Scientists behind a new genomic study now claim that the last woolly mammoths on Earth were wiped out by an extreme storm or a plague – meaning that if an extinction event hadn’t happened, they could still be around to date.
These giant Ice Age beasts roamed the then tundras of North America, Europe and Asia as early as 300,000 years ago. They later became extinct approximately 4,000 years ago on an isolated island off the coast of Siberia in the Arctic Ocean.
The latest analysis shows that several hundred woolly mammoths flocked to the small island of Wrangel for about 6,000 years, but scientists say they did not die because of the blood connection, The Guardian reported.
The long-held theory was that woolly mammoths eventually accumulated enough harmful genetic mutations to cause a ‘genomic meltdown’.
“We can now confidently reject the idea that the population was simply too small and that they were doomed to extinction for genetic reasons,” said evolutionary geneticist Love Dalén at the Center for Paleogenetics, a collaboration between Stockholm University and the Swedish Museum of Nature. . History.
Woolly mammoths roamed the Ice Age tundras of North America, Europe and Asia as early as 300,000 years ago. They later became extinct approximately 4,000 years ago on an isolated island off the coast of Siberia in the Arctic Ocean.
Scientists now believe that the mammoths were killed by a random event – such as a bird flu or a storm – and not by bloodshed, as previously thought.
“That means it was probably just a random event that killed them off, and if that random event hadn’t happened, then we’d still have mammoths today,” he continued.
Dalén and his colleagues analyzed the genomes of 21 mammoth specimens found on Wrangel Island and the Siberian mainland, which are estimated to have existed for 50,000 years.
In the photo: Professor Love Dalén
They found that the prehistoric creatures went through a ‘severe bottleneck’ after being stranded on Wrangel Island due to rising sea levels as the earth warmed.
At one point during the Holocene period (11,500 years ago to the present), the total population was eight or less.
“These findings suggest that Wrangel Island may have been founded by a single herd of woolly mammoths,” according to the study.
The authors of the study said that you would normally expect a species to undergo ‘an accelerated genomic decline’, but this was not the case.
“The population recovered quickly after the bottleneck and then remained stable. “More specifically, we even find evidence that the recovered population was large enough, or perhaps changed its behavior, to avoid inbreeding with close relatives…during the 6,000 years of island isolation,” the study says. .
So if they were able to eventually avoid inbreeding, what killed them all?
Wrangel Island, where woolly mammoths made their last stand as a species, is visible just above the northeastern tip of Russia
The moisture of an extinct woolly mammoth. It is about 4000 years old and was found on Wrangel Island
It’s not clear and will likely never be known with exact precision, but Dalén believes something like bird flu may have doomed the species.
“Perhaps mammoths would have been vulnerable to it given the reduced diversity we identified in immune system genes. Alternatively, something like a tundra fire, a layer of volcanic ash or a very bad weather season may have caused a very bad growing year for plants in Wrangel.’
“Given how small the population was, it would have been vulnerable to such random events,” Dalén said, adding, “It seems to me that maybe the mammoths just got lucky.”
The paper’s lead author, Marianne Dehasque of Uppsala University, told the Guardian that this new story of how mammoths died holds a lesson for the world today as biodiversity declines more and more each year.
The World Wildlife Fund’s 2022 Living Planet Report found that wildlife populations have declined by an average of 69 percent in the past 50 years.
“Mammoths are an excellent system for understanding the ongoing biodiversity crisis and what happens genetically when a species goes through a population bottleneck, because they mirror the fate of many populations today,” Dehasque said.