Exactly when mammoths went extinct has fascinated paleontologists for generations, perhaps because their decline coincided with the arrival of people to North and South America.
So it’s only natural to wonder if humans more than contributed to the extinction of these enormous beasts of the ice age more than 10,000 years ago.
A University of Cincinnati paleontologist refutes the latest timeline published in 2021 in the journal Nature that suggested mammoths met their end much more recently than we believed. An international team of researchers examined environmental DNA of mammoth remains and more than 1,500 arctic plants to conclude that a wetter climate quickly changed the landscape from tundra grassland steppe to forested wetlands that could not support many of these big grazing animals, driving mammoths to extinction as recently as 3,900 years ago.
But in a rebuttal paper to be published Dec. 1 in Nature, UC College of Arts and Sciences assistant professor Joshua Miller and co-author Carl Simpson at the University of Colorado Boulder argue that the environmental DNA used to establish their updated timeline is more complex than previously recognized.
“The issue is you have no idea how old that DNA is,” Miller said. “Sedimentary deposits are complex. Materials of different ages are routinely buried together.”
From recent discoveries like the baby mammoth found in Canada this year, we know that many ice age animals that died tens of thousands of years ago can become mummified in the arctic’s dry, cold environment. Miller said researchers can’t tell whether environmental DNA preserved in sediment was shed from a living or dead animal.
“DNA is shed from organisms all the time,” Miller said. “In fact, DNA continues to be shed long after the animal dies. In places where decomposition is slow, that means long-dead and even long-extinct species can continue to make their way into surrounding sediments. In the arctic and other cold-weather places, it can take thousands of years for something to decompose.”
They’re tantalizingly similar to animals that live among us today. We can almost touch them. That makes mammoths really alluring.
Joshua Miller, UC paleontologist
The researchers say the slow decomposition of animals in arctic regions could explain how mammoth DNA is showing up thousands of years later than the most recent mammoth fossil discovered. The paper notes that the mummified remains of elephant seals near Antarctica can be more than 5,000 years old.
In some remote parts of the arctic, it’s not unusual to find 2,000-year-old caribou antlers on the surface, Miller said. But the most recent mammoth fossils found in the Siberian area were entombed in permafrost 11,000 years ago.
Simpson said his work studying marine environments from recently eroded hillsides demonstrates how difficult it is to date ancient specimens.
“Seashells can sit on the seafloor for thousands of years. When you see shells on the beach, some could be from animals that died recently while others might be from shellfish that died millennia ago,” Simpson said. “This happens in the vertebrate record as well.”
AR #112
The Coming of the Clones”
Patrick Marsolek
