Here’s a weird time-perspective for you to consider: we live closer in time to Cleopatra than she did to the building of the great pyramids.
The Great Pyramid of Giza was more than 2600 years old when Cleopatra was alive. By contrast, she lived less than two thousand years before the present.
Here’s another mind-bender: there were still woolly mammoths around when the pyramids were being built.
Well, okay: the beasts had gone extinct on the Eurasian mainland around 8,000 years before that, but a small population hung on at Wrangel Island, an Arctic island north of the easternmost tip of Russia, for another 6,000 years.
What caused the mammoths to go extinct has been a hot archaelogical topic for years. Like the megafauna of the Americas and Australia, the blame has usually been laid at the feet (or spears) of human hunters. Wrongly, it seems.
Now the hotly debated question about why mammoths went extinct has been answered — geneticists analysed 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 new research used DNA “shotgun sequencing”, which breaks the genome into a collection of small fragments in order to sequence them faster, to analyse plant and animal remains from ancient mammoth environments. Not unlike testing human sewage samples for traces of drugs or covid-19, the scientists analysed plants, urine, faeces and skin cells in order to build up a picture of the mammoths’ world.
It’s been tempting, of course, to ping humans for the mammoths’ extinction. After all, humans lived alongside mammoths for thousands of years, and certainly hunted them, as well as using their bones and tusks to build shelters, make tools — and even the world’s oldest known musical instrument, a flute carved from a mammoth bone.
But it now looks as though human hunting wasn’t intensive enough to actually wipe out the mammoths (“we should remember that there were a lot of animals around that were easier to hunt than a giant woolly mammoth — they could grow to the height of a double decker bus!”).
“We have finally been able to prove was that it was not just the climate changing that was the problem, but the speed of it that was the final nail in the coffin — they were not able to adapt quickly enough when the landscape dramatically transformed and their food became scarce.
“As the climate warmed up, trees and wetland plants took over and replaced the mammoth’s grassland habitats.”
Using the detail gleaned from the environmental DNA, scientists have mapped the population spread of the mammoths, showing that it became smaller and smaller as the climate warmed, over ten thousand years ago.
“When the climate got wetter and the ice began to melt it led to the formation of lakes, rivers, and marshes. The ecosystem changed and the biomass of the vegetation reduced and would not have been able to sustain the herds of mammoths. We have shown that climate change, specifically precipitation, directly drives the change in the vegetation — humans had no impact on them at all based on our models.”
Science Daily
Once again, of course, we should observe the caveat that this last conclusion is based on computer models. So, “proved” may be too strong a claim.
But the research shows, once again, that the impact of natural climate fluctuations can exceed anything human beings might supposedly be responsible for in a hundred years’ time.
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