the incomplete fossil record.

Title:

Content: Scientists fear a repeat of an ancient fire that wiped out entire species
Science and Technology
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Over the past decade, deadly wildfires have become increasingly common due to human-induced climate change and disruptive land management practices.
Southern California experienced a wave of wildfires 13,000 years ago.
These fires have permanently changed vegetation in the region and contributed to the largest extinction on Earth in more than 60 million years.
A team of researchers has a unique perspective on the causes and long-term consequences of environmental changes, both those associated with natural climate variability and those caused by humans.
In a new study published in August 2023, researchers sought to understand the changes that occurred in California during the last major extinction event at the end of the ice age.
The event wiped out most of the large mammals on Earth about 10,000 to 50,000 years ago, as dramatic climatic disturbances spread.
Scientists often call the past 66 million years of Earth's history the Age of Mammals.
During that time, some organisms exploited the extinction of dinosaurs to become the dominant species on the planet.
During the Ice Age, Eurasia and the Americas were teeming with enormous beasts such as woolly mammoth, giant bears, and terrible wolves.
Two camels, three species of ground sloths and five species of big cats roamed what is now Los Angeles.
And then suddenly she went away.
Around the world, the large mammals that characterized global ecosystems have disappeared for tens of millions of years.
North America has lost more than 70% of mammals weighing more than 97 pounds (44 kg).
South America lost more than 80%, and Australia lost almost 90%.
Africa, Antarctica and a few remote islands hold what can be considered “normal ” animal communities today.
The cause of these extinctions remains unclear.
For decades, paleontologists and archaeologists have debated possible causes.
With the end of the last ice age, the warming of the climate changed weather patterns and reorganized plant communities.
At the same time, the population was growing rapidly and spreading all over the world.
Either or both of these processes could be involved in the extinction event.
But the fossil record of any region is usually so rare that it is not known exactly when large mammal species from different regions disappeared.
This makes it difficult to determine whether habitat loss, resource scarcity, natural disasters, human hunting, or a combination of these factors is the cause.
Some records provide evidence.
La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, the richest ice age fossil site in the world, preserves the bones of thousands of large mammals that have been trapped in sticky asphalt spills for the past 60,000 years.
The proteins in these bones can be accurately dated using radiocarbon, giving scientists unprecedented insight into the ancient ecosystem and a chance to shed light on when – and why – it collapsed.
A recent study of La Brea Tar Pits and nearby Lake Elsinore uncovered evidence of a tragic event 13,000 years ago that permanently altered southern California ’ s vegetation and caused the disappearance of La Brea ’ s famous mega-mammals.
Sediment archives from the bottom of the lake and archaeological records provide evidence of a deadly combination — a warm climate punctuated by decades of drought and a rapidly growing population.
These factors have pushed the Southern California ecosystem to a turning point.
The catalyst for this dramatic shift seems to have been the unprecedented increase in wildfires, possibly caused by humans.
The processes that led to this collapse are familiar today.
As California warmed up after emerging from the last ice age, the landscape became drier and forests receded.
In La Brea, herbivores have declined, possibly due to a combination of human hunting and habitat loss.
In the millennium before the extinction, average annual temperatures in the region rose by 5.5 degrees Celsius, and the lake began to evaporate.
Then, 13,200 years ago, the ecosystem went into a 200-year drought.
Half of the remaining trees were lost.
With fewer large herbivores eating them, dead plants accumulated on the landscape.
Humans and our ancestors have used fire for hundreds of thousands of years, but fire has different effects on different ecosystems.
Coal records from Lake Elsinore reveal that before humans, fire activity was low on the southern coast of California.
But from 13,200 to 13,000 years ago, as the population grew, fires in the region increased in order of magnitude.
The research suggests that the combination of heat, drought, loss of herbivores and human fires has pushed this system to a tipping point.
At the end of this period, Southern California was covered with plants that thrive after the fires.
A new fire system was created, and the huge animals disappeared.
Lessons for the future
Studying the causes and consequences of Pleistocene extinctions in California can provide a valuable context for understanding today ’ s climate and biodiversity crises.
A similar combination of climate warming and population expansion, biodiversity loss and human-ignited fires that marked the receding ice age in Southern California is once again emerging today.
The worrying difference is that temperatures today are rising 10 times faster than they were at the end of the ice age, mainly due to the burning of fossil fuels.
This human-caused climate change has contributed to a fivefold increase in the frequency, intensity and area burned in California in the past 45 years.
While California is now famous for severe fires, the study reveals that fire is a relatively new phenomenon in this region.
In the 20,000 years leading up to the extinction, the Lake Elsinore record showed a drastic reduction in the incidence of any fire even during similar droughts.
It is only after the arrival of man that fire becomes a regular part of the ecosystem.
Even today, collapsed power lines, campfires and other human activities have caused more than 90% of wildfires on the California coast.
The similarities between the massive extinctions of the Pleistocene and the current ecological crises are striking.
The past teaches us that the ecosystems we depend on are prone to collapse when subjected to multiple intersecting pressures.
Redoubling efforts to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, prevent reckless fires and preserve the massive organisms remaining on Earth could help avoid another, more catastrophic transformation.
The report was prepared by Lisa N. Martinez, PhD candidate in Geography from the University of California, Los Angeles, and Regan E. Dunne, Assistant Professor of Earth Sciences from the School of Arts, Arts and Sciences at the University of Southern California, Duransev.
Source: Science Alert
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How did humans contribute to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

The warming of the climate at the end of the last ice age is considered a possible environmental factor that contributed to the extinction of the woolly mammoth.

According to most recent research, what is the primary cause of wooly mammoth extinction?

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

What aspects of climate change contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

Human activities, including possible hunting or scavenging by Neanderthals, may have contributed to the woolly mammoth's extinction, as evidenced by the discovery of a flint hand-axe and bones with potential cut marks.

Title:

Content: Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard: Why an Ice Age discovery near Swindon has excited archaeologists

David Attenborough visited the site where the bones of several mammoths have been found alongside tools used by Neanderthals, for a new BBC documentary

If you were hoping to find the remains of Ice Age beasts, you might expect to travel to Siberia, not Swindon. But that is exactly where Sally and Neville Hollingworth, two amateur archaeologists from Wiltshire, made a spectacular find.

Exploring a quarry north of the town in 2017, they spotted something sticking up out of the ground. They were astonished to find it was the fossilised humerus – a leg bone – of a Steppe mammoth, a forerunner of the more famous woolly mammoth.

Further excavation of the site revealed three more mammoths, as well as a Steppe bison and a brown bear, all perfectly preserved in the prehistoric riverbed of the Thames.

Sally Hollingworth also disinterred a rare hand axe made of flint, lying beside the remains. As the dig progressed, more handmade tools were unearthed – suggesting there was a relationship between the animals and humans.

This story – and the discoveries still emerging from the site – is the subject of an absorbing new BBC documentary, Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard, airing after Christmas. In this one-off film, Sir David Attenborough, who has been a passionate fossil-hunter since he was a small boy, joins the excavation and investigates the importance of the finds.

Unlike most mammoth bones, which are “merely” tens of thousands of years old, experts using state-of-the-art soil-dating technology estimate the site discovered by the Hollingworths dates back 215,000 years. These are some the oldest mammoth remains ever unearthed in the UK.

The human-made implements could also be gamechangers for our understanding of the lives and capabilities of the Neanderthals, who were supplanted soon afterwards by our own species, Homo Sapiens.

Led by Professor Ben Garrod from the University of East Anglia, the excavation prompts – and helps to answer – many fundamental questions: Why were the mammoths at this particular place? How did they meet their ends? Could the Neanderthals have killed them or was there some kind of cataclysmic event?

The Hollingworths, who both have day jobs in an office and whose house is a wondrous small museum dedicated to fossils, feel a real connection with their discovery. They even used the hand-axe to cut their wedding cake – before, Attenborough jokes, eating “a mammoth meal.” (As archaeologists might say, the old ones are the best.)

Sally Hollingworth recollects her emotions when she first picked up the hand-axe. “I had the feeling that I was the first human to touch this stone tool in thousands of years.”

Attenborough agrees. “It’s a great thrill, this whole business, isn’t it?” he says. “The finds of this remarkable site have given us a rare glimpse of early Britain, a time when humans were fully immersed in the wild, living as part of Nature.”

Garrod is equally moved by the whole venture. Sitting in the mud on the site with three colleagues, he exclaims: “Isn’t it wonderful to think that the last time someone sat exactly in this spot with a little group of people, and that stone tool in their hands as a mammoth was lying there, was 200,000 years ago? We are talking about it now hundreds of thousands of years later. It’s quite poignant, isn’t it?”

Lisa Wescott Wilkins, an archaeologist whose company DigVentures is excavating the site, reinforces the significance of the discovery by describing her own joy when she first visited the quarry north of Swindon two years ago.

“I can remember the feeling of stepping onto the site for the first time very, very clearly because it’s something that I had never expected to experience in my career as an archaeologist,” she tells i. “Just seeing a mammoth tusk in the ground, and knowing what had been found close to it, and feeling the potential of the site – it was heart-stopping. I’m still buzzing really!”

Wescott Wilkins’ excitement was heightened when she and three colleagues helped lift an exceedingly heavy one-and-a-half-metre long mammoth tusk from the site. “If someone asks me how much it weighs, I’ll just have to say, ‘Well, it’s four-people’s worth!’”

The archaeologist is particularly pleased by the discovery of the flint hand-axe, “because what that might be showing is the actual interaction of the Neanderthals with the mammoths. We have bones that look to the naked eye like they’ve got cut marks on them. If they do, that is a smoking gun for this time period. It means the mammoths could have been either hunted or scavenged.

“The bones are in such amazing condition. They haven’t been knocked around. They are exactly where they fell. Also, the tools are still so sharp, you could use them today. So this is really indicating that an episode happened here. Such evidence has never been found before. My heart speeds up even thinking about it!”

Wescott Wilkins adds that “archaeology is so exciting because it gives you that sense of touching something that is bigger than yourself, and that really applies to this site. It’s very, very special. As an archaeologist, you can never know everything – and what fires me up about this site are all the amazing new things I’m learning. That is a fantastic reason to get out of bed every morning.”

Although prehistoric, this site also tells a very pertinent, up-to-the-minute story about climate change. The Neanderthals had to adapt rapidly as temperatures dropped steeply during the Ice Age.

“The Neanderthals were having to deal with changes in the landscape that were beyond their control,” says Wescott Wilkins. “Weather events would have affected the environment and the amount of food that they could find.

“All that was happening around them and they had to cope with it. Looking at the impact of climate change on this Neanderthal population, it’s definitely a cautionary tale about how far it can change the way we live.”

Attenborough echoes those sentiments: “It is thought that Neanderthals may have been around for some 400,000 years. Their survival relied on their instinctive understanding of the natural world. Whether our own species can thrive for quite as long remains to be seen.”

But we leave the last word to the woman without whom none of these extraordinary advances in our understanding of prehistory would have been possible. How would Sally Hollingworth sum up this venture? “It’s like a time travel through the gravel.”

Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard, BBC1, Thursday 30 December, 8pm

How did humans contribute to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

The extinction of the mammoths may have been caused by a combination of factors, including human activities such as hunting or scavenging, as suggested by the discovery of cut marks on mammoth bones and the presence of flint hand-axes.

How did humans contribute to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

Colossal Biosciences is the company aiming to revive the woolly mammoth.

Title:

Content: ADVERTISING

TECHNOLOGY

CIA wants to revive prehistoric species such as the woolly mammoth

The CIA is funding a project that aims to revive iconic species like the woolly mammoth and Tasmanian tiger, but it’s not good news.

The CIA has become the latest investor in Colossal Biosciences, a genetic engineering company that wants to revive iconic species of the past, such as the woolly mammoth and Tasmanian tiger. According to LiveScience, reports indicate that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency is funding research into the ‘resuscitation’ of extinct prehistoric species.

Through a venture capital investment firm called In-Q-Tel, which is funded by the CIA, the government agency has made a financial commitment to Texas-based Colossal Biosciences. The latter’s official website explains that its goal is to “see the woolly mammoth thunder over the tundra once again” by combining “genetic science with the business of discovery.”

ADVERTISING - CONTINUE READING BELOW

According to the In-Q-Tel blog, investing in the project will help the U.S. government “set the ethical standards” for genetic engineering technology and keep the country at the forefront of nations that may also be interested in engineered genetic code modification research.

Reviving prehistoric creatures

Colossal Biosciences appears to be interested in bringing back various prehistoric animals, such as the woolly mammoth that inhabited Arctic regions from North America to Siberia and became extinct at the end of the Pleistocene due to the disappearance of its natural habitat.

ADVERTISING - CONTINUE READING BELOW

But the interest in reviving species also includes others such as the Dodo bird, which disappeared from the Earth at the end of the 17th century due to human causes. The Tasmanian tiger is another animal that Colossal has its sights set on; this species became extinct in the 20th century, also due to anthropological causes.

Is it feasible to bring the species back?

Genetic engineering has been used in the past for nature conservation, but only cloning has been used as a measure to prevent species from becoming extinct forever. Genes have been taken from captive-bred specimens for cloning and then reintroduced into the wild.

ADVERTISING - CONTINUE READING BELOW

So far, genetic modification using the CRISPR addition technique, which is used to ‘copy, paste and replace’ specific gene sequences in DNA, is not a tool that has been used for nature conservation, and many have warned about the dangers this would bring.

The woolly mammoth, for example, lived in the ice age when temperatures were much lower than they are now. It became extinct due to climate change that wiped out its natural habitat, so the thought of reviving it brings with it an inherent ethical debate that cannot be ignored.

ADVERTISING - CONTINUE READING BELOW

In any case, the large amounts of money that the CIA intends to invest in resuscitating the woolly mammoth and other ancient species could be used for the conservation of species that are currently in danger of disappearing. However, it seems that beyond an animalistic objective, the agency seems to have a special interest in genetic modification, an area that is increasingly growing and completely lacks ethical and professional guidelines.

Story originally published in Spanish in Ecoosfera

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"Neanderthal hunting or scavenging may have contributed to the mammoth's extinction, as suggested by prehistoric evidence and planned research investigations."

Title:

Content: Skip to main content

200,000-year-old 'mammoth graveyard' found in UK

Researchers have unearthed a mammoth "graveyard" filled with the bony remains of five individuals — an infant, two juveniles and two adults — that died during the last ice age at what is now a quarry in Swindon, a town in southwest England.

Alongside the mammoth remains, researchers discovered stone tools crafted by Neanderthals, including a hand ax and small flint tools known as scrapers, which were used to clean fresh animal hides, according to DigVentures, the crowdsourced archaeological outfit in the U.K. that led the excavation. However, the team has yet to analyze the mammoth bones to determine whether they have Neanderthal tool marks on them.

"Finding mammoth bones is always extraordinary, but finding ones that are so old and well preserved, and in such close proximity to Neanderthal stone tools is exceptional," Lisa Westcott Wilkins, the co-founder of DigVentures, said in a statement.

Related: Photos: See the Ancient Faces of a Man-Bun Wearing Bloke and a Neanderthal woman

Two amateur fossil hunters, Sally and Neville Hollingworth, discovered the graveyard and Neanderthal tools. Soon after, DigVentures organized two field seasons in 2019 and 2020 to excavate the site. The archaeologist-led work uncovered more ice age remnants, including delicate beetle wings, fragile freshwater snail shells and mammoth remains, such as tusks, leg bones, ribs and vertebrae belonging to a species of Steppe mammoth, a group whose descendants include the woolly mammoth. Although early Steppe mammoths stood up to 13.1 feet (4 meters) high at the shoulders, the five mammoth individuals at the graveyard were small, an indication that the species might have shrunk during an especially cold spell during the ice age, according to DigVentures.

Researchers dated the site to between 220,000 and 210,000 years ago, toward the end of an interglacial, or warm period, when Neanderthals still lived in Britain. Once temperatures dropped, however, the Neanderthals moved farther south.

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Going forward, the team plans to figure out why so many mammoths died at one spot and whether Neanderthals hunted the beasts or scavenged their remains. Some previously found prehistoric evidence suggests Neanderthals stalked mammoths and other large pachyderms. For instance, Neanderthal footprints were found at a 100,000-year-old "nursery" for straight-tusked elephants (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) in southern Spain, Live Science previously reported

The new graveyard findings are described in the new BBC documentary "Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard," with Sir David Attenborough and Ben Garrod, an evolutionary biologist at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, who joined DigVentures on site to film the excavations. The show airs at 8 p.m. GMT on Dec. 30 on BBC One.

"The findings have enormous value for understanding the human occupation of Britain, and the delicate environmental evidence recovered will also help us understand it in the context of past climate change," Duncan Wilson, the chief executive of Historic England, a British historical preservation body, said in a statement. "Through these finds and the research that will follow, we look forward to further light being shed on life in Britain 200,000 years ago."

The work was funded by Historic England and supported by Keith Wilkinson of ARCA at the University of Winchester, the site's landowners Hills Group Quarry Products and a wider specialist team from several U.K. research institutions.

Originally published on Live Science.

Laura is an editor at Live Science. She edits Life's Little Mysteries and reports on general science, including archaeology and animals. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Scholastic, Popular Science and Spectrum, a site on autism research. She has won multiple awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association for her reporting at a weekly newspaper near Seattle. Laura holds a bachelor's degree in English literature and psychology from Washington University in St. Louis and an advanced certificate in science writing from NYU.

How did humans contribute to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

The research results were published in Quaternary Research (QuatRes).

Title:

Content: A revolutionary breakthrough: how new technology can save large animals from extinction
QuatRes: Computational model shows the chances of extinction of large animals
1: 45.
Scientists from the University of California, San Diego have developed a computational model that can predict the probability of extinction of large animals.
This model takes into account the complexity of the interaction between humans and megafauna, the peculiarities of their life cycle and the environment.
The results of the study were published in the scientific journal Quaternary Research (QuatRes).
The authors believe that this model can become an important tool for the development of strategies and tactics for managing environmental policy in the face of the threat of extinction of species.
To create the model, the researchers chose Syncerus antiquus, a giant African buffalo that lived in Africa from 12 to 10 thousand years ago.
The reasons for the disappearance of this species are still a matter of discussion among experts.
Using computer simulations, the experts investigated how populations of Syncerus antiquus could evolve in different scenarios, given human and environmental exposures.
Factors such as climate change, the length of the vegetation period of plants and differences in natural conditions were considered.
40 rounds of simulation were conducted for each of the scenarios to estimate the probability of extinction of the Syncerus antiquus population.
The results showed that the probability of local extinction of buffalo increased with increased aggressiveness of males and in the conditions of climate change and instability of the feed base.
Now, the researchers plan to apply this model to ordinary livestock to improve agricultural planning in the face of climate change, as well as predict the extinction of other large representatives of wild fauna.
Author Makar Gorshenin
Makar Vadimovich Gorshenin is a student of the Moscow University of Finance and Law, a freelance correspondent of Pravda.Ru.

Climate change, specifically a cold spell during the ice age, may have contributed to the population decline of the mammoths, as evidenced by the smaller size of the mammoth individuals found at the excavation site.

According to most recent research, what is the primary cause of wooly mammoth extinction?

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

Humans may have contributed to the extinction of mammoths, as they are a large mammal species and humans have played a crucial role in the extinction of many large mammals.

Title:

Content: Cave lions in Europe and mammoths in the United States.
Scientists have told what the Earth would be without Homo sapiens
The researchers say that in general, the planet could be an exciting place, which would be inhabited by representatives of megafauna.
Scientists believe that without humans, the Earth would be a more wild and fertile place, in which giants such as ostrich moa birds with a height of 3.6 meters still lived.
They lived in New Zealand for millions of years, but disappeared 750 years after their land was invaded by man, writes LiveScience.
The vanished giant moas and eagles of Haast, whose wingspan was 2.6 meters or more, are a small example of how human activity has changed the planet.
The survival of such large animals is crucial in thinking about what the Earth would be like without humans, as such giants have a crucial influence on landscapes.
Senior lecturer in zoology at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, Seren Forby, says humans have played a crucial role in the extinction of many large mammals.
Forby led the study, published in the journal Diversity and Distributions.
It said that without humans, the Earth would resemble an ecoregion in East Africa, the Serengeti, teeming with life.
In such a scenario, extinct animals, along with elephants, rhinos and lions, would live throughout Europe.
For example, the African lions (Panthera leo) would still be replaced by cave lions (Panthera spelaea), a larger species that lived in Europe about 12,000 years ago.
At the same time, America would be home to larger relatives of elephants and bears, as well as unique species such as the glyptodon – car-sized armadillos and giant sloths.
“In a world without humans, there would be a lot more different species of large mammals, as well as a much more open habitat, ” says Forby.
Elephants or other species of large animals do not tolerate obstacles in their search for food.
In such cases, the territory acquires a less wooded appearance.
The world would be brighter
During the last Pleistocene Ice Age (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago), the Earth was rich in megafauna.
Much of it went extinct after the end of this ice age or millennia later.
A 2021 study from the journal Nature found that climate change had wiped out woolly mammoths as well as other Arctic megafauna, but humans also put additional pressure on these species by hunting them.
Christopher Doughty, an ecologist at the University of Northern Arizona, modeled how large animals, among other things, affected ecosystems by moving seeds and nutrients during eating and defecating.
The expert found that the movement of elements such as phosphorus, calcium and magnesium, which play a crucial role in life, decreased by almost 90% along with the disappearance of megafauna.
The researcher emphasizes that without human intervention, all the necessary elements would be evenly distributed throughout the landscape.
Thus, the soil would be more fertile and productive.
Agriculture and zoning make land less fertile compared to systems in the wild.
Such increased fertility means that the Earth would be much richer in crops and colors, the planet would definitely be brighter without humans.
Without humans, the climate would be different.
Human induced global warming is known to have raised the average temperature by 1 degree Celsius since the early 20th century.
Consequently, the weather on the planet would be cooler without humanity.
A 2016 study in the journal Nature found that current warming delayed the onset of the ice age by at least 100,000 years.
But this should not have happened for another 50,000 years, so it is unlikely that without humans there would be another ice age on Earth right now.
People are inevitable
Modern humans (Homo sapiens) were not always the only hominins on the planet.
The disappearance of Homo sapiens could open up new perspectives for Neanderthals.
There is no single answer to the question of why the Neanderthals died out about 40 thousand years ago.
There were probably several reasons for their disappearance, and Homo sapiens are the main suspects.
Professor Chris Stringer from the Natural History Museum in London believes that the competition between Neanderthals and humans was one of the reasons for the disappearance of the former.
“If Homo sapiens hadn ’ t come to Europe about 45,000 or 50,000 years ago, I think Neanderthals and their descendants would still have lived on Earth, ” Stringer says.
The expert notes that Neanderthals led a complex life in Europe, they faced climate change, were a small group with low genetic diversity.
“Neanderthals probably were already in distress when modern humans came to their lands, and this factor could be the last, ” the expert notes.
But humans could have influenced the survival of more than just Neanderthals.
At least there is another relative of Homo sapiens who shared land with humans and Neanderthals: the Denisovans.
This line is closer to Neanderthals than to modern humans in terms of genes and appearance.
Judging by a number of studies, people interbred with Denisovans, because modern people continue to find the DNA of Denisovans.
It is assumed that Denisovans had a wider range of habitat than Neanderthals.
They may also have more genetic diversity than Neanderthals.
"Perhaps the Denisovans were even better species for survival than the Neanderthals," Stringer said.
In general, Denisovans and Neanderthals could pave the way similar to H. sapiens, moving from hunting and gathering to the development of agriculture.
"There is no obvious reason why Neanderthals or Denisovans would not have evolved if they had the time to do so," he said.

How did humans contribute to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

Climate change contributed to the woolly mammoth's extinction by reducing their range through shifting vegetation patterns, making them more vulnerable to predators, including human hunters.

Title:

Content: Skip to main content
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During the last ice age, woolly mammoths were among the largest creatures to walk the North American landscape. Now, a team of American and Canadian researchers has discovered that the elephantine beasts took the “walking” part of their job description quite seriously.

Based on an analysis of a single tusk from an adult male woolly mammoth found in Alaska, the scientists determined that the animal journeyed about 70,000 kilometres over the course of its life – a trip equivalent to nearly twice around the world.

“The range is staggering. ... He definitely moved across a huge, huge area,” said Clement Bataille, an assistant professor of earth and environmental science at the University of Ottawa and a co-author on the study.

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Dr. Bataille said the high degree of mobility may have been part of the mammoth’s mating strategy. In comparison, African elephants can travel a lot, too, he added, and males typically depart from the groups they are born into once they reach sexual maturity.

However, Dr. Bataille and his colleagues note that the requirement for such a large range to roam in may have ultimately hastened the extinction of the species once the climate warmed and the shaggy grazers were hemmed in by shifting vegetation patterns. That, in turn, would have left them more vulnerable to predators, including human hunters.

The study began in 2018 when Matthew Wooller, director of the Stable Isotope Facility at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, invited Dr. Bataille and other colleagues to join an effort to extract information from a mammoth fossil discovered in 2010 on the north side of the Brooks mountain range, a few hundred kilometres from the Arctic Ocean. The fossil dates back 17,000 years, to a time when much of Alaska was a glacier-free grass plain connected to Siberia by the Bering land bridge.

The researchers nicknamed their specimen “Kik,” after a river system near the place where it was found.

Using the mammoth’s sliced-open tusk, they obtained detailed measurements of oxygen and strontium isotopes that were locked in the ivory material. The mammoth acquired the isotopes, which vary according to local geology, through the vegetation and water it consumed over the course of its life. As the tusks grew at the rate of about five to six centimetres each year, they recorded changes in isotope levels, which reveal when and how often the animal moved between locations with different geology.

The team also tested isotope levels in rodents that were gathered in different parts of Alaska as part of museum collections. That allowed them to match their mammoth isotope measurements to geographic locations. Finally, they used artificial intelligence software to reconstruct possible paths the mammoth may have taken, working backward from the location where it died at the age of 28.

The results suggest that Kik began its life in the Yukon River basin of central Alaska. As a juvenile it moved regularly in a north-south pattern, during a time when it was likely part of a herd, the researchers said. At about age 16 its movements transitioned to longer distance travel, often centred on certain core areas where it stayed for periods of time before setting out for new pastures.

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“It just takes off and goes on these 500- to 600-kilometre trips all at one time, going from one core area to the next,” Dr. Bataille said. The study found that some of the places where the mammoth lingered are frequented today by migrating herds of caribou.

Jeffrey Rasic, a study co-author and archaeologist with the U.S. National Parks Service based in Fairbanks, said the data suggest that Kik followed a predictable sequence of movements. If that was typical for Alaskan mammoths, it would have provided a huge incentive for hunters moving into the area from Asia to situate themselves in places where they could reliably expect to meet their quarry at certain times of the year, rather than pursuing them over a vast landscape.

“That would be an ideal set-up for intercepting a really big ticket meal item like a mammoth,” he said.

Vincent Lynch, an evolutionary biologist at the University at Buffalo who was not involved in the study, said that while it’s not surprising to find animals moving over great distances, it’s quite a different matter to show that it happened in a species that no longer exists.

“That’s the trick that makes this study interesting,” he said. “It helps us better reconstruct the behaviour and ecology of mammoths in a way that’s really remarkable for an extinct species.”

Dr. Lynch, who has studied the genetics of the last known population of woolly mammoths, which died out about 4,000 years ago, said it’s an open question whether large-scale movement was a disadvantage.

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“We tend to think that widely distributed species which are mobile ... might be better able to find new habitats should the environment change. But could mammoths find refuge in a world that was warming?” he said.

One obvious limitation of the study is that its conclusions depend entirely on the movements of a single individual. Dr. Bataille said that he and his colleagues plan to perform a similar analysis on a female mammoth specimen for comparison.

The team’s study was published Thursday in the journal Science.

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According to most recent research, what is the primary cause of wooly mammoth extinction?

How did climate change affect mammoth' habitat?

restricted habitat
food sources disappearing
shrank grassland

How did humans contribute to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

"Humans interacted with woolly mammoths in the area for around 700-800 years."

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Siberia's 'mammoth graveyard' reveals 800-year human interactions with woolly beasts

Woolly mammoths are evocative of a bygone era, when Earth was gripped within an Ice Age. Current knowledge places early mammoth ancestors in the Pliocene (2.58–5.33 million years ago, Ma) before their populations expanded in the Pleistocene (2.58 Ma–11,700 years ago, kyr). However, as climate changed, their numbers dwindled to isolated populations in modern Siberia and Alaska, until their last dated survival 4 kyr ago.

In the East Siberian Arctic (>70 °N), there is not only evidence of significant woolly mammoth populations, but also how humans interacted with them, the focus of new research in Quaternary Science Reviews.

Along the Berelekh River, Russia, a 'mammoth graveyard' can be found. Here, thousands of disarticulated bones, representing a minimum of 156 individual mammoths, found alongside an indicate the close proximity of these two communities, forming the Berelekh geoarchaeological complex.

Dr. Vladimir Pitulko, of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and colleagues aimed to assess the relationship between the 'mammoth graveyard' and the archaeological site through a re-examination of stratigraphic and paleogeographic data obtained in 2009, with new fieldwork focused on the left riverbanks where have readily yielded from their home in the sediment and appeared on the water's edge. Alongside them are remains of Pleistocene hare, Arctic fox and wolves, as well as soot and charcoal from hearths and worked mammoth tusks (one being an unfinished throwing spear).

The researchers suggest humans created these bone accumulations as a byproduct of the production of mammoth ivory technology, while hares may have been targeted for fur to produce winter clothing.

Notably, evidence of blowfly pupae activity on cavities in skulls and bones is indicative that the mammoth carcasses were added to the 'graveyard' de-fleshed. Indeed, there appears to be evidence of sorting of the bones, with only the most valuable transported to Berelekh from the area in which the mammoth was killed, leaving behind parts such as spinal columns, carpal ('hand') and tarsal ('foot') bones.

There are three radiocarbon dated peaks in woolly mammoth accumulation at 11.8, 12.2 and 12.4 kyr ago, which fall within known human settlement of the area (11.2–12.4 kyr ago) during the Bølling-Allerød deglacial, when the warmed and pollen evidence suggests the region became more arid.

Fluctuations in the abundance of mammoths in the 'graveyard' suggest human settlement of the area may also have changed through time (frequent occupation but not permanent), which the researchers attribute to on the floodplain permitting suitability for erecting campsites.

Radiocarbon dating of mammoth remains identifies their presence here pre-dating human settlement (beginning ~12.5 kyr ago), but also shows that humans remained in the area (until ~11.2 kyr ago) after mass mammoth remains accumulation declined (~11.8 kyr ago).

Given this, four possible causes are suggested by the scientists to explain such a significant mass accumulation of bones: 1) mass death by natural causes or human, 2) repeated group deaths in the same location, likely due to human predation, 3) concentration of remains by , such as river action, or 4) solely derived from human predation or scavenging from deceased carcasses.

However, the latter is considered to be the most likely to produce useful tools from ivory tusks, as well as meat to feed the community, as there is no evidence on the bones for a cause of mass death, radiocarbon ages do not cluster into multiple phases for recurrent death deposits and stream flows were unlikely to reach sufficient velocities to transport such heavy bones.

These findings are concurrent with mammoth remains at the Yana Paleolithic site, also in Siberia. Here, estimates suggest the 'graveyard' increased by 1–2 mammoths per year rather than a mass death event, a figure Dr. Pitulko and colleagues conclude could be similar or even higher for Berelekh.

This research is significant as it alters the previously-held belief that there was a lag of 50–80 years between mammoth bone accumulation from natural processes (such as deposition in flood channels) and , instead now defining a close relationship between the two over 700–800 years. Sadly, now that human-mammoth relationship has continued as ivory hunters have looted the site beyond further study.

More information: Vladimir V. Pitulko et al, From the Berelekh 'mammoth graveyard' to Berelekh geo-archaeological complex: Paleoenvironment, site formation processes, and human-mammoth relationships, Quaternary Science Reviews (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.quascirev.2024.108692

Journal information: Quaternary Science Reviews

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Citation: Siberia's 'mammoth graveyard' reveals 800-year human interactions with woolly beasts (2024, June 10) retrieved 10 June 2024 from https://phys.org/news/2024-06-siberia-mammoth-graveyard-reveals-year.html
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Climate change may have contributed to the mammoth's extinction, as suggested by the mention of "past climate change" in the context of the mammoth graveyard findings.

According to most recent research, what is the primary cause of wooly mammoth extinction?

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

What aspects of climate change contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?