Humans did not cause woolly mammoths to go extinct—climate change did: study

[Still Waters]

For five million years, woolly mammoths roamed the earth until they vanished for good nearly 4,000 years ago—and scientists have finally proved why.

The hairy cousins of today's elephants lived alongside early humans and were a regular staple of their diet—their skeletons were used to build shelters, harpoons were carved from their giant tusks, artwork featuring them is daubed on cave walls, and 30,000 years ago, the oldest known musical instrument, a flute, was made out of a mammoth bone.

Now the hotly debated question about why mammoths went extinct has been answered—geneticists analyzed ancient environmental DNA and proved it was because when the icebergs melted, it became far too wet for the giant animals to survive because their food source—vegetation—was practically wiped out.

The 10-year research project, published in Nature today, was led by Professor Eske Willerslev, a Fellow of St John's College, University of Cambridge, and director of The Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre, University of Copenhagen.

https://phys.org/news/2021-10-humans-woolly-mammoths-extinctclimate.html

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04016-x

[thedutchiedutch]

Nothing new for me because I swear that's exactly what I remember being taught at school already like 40 years ago lol

Edited October 20, 2021 by thedutchiedutch

[Michelle]

8 minutes ago, thedutchiedutch said:

Nothing new for me because I swear that's exactly what I remember being taught at school already like 40 years ago lol

Everything old is new again. 

[+OverSword]

No kidding.  They find them flash frozen and intact in the arctic tundra.   Men didn't do that.

My great grandmother told me that when she worked at a gold mining camp in the Yukon during the gold rush, one of the techniques used would be to use hoses and erode hillsides with pressurized water and then sluice the soil that ran off.  Every once in a while they would expose a mammoth which would start to decompose shortly after and you could smell them for miles around. 

Edited October 20, 2021 by OverSword

[thedutchiedutch]

1 hour ago, Michelle said:

Everything old is new again. 

So true Michelle lol 

[Orphalesion]

And in a few years a new study will come out that says early humans did it.

I'm pretty sure both factors didn't exactly help the mammoths.

[jethrofloyd]

When I see this 25,000-year-old structure in Siberia built of the bones of 60 mammoths, I’m not sure it’s just a climate that’s to blame.