The woolly mammoth's extinction is attributed to a combination of climate change and human hunting, with various sources suggesting that these factors played a significant role in their disappearance.

Climate change is believed to have reduced the availability of food and habitats for the woolly mammoths, ultimately leading to their extinction.

The warming climate led to changes in vegetation, replacing mammoth pastures with trees and swamp plants, which the mammoths could not adapt to.

Human activity, particularly hunting, is also thought to have contributed to the decline of the woolly mammoth population, with evidence suggesting that early humans hunted them for meat and raw materials.

The discovery of mammoth bones in Austria, dated to be around 30,000 to 40,000 years old, provides insight into the relationship between humans and mammoths, with some sources suggesting that humans may have set traps for the mammoths.

Climate change is estimated to have caused the extinction of 38 genera of large animals in North America at the end of the last ice age.

The woolly mammoths' extinction is believed to have occurred around 4,000 years ago, with some sources suggesting that they were restricted to Arctic islands near the time of their extinction.

The exact cause of the woolly mammoth's extinction is still debated, with some sources arguing that climate change was the primary factor [9], while others suggest that human hunting played a significant role.

Overall, the available evidence suggests that both climate change and human hunting contributed to the woolly mammoth's extinction, with climate change altering their habitats and food sources, and human hunting adding pressure to their already declining population.

The woolly mammoth's extinction is attributed to a combination of climate change and human hunting, with various sources suggesting that these factors played a significant role in their disappearance.

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Content: Skip to content
The Future

A zoologist explains why the project to resurrect the wooly mammoth should go extinct

De-extinction, if it is ever possible, will not be simple.
Key Takeaways
  • Over the past couple of decades, a handful of de-extinction projects have explored the potential of "resurrecting" the wooly mammoth.
  • The term is a bit misleading: Rather than resurrecting an extinct species, the process would essentially modify the genome of an existing species in order to give it traits an extinct species once possessed.
  • The British zoologist Matthew Cobb argues that the primary focus of conservation efforts needs to be on the prevention of species loss, not on de-extinction.

Excerpted from As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age by Matthew Cobb. Copyright © 2022. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

The most truly god-like ability provided by genetic engineering is the apparent possibility of resurrecting extinct species – ‘de-extinction’. The most attention-grabbing proposal, which has been around for over a decade, is the idea of recreating the woolly mammoth, using our knowledge of the mammoth genome, obtained from tissue frozen in the tundra. It is claimed that de-extincting mammoths and other large tundra-dwelling mammals would not only enable us to encounter fantastic beasts but would also help mitigate some of the effects of climate change – as these creatures trampled and disturbed the ground, they would supposedly allow the winter frost to penetrate deeper, keeping carbon trapped for longer.

Leaving aside the obvious lessons of Jurassic Park, the technical issues involved in recreating a mammoth appear insurmountable. It would require taking the genome of the mammoth’s closest living relative – an Asian elephant – and introducing all the relevant changes (synthesising a whole chromosome is an incredibly arduous process and has not yet been performed in an animal; a woolly mammoth had twenty-nine pairs of chromosomes). These two species split between 2.5 and 5 million years ago; there are millions of base pairs that differ between them. Not all of those differences are significant, and we do not know which are the ones that count, but it is technically possible that all the relevant differences could be identified and then introduced into the elephant genome (the Asian elephant has one fewer pair of chromosomes than a mammoth, so the whole process might prove problematic).

Assuming these difficulties can be overcome, the modified chromosomes would then have to be introduced into an elephant cell and safely interact there with all of the cell’s organelles and molecules. But this cellular environment would be different in so many unknown ways to the cells that the mammoth genome co-evolved with that there is no guarantee that this would work. As an indication of the challenge involved, it took Venter’s group twenty years to master this procedure in a bacterial cell, which has only one chromosome and does not have a nucleus or any of the complex structures found in eukaryotes such as elephants and mammoths and does not develop into a large, hairy, intelligent animal.

Even if all this went smoothly, the resultant embryo would have to be implanted into a surrogate – again, an Asian elephant would be best – and the myriad interactions between embryo and mother would have to function appropriately for months and not kill either or both. This is much trickier than you might think – a few years ago a Spanish-led team of researchers tried to clone an extinct subspecies of Pyrenean ibex; hundreds of embryos were created and implanted in a series of surrogate mothers of the same species, but only one animal was born and she died a few minutes after birth. Things could so easily go awry using a surrogate from a different species.

Perhaps for this reason, one version of the project involves artificial wombs (these are currently hypothetical), like those in Brave New World, but which would presumably have to be the size of a small car. Finally, mammoths were not simply bags of cells and DNA, but complex social animals that lived in an environment that has now disappeared along with the cultural aspects of their social organisation. Even if every one of those unbelievably complex steps could be overcome, there would be profound ethical questions about the well-being of these extraordinary animals in the alien world in which they would find themselves.

As a result of these very real problems, the woolly mammoth de-extinction scheme, initially the brainchild of George Church, has recently become less mammoth in scope. The current version of the project, partly funded by Revive & Restore (R&R), a US foundation co-founded by Stewart Brand, focuses on identifying those alleles that adapted the mammoth to cold temperatures, with the dream of maybe some day creating an elephant with enough mammothy characteristics to enable it to live in northern climes. By 2022, a biotech start-up co-founded by Church called Colossal Biosciences had raised $75 million* to try to create a ‘cold-resistant elephant’, which it was claimed would be ‘functionally equivalent’ to a mammoth. So not a mammoth.

All these nuances were lost in the inevitable media excitement at the Colossal announcement, which yet again led to headlines about de-extincting mammoths (these have recurred every few years). Tori Herridge, a mammoth expert at the Natural History Museum in London, was invited to be involved but declined. She explained why in a thoughtful article in Nature:

Colossal has committed to ‘radical’ transparency, inclusion and community engagement, but has the chance to set the bar even higher, by empowering the public as part of its de-extinction journey. … The ethical road to de-extinction has to include informed citizen voices, alongside experts and activists. This might mean that the process takes longer than five years, but private enterprises working for the common good shouldn’t shy away from the views of those they seek to serve. Let the people decide the future world they want to build.

As evolutionary biologist and R&R board member Beth Shapiro explains in her best-selling if somewhat misleadingly titled How to Clone a Mammoth, it is extremely unlikely that we will ever truly recreate any extinct species, not only because it is technically extremely difficult, but also because the ecological relationships that made up their world have all been lost. In that respect, extinction is indeed forever.

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Even more disturbing and god-like are the semi-serious, profoundly problematic proposals involving the recreation of Neanderthals – extinct humans who lived in Europe, Asia and the Middle East before us. Leaving aside some absurd internet fantasists, no scientist is actually considering such an experiment – cloning a Neanderthal and implanting the embryo in a surrogate human mother would be nauseatingly unethical on every level. However, researchers have studied the function of Neanderthal genes in human brain organoids – lentil-size blobs of tissue that can be grown in the laboratory from stem cells. A Neanderthal allele in a gene that plays a role in neural development and function altered the organisation and activity of otherwise human tissue. Brain organoid research is slightly creepy (they spontaneously grow eye-like structures that respond to light) as well as being a potential ethical minefield (could such a structure become even dimly conscious? How would we know?), but the researchers involved claim that this kind of study might shed light on how the functions of some of our genes may have differed in our close relatives.

Despite all the substantial technical and ethical issues relating to de-extinction, in 2014 the International Union for the Conservation of Nature set up a De-extinction Task Force which produced a set of guiding principles outlining the kind of detailed ecological and financial risk assessments that would be necessary before genetic engineering was applied to endangered or extinct species. In 2019, a subgroup of the Task Force published a positive exploration of the potential impact of genetic technology on conservation. At around the same time, ecologists from the University of California Santa Barbara and Imperial College took a far more cautious view, arguing that any de-extinction program should focus on recently extinct species (their ecology would be more likely to be intact) that could be restored in sufficient numbers to enable the recreation of their lost ecological function. That would rule out the mammoth, or a mammothified elephant.

What looks like a spiffy technofix might provoke excitement and attract funding from the public or mega-rich celebrities but is unlikely to be a solution to extinction for any but a tiny handful of cases. If molecular biology really must be employed, then scientists should try cloning dead members of an endangered species to increase genetic diversity, as has been done in the case of the US black-footed ferret, with funding from the R&R foundation. In 2022, an attempt to recover the genome of the extinct Christmas Island rat, using different extant rat genomes as models, showed that it was impossible to recover around 5 per cent of the genome, with over twenty genes being completely absent. Key genes involved in the sense of smell and the immune system were particularly affected.

De-extinction, if it is ever possible, will not be simple. The primary focus of conservation efforts needs to be on the prevention of species loss, not on de-extinction. In the vast majority of cases, that will involve basic work to prevent habitat degradation and to keep humans away from the endangered organisms. That might be less sexy, but it is a lot more sensible.

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

How did humans contribute to the wooly mammoth extinction?

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

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

Climate change is believed to have reduced the availability of food and habitats for the woolly mammoths, ultimately leading to their extinction.

Title:

Content: Partners news
The cause of the extinction of mammoths
Scientists have found that mammoths died out due to climate change
Photo: Stanislav Krasilnikov / TASS
An international team of researchers found that the cause of the extinction of mammoths in Siberia was primarily a sharp climate change, not human activity.
The article is published in the journal Nature.
Woolly mammoths became extinct only about four thousand years ago.
They were not only the main source of meat of ancient people – the latter made from their bones the basis for dwellings, from their tusks made harpoons and even musical instruments.
Therefore, there is a widespread theory that the main cause of extinction was humans.
Researchers from the Institute of Earth Sciences of St. Petersburg State University together with colleagues from the UK, Denmark, China, Norway and the United States decided to restore the appearance of the tundrosteppe, which was inhabited by mammoths.
To do this, they using the shotgun method — obtaining from a random massive sample of cloned fragments of the original sequence — analyzed the DNA of ancient plants and animals collected from 535 different places in the Arctic, where the mammoth lived, over 20 years.
They also analyzed the DNA of more than 1,500 modern plants and animals.
Researchers were able to map the distribution of populations of mammoths and other representatives of the megafauna of the tundrosteppe.
They saw that over time their populations and genetic diversity became smaller and smaller — making survival increasingly difficult.
With the end of the Pleistocene about 12 thousand years ago and the accompanying retreat of glaciers and the formation of rivers, lakes and marshes, vegetation has decreased in volume, and it has become insufficient to maintain the previous level of populations.
As the climate warms, trees and swamp plants have taken the place of former mammoth pastures.
“We have shown that climate change, in particular rainfall, has directly led to changes in vegetation.
According to our models, people did not have any influence on them [mammoths], ” said the first author of the work, a researcher at the University of Cambridge Yuchen Wang.
However, the extinction of mammoths was influenced not only by the warming of the climate itself.
“His speed was the last nail in the lid of the coffin – they (megafauna tundrosteppe – approx.
“Tape.ru ”) could not adapt quickly enough, when the landscape radically changed and food was not enough, ” said the head of the scientific group, Professor of Copenhagen and Cambridge universities Eske Willerslev.
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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?

shrank grassland
food sources disappearing
restricted habitat

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?

The warming climate led to changes in vegetation, replacing mammoth pastures with trees and swamp plants, which the mammoths could not adapt to.

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

How did climate change affect mammoth' habitat?

shrank grassland
pastures becoming swampy
food sources disappearing
restricted habitat

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 activity, particularly hunting, is also thought to have contributed to the decline of the woolly mammoth population, with evidence suggesting that early humans hunted them for meat and raw materials.

Title:

Content: Woolly Mammoth Bones Unearthed in Austrian Wine Cellar

It wasn’t the first time that ancient artifacts were discovered in one of Kamptal’s wine cellars.

An Austrian winemaker renovating his cellar unearthed a trove of woolly mammoth bones that could expand our understanding of the relationship between humans and the prehistoric beasts.

Andreas Pernerstorfer’s winery is in the notable winemaking and cultural region of Kamptal in northeastern Austria. After stumbling upon the huge bones in the dirt floor, he reported his discovery to Austria’s Federal Monuments Office. The Austrian Archaeological Institute has been excavating the site since March 2024 to a depth of 55 feet below ground and says it’s the first significant paleontology site found in Austria in a century.

The bones are believed to be between 30,000 and 40,000 years old and belonged to at least three woolly mammoths. According to Hannah Parow-Souchon, the paleontologist leading the excavation, the discovery is significant because mammoth bones are rarely found packed together. This could mean they were bunched there by humans, which could indicate they were hunted and slaughtered by humans; the site might be the remains of a Holocene Epoch cookout.

Most archaeologists agree that humans gathered in groups and used spears and other tools to take down woolly mammoths and other megafauna, which would have been immense sources of meat, hides, and bones to use as raw materials for tools. This activity could have contributed to the animals’ extinction

There is some debate whether preying on the massive beasts was a regular practice for Stone Age people, and science is foggy about how a band of simple humans could get the drop on an animal that stood 10 feet tall, weighed as much as six tons, and had fearsome protective tusks. The process would reveal a lot about coordination and planning among Paleolithic people.

Parow-Souchon said in a statement from the Austrian Academy of Sciences that it is possible that humans set a trap for mammoths there. She also said it was the most significant discovery of woolly mammoth remains in more than 100 years; most such sites in Europe have been dug up and hollowed out, with their archaeological value lost over time.

This is not the first such find in Kamptal. About 150 years ago, relics of early human life—including flint artifacts, jewelry fossils, and charcoal—were discovered there in a wine cellar next door.

How did humans contribute to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

The discovery of mammoth bones in Austria, dated to be around 30,000 to 40,000 years old, provides insight into the relationship between humans and mammoths, with some sources suggesting that humans may have set traps for the mammoths.

Title:

Content: Austrian Man Discovers Hundreds of Mammoth Bones While Renovating His Wine Cellar

Owner Andreas Pernerstorfer thought he’d found a piece of wood, but then he remembered something his grandfather had said about finding teeth in the cellar decades ago

Andreas Pernerstorfer was renovating his wine cellar in northern Austria when he stumbled upon something unusual.

Initially, he thought he’d found a piece of wood that had been left behind by his grandfather, he tells BBC News’ Bethany Bell.

But then Pernerstorfer remembered something his grandfather had mentioned once about finding teeth in the cellar while renovating it decades ago. He wondered if what he thought was a piece of wood was actually something more special.

When he reported his discovery, it turned out his instincts were right: Pernerstorfer’s wine cellar was full of huge mammoth bones—at least 300 of them, reports CNN’s Lianne Kolirin.

Since the middle of May, researchers with the Austrian Archaeological Institute at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW) have been excavating the site, which is located in Gobelsburg, a small town about 45 minutes northwest of Vienna.

So far, they’ve found bones that belonged to three individual mammoths, plus charcoal and stone artifacts. They believe the bones—which were stacked on top of one another—are between 30,000 and 40,000 years old.

“I’ve worked in many parts of the world and have never seen so many mammoths in one place,” says Hannah Parow-Souchon, the Austrian Academy of Sciences archaeologist who is leading the dig, to the Washington Post’s Victoria Bisset.

Eventually, the bones will be given to the Natural History Museum Vienna for restoration. Since they started their work this spring, archaeologists have only excavated a 129-square-foot site. They hope to return in August to continue digging.

Roughly 150 years ago, a neighboring wine cellar turned up charcoal, flint artifacts and jewelry. The archaeologists think the two wine cellars probably belong to the same site. Meanwhile, other similar sites in Austria and neighboring countries were excavated more than a century ago and have “largely been lost to modern research,” according to a statement from the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

The discovery marks the “first time we’ve been able to investigate something like this in Austria using modern methods,” says Parow-Souchon in the statement. “Such a dense bone layer of mammoths is rare.”

It’s not clear how or why three different mammoths ended up in the same spot—nor whether they died there or died elsewhere and were later transported to the site. One possibility is that early humans set up a trap or took advantage of the natural topography to ensnare them.

“We have strong indications that [humans] hunted for them but we have no idea how,” says Parow-Souchon to NBC News’ Alex Holmes. “We know that elephants have issues with slopes, so maybe they were hunted on a slope and therefore vulnerable.”

Mammoths, including woolly mammoths, are the extinct ancestors of modern elephants. These huge, tusked mammals roamed the Earth during the Pleistocene and early Holocene epochs, before disappearing roughly 4,000 years ago. Today, discoveries of the remains of these massive creatures can reveal insights into the species—and the ways that early humans interacted with them.

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How did humans contribute to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

from 300,000 years ago up until 10,000 years ago

Climate change is estimated to have caused the extinction of 38 genera of large animals in North America at the end of the last ice age.

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Content: How would the earth be different if modern man did not exist?
The Libyan Observatory Newspaper
LATEST NEWS
The human footprint can be seen across the planet today, from the towering skyscrapers that define our modern capitals to the pyramids and other ancient relics from our past.
Human activity also represents the sprawling open fields of agriculture, the roads that connect everything together.
But what would the world look like if humans didn ’ t exist before?
Some scientists paint a picture of a pure wilderness and an abundance of species, from fashionable to uncommon.
Trevor Worthy, a paleontologist and assistant professor at Flinders University in Australia, told Live Science: “I think it would be a much more vegetative place with a wealth of animals, of great size, spread across all continents except Antarctica. ”
A world without modern humans may also mean that our extinct human relatives, such as Neanderthals, will still exist.
And, of course, they would have changed the scene as well.
Humans shaped the world at the expense of many species, from the dodo (Raphus cucullatus) to the Tasmanian tiger (Thylacinus cynocephalus), which pushed us to extinction through activities such as hunting and habitat destruction.
The rate of extinction on Earth today is more than 100 times what it would have been without humans, according to the most conservative estimates, and has not been higher since the Cretaceous and Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction event that wiped out about 80% of animal species, including non-floating dinosaurs, 66 million years ago.
In other words, humans collided with the planet like an asteroid, and the dust continues to settle as wildlife continues to deteriorate.
“My great-grandfather was able to see herds of thousands of parrots in the landscape, my grandfather saw a hundred flocks, my father saw little and I ’ m lucky if I could see two in the woods, ” said Worthy.
The human-driven decline of nature suggests that Earth would be a more wild place without us, with some lost giants, such as moas, standing out the most.
This group of ostrich-like birds, some of which extend up to 11.8 feet (3.6 m) in New Zealand, evolved over millions of years.
Within 200 years of humans reaching their land 750 years ago, all nine species of moa have disappeared, along with at least 25 other vertebrate species, including the giant Haast eagles (Hieraaetus moorei) that hunted moa, according to Worthy.
The giant moa and the Haast vultures are recent examples of large animals whose eventual extinction is linked to human activities, such as unsustainable hunting and the introduction of invasive species into new habitats.
They are also indicators of what our relationship with large animals might be like elsewhere.
The survival of large animals is crucial to speculate on the existence of a land without humans, as these monsters have a significant impact on the landscape.
– Serengeti System
Soren Furby, senior lecturer in zoology at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, believes that humans played a key role in the disappearance of many large mammals thousands of years ago.
He led a 2015 study, published in the journal Diversity and Distributions, which suggested that without humans, the Earth would be much like the contemporary Serengeti system, an African ecosystem teeming with life.
In this scenario, extinct animals similar to those found in Serengeti today – including elephants, rhinos and lions – would live across Europe.
For example, instead of African lions (Panthera leo), there are still cave lions (Panthera spelaea), a slightly larger species that lived in Europe until about 12,000 years ago.
Meanwhile, the Americas will be home to relatives of huge elephants and bears, along with unique species, according to Forby.
"In a world without humans, there will be much more diversity than large mammals, and if you see a greater diversity than large mammals, you tend to see a more open habitat," Forby said.
Elephants and other large animals are well identified when finding food, and will not tolerate unnecessary obstacles.
“If you ’ re old enough, it might be easier to knock on a tree and eat fresh leaves on top of it, ” Forby said.
But also, if there are a large number of large mammals, there is a tendency to have fewer wooded plants in the first place, he said.
Large animals, such as elephants, are known as megafauna.
During the last ice age (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago), the world was rich in megafauna, but most of them died at the end of the ice age, or in the thousands of years since.
For example, about 38 genera of large animals went extinct in North America at the end of the last ice age, according to a 2020 study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Over the past century, scientists have debated whether natural climate changes or human activities, such as overfishing, are the main reason for the decline of these large animals.
A 2021 study published in Nature concluded that climate change ultimately wiped out the woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) and other Arctic megafauna that survived the end of the ice age.
However, humans hunted mammoths.
Scientists who believe humans may have been the main factor in their extinction, such as Forby, argue that mammoths survived climate change before humans appeared and would probably survive to this day had it not been for the added pressure humans placed on them.
Christopher Dottie, an associate professor and ecologist at Northern Arizona University, is modeling how past and present large animals transport seeds and nutrients through eating and defecating.
His work indicates that the transport of elements such as phosphorus, calcium and magnesium, which are important for life, was reduced by more than 90% through the extinction of large animals.
Dotti hypothesizes that without humans, elements would be evenly distributed across the landscape.
This means more fertile soil, which makes ecosystems more productive.
Humans tend to group elements together through practices such as farming and creating fenced areas, so that these areas become less fertile over time compared to terrestrial systems, according to Dauty.
Greater fertility means that plants can devote their resources to more fruit and flowers, so that the world looks more vibrant and feeds more animals.
While it is difficult to determine how humans and megafauna have influenced climate change for thousands of years with evidence obscured over time, it is much easier to judge our impact on Earth ’ s climate today.
Through global warming, caused by activities such as burning fossil fuels, humans have raised the global average temperature by about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degrees Celsius) since the beginning of the 20th century.
Therefore, the Earth would have been at least colder without us.
A 2016 study published in the journal Nature concluded that human-induced warming would delay the next ice age by at least 100,000 years.
And it wasn't due for another 50,000 years, though, even without human delay, so it's unlikely that Earth would be in the middle of another ice age today if we didn't exist.
Humans are inevitable.
Scientists aren ’ t sure why Neanderthals went extinct about 40,000 years ago, but because they mate with Homo sapiens, parts of their DNA are found in some of us.
There were probably multiple causes of Neanderthal death, but we're a prime suspect.
Chris Stringer, a professor and research leader in human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, believes competition for resources was a factor in the disappearance of Neanderthals.
“If we weren ’ t around, if we hadn ’ t come to Europe 45,000 or 50,000 years ago, I think they ’ d probably stay here, ” he told Live Science.
According to Stringer, Neanderthals lived a complex life in Europe, similar to modern humans, but they had difficulty adapting to climate change and were relatively few in number, with low genetic diversity.
This is bad news for any species, as it is a sign of inbreeding and ill health.
Stringer said Neanderthals were probably “already in trouble, and when modern humans got there too, I think that ’ s probably what pushed them to the edge. ”
Scientists are still learning about at least one human lineage that lived around the same time as modern humans and Neanderthals: Denisovans.
This lineage appears to be closer to Neanderthals than modern humans in genes and appearance, but it can be distinguished from Neanderthals with very large molars.
There is evidence of DNA in current humans living in places like New Guinea in Oceania — a finding that suggests Denisovans were in Southeast Asia interacting with ancestors of modern humans who later settled in the East, according to a 2012 study published in the journal Science.
These Denisovan interactions, along with fossil evidence, suggest that they had a larger geographic range than Neanderthals, encompassing a variety of environments and, therefore, arguably, were more adaptive than Neanderthals.
DNA evidence also suggests that Denisovans may have had greater genetic diversity than Neanderthals, according to Stringer.
Stringer said: “There ’ s no reason why Neanderthals or Denisovans shouldn ’ t do it eventually, given enough time. ”
He added that they may have overcome any potential intellectual deficiency, which is not clear to them, through evolution.
So maybe the world won ’ t look completely different after all.
Likewise, they could have made the same mistakes we have made since then.
So, global warming could have been here, but with Neanderthals or Denisovans leading it, not us.
"Who knows?"
Source: Live Science

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?

The woolly mammoths' extinction is believed to have occurred around 4,000 years ago, with some sources suggesting that they were restricted to Arctic islands near the time of their extinction.

Title:

Content: Woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius)

The most famous of the 10 mammoth species known to have existed is undoubtedly the woolly mammoth. Standing at around the same size as today’s African elephants, this magnificent animal roamed the northern hemisphere for roughly half a million years, becoming extinct by around 2000 BC.

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The reasons for the woolly mammoth’s demise are multifaceted. As the climate warmed at the end of the last Ice Age, and forests spread across the northern hemisphere, the grassland habitats in which the animal thrived were drastically reduced. This, combined with hunting pressures from humans, meant the woolly mammoth population ended up being restricted to just a couple of islands in the Arctic Ocean near Siberia and Alaska.

Some scientists hope to bring the woolly mammoth back from extinction, but with African and Asian elephant populations still facing a huge range of threats, many believe that our focus should be on preserving those animals instead.

Dodo (Raphus cucullatus)

For a large bird species that only became extinct relatively recently, we know surprisingly little about the dodo and its behaviours. In fact, there is just one near- complete dodo skeleton with bones from one bird, and there is only one specimen that contains soft tissue.

What we do know is that the dodo was restricted to Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean off the eastern coast of Madagascar and part of the Mascarene Archipelago, and was a relative to doves and pigeons. It’s thought that natural selection caused the animal to evolve into a flightless bird, with the species no longer needing to fly on an island with no predators.

However, when humans – and the animals they brought with them – first came to Mauritius in the 16th century, the dodo became extremely vulnerable. As well as being hunted for meat, it suffered from habitat loss and the predation of its eggs, resulting in its extinction by c1680.

Thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus)

Also known as the Tasmanian tiger or Tasmanian wolf, the thylacine was a carnivorous mammal originally found in Australia and New Guinea. Despite being similar in appearance to the domestic dog, it was actually a marsupial – a group of mammals that also includes kangaroos, koalas, wombats and opossums – and had a pouch.

Once widespread, the thylacine became extinct on the Australian mainland no less than 2,000 years ago, although the reasons for this are unknown. The species then became restricted to the island of Tasmania, off the south coast of Victoria, with between 2,000–4,000 individuals remaining when the British arrived in the early 19th century.

Eventually, the thylacine was persecuted as it was deemed a threat to livestock. The last known captive individual died from exposure at a zoo in Hobart in 1936 after being accidentally left out overnight. It’s thought that the last wild thylacines died in the 1960s, but that hasn’t stopped persistent rumours over the species’ continued survival.

Great auk (Pinguinus impennis)

Despite being similar in colouration and shape and bearing the genus name Pinguinus, the great auk wasn’t a relative of penguins, but was instead a member of the same family as puffins and guillemots.

Once a relatively common species in the North Atlantic, it bred on remote rocky islands such as Funk Island off the coast of Newfoundland, which was described by one 18th- century sailor as being “entirely covered with those fowls, so close that a man could not put his foot between them.”

However, exploration of the North Atlantic seas by European sailors spelled danger for the flightless seabird, with overharvesting of its eggs and adults for meat, feathers and body parts dramatically reducing the population. Attempts were made to protect the great auk, but that only increased its worth to collectors.

Sadly, the last breeding pair were killed and their single egg accidentally crushed by fishermen on Eldey Island, Iceland, on 3 July 1844.

Xerces butterfly (Glaucopsyche xerces)

Named after the Persian kings Xerxes I and Xerxes II (whose names are sometimes spelled ‘Xerces’ in France), this diminutive blue butterfly species lived among the coastal sand dunes of the San Francisco Peninsula, where its caterpillar preferred to feed on a single plant species.

However, urban development resulted in the loss of the plant, which could not survive in disturbed soil, and thus the loss of the Xerces blue in the 1940s – the first example of a butterfly becoming extinct due to human activity in North America.

Later, the Xerces Society, a non-profit conservation organisation established in 1971, was named in memory of the lost invertebrate.

For a while, there was uncertainty as to whether the Xerces blue was a distinct species or a subspecies of another blue butterfly. However, a scientific paper published in 2021 examined the DNA of a museum specimen collected in 1928 and proved that it was indeed a distinct species.

Passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius)

The passenger pigeon was one of the most abundant pigeon species on the planet. Native to North America, it was called jahgowa by the Seneca Tribe, which translates to “big bread”, as it was a source of food by the Seneca and the rest of the Haudenosaunee people. Despite this, the hunting of the species was carefully regulated by rules set by each tribe.

However, after colonisation by the Europeans, hunting of the passenger pigeon increased and gradually became more industrial and commercialised. As the population declined, the species then became vulnerable to further pressures such as habitat loss and predation by other animals.

The last living passenger pigeon was a female named Martha, who was kept at Cincinnati Zoo in Ohio. She died on 1 September 1914 – one of the few times we have known the absolute date of a species’ extinction. Her death contributed to the creation of the US Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which requires permits to hunt some migratory bird species.

Golden toad (Incilius periglenes)

So-named for the brilliant yellow-orange colouration of the male (the female was black with yellow and red patterning), the golden toad has become a poster child for extinctions connected to the climate crisis.

Found in the Monteverde Cloud Forest of Costa Rica, the amphibian spent most of the year underground. It only emerged for a few days each April, with males fighting with each other around pools of rainwater in order to mate with females.

In 1987, roughly 1,500 golden toads were observed. However, the following year, only 10 toads were found, and in 1989, just one male. That one male was the last golden
toad ever seen, and the species was officially declared extinct in 2004.

While the exact cause of extinction is unknown, the climate crisis – combined with habitat loss and an infectious disease called chytridiomycosis – are all thought to have played a part.

Baiji (Lipotes vexillifer)

The baiji was a freshwater dolphin that lived in the Yangtze River in China, the third-longest river in the world. Although still listed as ‘Critically Endangered’ on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List, having last been assessed in 2017, the species is considered extinct by conservationists. In fact, both the last confirmed sighting of a wild individual and the death of the last captive individual occurred in 2002.

The Yangtze River is also home to the Yangtze finless porpoise, the only freshwater porpoise in the world. Like the baiji, its existence is currently threatened by overfishing, shipping traffic and noise pollution.

However, the 2017 suspension of sand mining in Dongting Lake – a flood basin of the Yangtze in China’s Hunan province – has seen the finless porpoise return to areas that it had previously been avoiding.

Pinta Island giant tortoise (Chelonoidis nigra abingdonii or Chelonoidis abingdonii)

While there is debate about whether the giant tortoises of the Galápagos Islands are subspecies of the same species or a completely different species altogether, one thing is certain: Lonesome George was the last of his kind.

George was a Pinta Island tortoise, a species (or subspecies) that was already thought to have been extinct until he was discovered alone on the island that gave George and his former companions their collective name.

There were attempts to find other Pinta Island tortoises, and to mate him with closely related females, but to no avail. He died in 2012 of natural causes when he was around 100 years old.

Curiously, scientists believe it might be possible to bring back the Pinta Island tortoise, or at least a closely related version. Researchers have discovered hybrid tortoises with Pinta Island tortoise genes on nearby Isabela Island, with their Pinta Island ancestors having been moved there by whalers and pirates.

Megan Shersby is a naturalist, science writer and communicator. She was previously editorial and digital coordinator at BBC Wildlife Magazine

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This content first appeared in the November 2023 issue of BBC History Revealed

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Megan ShersbyNaturalist, writer and content creator
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How did climate change affect mammoth' habitat?

When did the last population of wooly mammoth become extinct?

Where were the last areas of wooly mammoth habitat?

islands in the Arctic Ocean near Siberia and Alaska

The exact cause of the woolly mammoth's extinction is still debated, with some sources arguing that climate change was the primary factor [9], while others suggest that human hunting played a significant role.

How did humans contribute to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

Overall, the available evidence suggests that both climate change and human hunting contributed to the woolly mammoth's extinction, with climate change altering their habitats and food sources, and human hunting adding pressure to their already declining population.

How did climate change affect mammoth' habitat?

food sources disappearing
restricted habitat

How did humans contribute to the wooly mammoth extinction?

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

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?