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| The habitat of mammoths shifted from cold and dry to warm and humid, leading to their extinction. (Image: Antelope Valley Indian Museum) |
Mammoths and other species may have gone extinct over 10,000 years ago due to climate change, rather than excessive hunting by humans, a recent study suggests.
Radiocarbon dating of 600 bison, moose, and human skeletons (species that survived the mass extinction event) along with remains of mammoths and wild horses (Equus ferus, which did not survive) indicates that humans were not the cause of this extinction event.
Scientists have proposed various hypotheses to explain the disappearance of mammoths and wild horses, coinciding with the arrival of humans in Central Asia and North America over 12,000 years ago.
One hypothesis suggests that a highly toxic disease was responsible for this situation. Another argues that humans themselves exterminated herbivores, leading to vegetation changes that resulted in large-scale extinction.
The Blitzkrieg hypothesis, or overhunting theory, explains how ancient hunters nearly wiped out most large mammals, pushing some species to the brink of extinction.
“However, contrary to this hypothesis, my data shows that the populations of bison and moose both increased both before and during the time humans were expanding across the Earth,” said Dale Guthrie, a study author from the University of Alaska.
His radiocarbon research indicated a 1,000-year gap between the extinction periods of wild horses and woolly mammoths, which Guthrie believes contradicts other hypotheses.
Instead, he argues that climate change altered the characteristics of cold and dry regions. Warmer and wetter summers transformed the vegetation into types that mammoths and wild horses could not survive on.
T. An
