The Story of the Mammoth

The mammoth is the classic ice age creature, often depicted wandering the steppe and towering over humans. Their closest contemporary relatives are elephants, but a mammoth typically had longer, curved tusks, and a covering of shaggy brown hair. As their name suggests, they were extremely large, with the biggest species reaching heights of around 13 feet at the shoulder. The mystery of the mammoth is why exactly these giant creatures died out.

Woolly mammoths are probably the best known of the mammoths because their remains have been so extensively studied and documented, as many well-preserved specimens have been found. They were not the largest mammoth species, but at between 9 and 11 feet tall they were around the same height as an African elephant. The woolly mammoth’s habitat was the vast ecosystem known as the mammoth steppe. They were perfectly suited to the extreme conditions on the steppe, which included freezing temperatures and a dry climate.

As with other mammoth species, most woolly mammoths died out in the early Holocene (the geological era that followed the last ice age), around 10,000 years ago. However, a small number of woolly mammoths survived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Circle, where they lived until around 2500 BC, the time the pyramids were built in Egypt. The reasons for the extinction of the mammoth are still debated, with some claiming climate change was the most significant factor, while others speculate that it was disease, or that humans killed them off. Humans did migrate across areas where mammoths resided during this period, while also developing new weapons which could have allowed them to hunt large creatures like mammoths.

However, the most likely scenario is that a variety of factors contributed to the mammoth’s disappearance. The warming climate in the early Holocene did have an impact on the habitat of the mammoth steppe, which gradually changed from grassy terrain to wetlands. This could have forced mammoths into much smaller habitats, where they could easily be targeted by human hunters. Furthermore, these small, isolated populations of mammoths were prey to disease and general weakness because of inbreeding