A specialized elephant originating in Africa, which spread in the early Pleistocene epoch through Eurasia and North America. The woolly mammoth was abundant in tundra regions, had long hair and a thick fat layer for insulation, fed on grasses and legumes in summer, and on shrubs and bark in winter. It died out c.12 000 years ago. (Order: Proboscidea.)
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Mammuthus africanavus Sardinian Dwarf Mammoth |
A mammoth is any of a number of an extinct genus of elephant, often with long curved tusks and, in northern species, a covering of long hair.
Evolutionary history
Mammoth remains have been found in Europe, Africa, Asia, and North America.
Despite their African ancestry, they are in fact more closely related to the modern Asian Elephant than either of the two African elephants. The common ancestor of both mammoths and Asian elephants split from the line of African elephants about 6 - 7.3 million years ago. The Asian elephants and mammoths diverged about half a million years later (5.5 - 6.3 million years ago).
In due course the African mammoth migrated north to Europe and gave rise to a new species, the southern mammoth (Mammuthus meridionalis). The southern mammoth consequently declined, being replaced across most of its territory by the cold-adapted steppe mammoth (Mammuthus trogontherii). This in turn gave rise to the woolly mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius) around 300,000 years ago.
Extinction
Most mammoths died out at the end of the last Ice Age. However, the dwarf mammoths of Wrangel Island became extinct only around 1700 to 1500 BC.
Whether the general mammoth population died out for climatic reasons or due to overhunting by humans is controversial. Homo erectus is known to have consumed mammoth meat as early as 1.8 million years ago.
However, the American Institute of Biological Sciences also notes that bones of dead elephants, left on the ground and subsequently trampled by other elephants, tend to bear marks resembling butchery marks, which have previously been misinterpreted as such by archaeologists.
The survival of the dwarf mammoths on Russia's Wrangel Island was due to the fact that the island was very remote, and uninhabited in the early post-Pleistocene period. A similar dwarfing occurred with Mammoths on the outer Channel Islands of California, but at an earlier period.
On August 14, 2006, scientists announced that they are considering possible means of bringing a hybrid species of the long-extinct woolly mammoth back from extinction. They say that sperm frozen in the testes of male mammoths may be viable and could be injected into Asian elephant eggs, which would produce a mammoth-elephant hybrid .
Mammoths and cryptozoology
There have been occasional claims that the mammoth is not actually extinct, and that small isolated herds might survive in the vast and sparsely inhabited tundra of the northern hemisphere. Townsend traveled in Alaska, saw Eskimos trading mammoth tusks, asked if there still were living mammoths in Alaska and provided them with a drawing of the animal. Gallon added that the fur-trapper didn't even know about mammoths before, and that he talked about the mammoths as a forest-animal at a time when they were seen as living on the tundra and snow (Sjögren, 1962).
Size
It is a common misconception that mammoths were much larger than modern elephants, an error that has led to "mammoth" being used as an adjective meaning "very big". Certainly, the largest known species, the Imperial Mammoth of California, reached heights of at least 4 meters (13 feet) at the shoulder. However, most species of mammoth were only about as large as a modern Asian Elephant, and fossils of a species of dwarf mammoth have been found on Wrangel Island off the east coast of Siberia as well as the Californian channel islands (M.
Adaptations
Mammoths had a number of adaptations to the cold, most famously the thick layer of shaggy hair, up to 50 cm (20 in) long, for which the woolly mammoth is named. the largest mammoth ear found so far was only a foot (30 cm) long, compared to six feet (1.8 m) for an African elephant.
Mammoths had extremely long tusks - up to 16 feet (5 m) long - which were markedly curved, to a much greater extent than those of elephants.
Preserved remains, genetic evidence
Preserved frozen remains of woolly mammoths have been found in the northern parts of Siberia. From his book, Siberian Man and Mammoth, he says about the mammoth:
"Its death must have occurred very quickly after its fall, for we found half-chewed food still in its mouth, between the back teeth and on its tongue, which was in good preservation. In one location, by the Berelekh River in Yakutia in Siberia, more than 9,000 bones from at least 156 individual mammoths have been found in a single spot, apparently having been swept there by the current.
In addition to frozen corpses, large amounts of mammoth ivory have been found in Siberia. Güyük, the 13th century Khan of the Mongols, is reputed to have sat on a throne made from mammoth ivory, and even today it is in great demand as a replacement for the now-banned export of elephant ivory.
Since there is a known case in which an Indian elephant and an African elephant have produced a live (though sickly) offspring, it has been theorised that if mammoths were still alive today, they would be able to interbreed with Indian elephants.
This has led to the idea that perhaps a mammoth-like beast could be recreated by taking genetic material from a frozen mammoth and combining it with that from a modern Indian elephant. However, not enough genetic material has been found in frozen mammoths for this to be attempted. The analysis demonstrates that the divergence of mammoth, African elephant, and Asian elephant occurred over a short time, and confirmed that the mammoth was more closely related to the Asian than to the African elephant. American researchers were able to assemble a complete mitochondrial DNA of the mammoth, which allowed them to trace the close evolutionary relationship between mammoths and the Asian elephant. African elephants branched away from the woolly mammoth around 6 million years ago, a moment in time intriguingly close to that of the similar split between chimps and humans.
On July 6, 2006 it was reported that scientists, using the latest genetic techniques, determined that a gene called Mc1r, extracted from a 43,000-year-old woolly mammoth bone from Siberia, caused Mammoths to have dark brown coats or blond hair (Rompler H et al.
Origins of the name
The name "mammoth" comes via Russian from the Tatar language. The 17th century traveller Eberhard Ysbrant Ides recorded that the Evenk, Yakut and Ostyak peoples of Siberia believed that the mammoths "continually, or at least by reason of the very hard frosts, mostly live under ground, where they go backwards and forwards."
Aboriginal legends
A mammoth possibly appears in an ancient legend of the Kaska tribe in British Columbia, The Bladder Headed Boy. The mammoth is described fairly accurately as a "huge shaggy beast that roamed the land long ago", but is also said to steal meat and eat people, suggesting that the creature in the story could be a conflation of more than one kind of animal.
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