When almost the entire skeleton of a mammoth was dug up in Michigan, it raised many questions as to what exactly happened to the woolly mammoth, the great beast of the Ice Age.
Did Humans Kill the Mammoth?
Dan Fisher, paleontologist Dan Fisher proposes that prehistoric people may have killed and butchered the newly discovered mammoth, and what they didn’t consume immediately was refrigerated in the depths of a frigid lake. Other scientists argue that there is no certainty as to what killed the mammoth unless bones are examined for cuts or other clues.
The fact remains that the reason for the extinction of the woolly mammoth, as well as 36 other North American mammoth species at the end of the Ice Age, remains largely unknown and also largely disputed. While it could have been the cavemen, it may as well have been due to a changing climate.
Farmers working on a soy field in the outskirts of Chelsea, Michigan, uncovered the bones of a woolly mammoth, which was treading the very land about 12,000 years ago. Fisher immediately came in to excavate the bones, which included a full skull, tusks and all. It was an interesting find, since woolly mammoths have been uncovered from Europe to Asia and North America, but Michigan soil has covered about ten woolly mammoths, and 300 American mastodon bones.
Chris Widga, paleontologist at the Illinois State Museum, supposes mammoths can’t have been very common in Michigan, because there would have been a lot of waxing and waning of glaciers at the time the beasts walked the land. Michigan was under ice at the time of the mammoth, and by the time the ice had melted, mastodons outnumbered the mammoth, which makes this specific find a very rare one.
New Mammoth Finds Are Always Awesome
Finding even one more mammoth is exciting. It helps scientists etch out as much information as possible about the animal and the time that it lived. Widga’s team achieves this through details in the tusks of the remains, and attempts to figure out histories of particular instances of the animal’s life.
So, What Did Kill the Mammoth?
There is very little concrete evidence to show that humans hunted or scavenged mammoths. In a paper released by Donald Grayson, zooarchaeologist at the University of Washington, and David Meltzer, colleague at the Southern Methodist University, notes that out of the 76 of the mammoth kill sites discussed, only 12 in the whole of Northern America suggests human hunting. So by this data, they suggest that humans were not the primary drivers of North America’s Ice Age extinctions.
Climate, however, is a different story. It was changing at a global scale, and very rapidly, from cold and dry to warm and wet. It winnowed away arid glasslands, which were a preferred terrain for the woolly mammoth. Other ecological changes, such as the surge of the bison, and the springing of forests where mammoths were once living, may have helped drive away the animal.
Extinction can never be tied down to a single cause, and these discoveries may help us discover what exactly happened, which causes were stronger than others, and which ultimately was the tipping point that washed the mammoths away around 4,000 years ago.
