Mammoth

A mammoth is any species of the extinct genus Mammuthus. These proboscideans are members of the elephant family and close relatives of modern elephants. They were often equipped with long curved tusks and, in northern species, a covering of long hair. They lived from the Pliocene epoch from around 4.8 million to 4,500 years ago.The word mammoth comes from the Russian мамонт mamont, probably in turn from the Vogul (Mansi) language.

The woolly mammoth was the last species of the genus. Most populations of the woolly mammoth in North America and Eurasia died out at the end of the last Ice Age. Until recently, it was generally assumed that the last woolly mammoths vanished from Europe and Southern Siberia about 10,000 BCE, but new findings show that some were still present there about 8,000 BCE. Only slightly later, the woolly mammoths also disappeared from continental Northern Siberia.[4] Woolly mammoths as well as Columbian mammoths disappeared from the North American continent at the end of the ice age. A small population survived on St. Paul Island, Alaska, up until 3,750 BCE,and the small mammoths of Wrangel Island survived until 1,650 BCE
Illustration of an Indian elephant jaw and a mammoth jaw from Georges Cuvier's 1796 paper on living and fossil elephants.

A definitive explanation for their mass extinction is yet to be agreed upon. About 12,000 years ago, warmer, wetter weather began to take hold. Rising sea levels swamped the coastal regions. Forests replaced open woodlands and grasslands across the continent. The Ice Age was ebbing. As their habitats disappeared, so did the bison and the mammoth.

Whether the general mammoth population died out for climatic reasons or due to overhunting by humans is controversial. Another theory suggests that mammoths may have fallen victim to an infectious disease. A combination of climate change and hunting by humans is the most likely explanation for their extinction.

New data derived from studies done on living elephants (see Levy 2006) suggests that though human hunting may not have been the primary cause for the mammoth's final extinction, human hunting was likely a strong contributing factor. Homo erectus is known to have consumed mammoth meat as early as 1.8 million years ago (Levy 2006: 295).

However, the American Institute of Biological Sciences also notes that bones of dead elephants, left on the ground and subsequently trampled by other elephants, tend to bear marks resembling butchery marks, which have previously been misinterpreted as such by archaeologists.

The survival of the dwarf mammoths on Russia's Wrangel Island was because the island was very remote and uninhabited in the early Holocene period. The actual island was not discovered by modern civilization until the 1820s by American whalers. A similar dwarfing occurred with the Pygmy Mammoth on the outer Channel Islands of California, but at an earlier period. Those animals were very likely killed by early Paleo-Native Americans, and habitat loss caused by a rising sea level that split the Santa Rosae into the outer Channel Islands.

Thomas Jefferson, well-versed in the natural sciences, suggested to Lewis and Clark that they might find mammoth fossils during their explorations of the American West.