Climate Change, Not Humans, May Have Caused Iconic Wooly Mammoth's Extinction

Woolly mammoths roamed the globe for five million years until they perished for good around 4,000 years ago, and scientists have now discovered why.

"The most recent Ice Age - termed the Pleistocene - ended 12,000 years ago when the glaciers began to thaw and the traveling area of mammoth herds diminished," said Dr. Yucheng Wang, first author of the work and a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge's Department of Zoology. Mammoths were assumed to have gone extinct at that time, but we discovered that they lasted past the Ice Age in various parts of the Arctic and into the Holocene - the period we are currently living in - considerably longer than experts expected.

"We zeroed in on the fine details of environmental DNA to map out the population distribution of these creatures and illustrate how it is shrinking, and their genetic variety is shrinking as well, making it even more difficult for them to survive."

"Lakes, rivers, and marshes were formed as the environment became wetter and the ice began to melt. As a result, the environment altered, and the biomass of the plants decreased, making it impossible for mammoth herds to survive. We've demonstrated that climate change, especially precipitation, promotes changes in vegetation - and that people have no influence on them at all, according to our models."

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