Woolly mammoths still roamed an Arctic island when Egypt was a kingdom
Most woolly mammoths vanished from mainland Siberia around 10,000 years ago, but a stranded population hung on at Wrangel Island until about 4,000 years ago. Frozen carcasses, dung and cave paintings make this one of the best understood prehistoric animals, and a cheese given to Thomas Jefferson turned its name into an adjective.
Mammoths began in Africa with Mammuthus subplanifrons in the early Pliocene and reached Europe about 3 million years ago. Their story is written in their teeth: each new species carried more enamel ridges on its molars for grinding tougher grass, rising from eight to ten in the earliest European form to 26 in animals that appeared in Siberia around 400,000 years ago and became the woolly mammoth. Skulls grew taller and shorter to hold those deep crowns. The species crossed the Bering Strait into North America about 100,000 years ago, where DNA shows it interbred with the Columbian mammoth.
Bulls stood up to 3.49 metres at the shoulder and could weigh 8.2 tonnes, roughly African elephant size, while a newborn calf was about 90 kilograms. Long guard hairs over a short undercoat, small ears and a short tail limited heat loss and frostbite on the mammoth steppe that spread across northern Eurasia and North America. It grazed mostly grasses and forbs, cycled through six sets of molars, and could probably live to about 60. People hunted it and built tools, art and even shelters from its bones and tusks.
Explaining the bones took centuries. Hans Sloane saw in 1728 that Siberian teeth and tusks belonged to elephants but blamed the biblical flood; Johann Philipp Breyne made the same guess ten years later. Georges Cuvier argued in 1796 that they came from a distinct species that had died out, an idea few then accepted, and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach named it the first-born elephant in 1799. The word mammoth may come from a Vogul term meaning earth-horn, though its origin is uncertain.
Genetics has since placed the Asian elephant as its closest living relative, confirmed by three teams who pieced together its mitochondrial genome within six weeks in 2005 and 2006. Finishing the full genome in 2015 prompted talk of bringing the animal back, but no proposed method is currently workable.
Source: Woolly mammoth
