Woolly mammoths were still alive when the first Egyptian civilisation rose
The last mammoths did not vanish in some distant ice age. A population on Wrangel Island, in the Arctic Ocean, lasted until roughly 4,000 years ago, while early civilisations flourished in Egypt and Mesopotamia. The genus itself began about six million years earlier, in Africa, not the frozen north.
The oldest known mammoth, Mammuthus subplanifrons, lived in southern and eastern Africa in the late Miocene. By around 3.2 million years ago mammoths had walked into Eurasia via Sinai, and roughly 1.5 to 1.3 million years ago the steppe mammoth crossed the Bering land bridge to North America, giving rise to the Columbian mammoth. The woolly mammoth evolved from steppe ancestors in Siberia several hundred thousand years ago. Genetic work since the woolly mammoth's mitochondrial genome was published in 1997 shows mammoths were closer kin to Asian elephants than to African ones.
Size varied hugely. Steppe mammoths and their predecessors dwarfed today's elephants, with big males standing about 3.8 to 4.2 metres at the shoulder and weighing up to around 12.7 tonnes. Woolly mammoths were roughly the size of an African bush elephant. On islands, dwarfism produced miniatures; the Cretan species stood perhaps a metre tall and weighed about 180 kilograms. Both sexes carried spirally twisted tusks, some over 4 metres long. Over time their molars gained many more enamel ridges, from about 8 to 10 in early Eurasian forms to 20 to 28 in woolly mammoths, as their diet shifted from browsing to abrasive grazing.
The name probably comes from a Mansi word meaning earth horn, after tusks eroding out of Siberian riverbanks. Siberian peoples wove the bones into their stories: the Evenk said mammoths dug the land up from the seabed, and the Yakuts saw them as water spirits. In South Carolina around 1725, enslaved Africans digging near the Stono River recognised Columbian mammoth molars as elephant teeth like those of their homeland, which the naturalist Mark Catesby accepted, the first technical identification of a fossil animal in North America.
In 1796 Georges Cuvier argued that woolly mammoth remains belonged to a vanished species, an idea of extinction many then resisted. Thomas Jefferson's fascination helped turn the noun into an adjective: its first recorded use as one describes the huge Cheshire Mammoth Cheese presented to him in 1802.
Source: Mammoth
