Woolly Mammoths

Towering over 11 feet tall and weighing 6 tonnes, the Woolly Mammoth ruled the Ice Age. But how did these mighty beasts thrive for over 100,000 years—and why did they disappear? In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes kicks off a brand-new Ice Age miniseries with two leading experts. Professor Adrian Lister from the Natural History Museum explores the mammoth’s origins, evolution and adaptation to the harsh Ice Age climate. Then, Professor David Meltzer reveals the story of mammoths in North America, their encounters with early humans, and the astonishing discovery that some still roamed the Arctic just 4,000 years ago. Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK All music courtesy of Epidemic Sound Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

  Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Teutoburg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week, covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Hannah Berner from Giggly Squad and the holidays are around the corner, which means I'm officially entering my Hostess Hannah era with Arm & Hammer Hardball Cat Litter. You guys know I love cats and fostering, but when I'm hosting, I do not want my house smelling like cats. I want people focusing on my hosting skills. That's why I love Arm & Hammer Hardball Cat Litter. It delivers long-lasting odor control and forms compact clumps that make cleanup easy, so that's one less thing I need to worry about when people come over. Be guest-ready with Arm & Hammer Cat Litter. Find it now at Walmart or Amazon.

• 1:04Speaker 02

  This ad is sponsored by Zocdoc. Hi, it's Danny Pellegrino from Everything Iconic. Have you been putting off that annual doctor's appointment because you don't want to make the call? Or maybe you've been meaning to find a new dentist, but you have no idea where to start? I find that's especially true when you move, it's hard to find your people. I've been there, which is why I use Zocdoc. Now, as a busy podcaster, parent, and someone who's always juggling a million things, I love anything that makes life easier. And Zocdoc lets you search and compare local, in-network doctors with over 250,000 providers across more than 200 specialties. You can read reviews from real patients, find a provider who feels like the right fit, see actual appointment openings, and book instantly. I recently had a last-minute health issue pop up and I needed to see someone fast.

• 1:48Speaker 02

  Instead of calling around or sitting on hold, I found a doctor on Zocdoc and booked an appointment in just a few minutes. It made the whole process so much less stressful. Now, taking care of your health just got easier. Download the Zocdoc app today. That's Zocdoc, Z-O-C-D-O-C, and book that appointment on your to-do list.

• 2:11Tristan Hughes?

  This episode is sponsored by Smart Travel, a new podcast from Nerd Wallet. Now, you know that one friend who always finds the best travel deals, picks the right cards, and somehow ends up in first class for the price of coach? Smart Travel is like that friend, but in podcast form. They cover all the things travel finance, so you can stop stressing and actually start enjoying your trips. I'm lucky enough to travel a fair bit. You might have heard me talking about being on tour with The Ancients in Australia and New Zealand quite recently. Well, Smart Travel Podcast from Nerd Wallet was a great help. They dig into which airport lounges are really worth it, and which are just an airport gate

• 2:53Tristan Hughes?

  with better sacks and worse lighting, and what actually happens when an airline loses your luggage for 12 days, and how to get real money back instead of a free drink and an apology. Plus, the tip I really needed: how to book flights without it turning into a part-time job. Travel smarter and spend less with help from Nerd Wallet. Follow Smart Travel wherever you get your podcasts.

• 3:36Tristan Hughes?

  The woolly mammoth, a great beast that has become synonymous with the Ice Age. More than 11 feet tall and 6 tonnes in weight when fully grown, covered in thick fur and possessing two mighty curved tusks, woolly mammoths roamed across great grassy plains for over 100,000 years, before they ultimately went extinct. There have even been attempts to bring mammoths back through their DNA. They are an incredibly popular extinct animal that fascinates so many of us. So what do we know about these massive beasts? How often were they hunted by humans? And why eventually did they go extinct?

• 4:16Tristan Hughes?

  It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. Welcome to the first episode of a brand new mini-series this February all about the Ice Age. Every Sunday we'll be covering a story from this extraordinary epoch, from mammoths and other great megafauna that once roamed the Earth, to neanderthals and extinctions at the end of the Ice Age. To kick off this new series, we're covering the woolly mammoth, this fan-favorite Ice Age animal. This episode will feature not one but two leading experts. First, a chat with the Natural History Museum's Professor Adrian Lister, a paleobiologist and leading expert on the woolly mammoth.

• 4:58Tristan Hughes?

  Adrian will explain their origins and how they were built to survive in cold conditions from tusk to tail. Following that, we have an interview with Professor David Meltzer from Southern Methodist University, who has been on the podcast twice before to talk about Ice Age America and the first humans who settled that land during the Ice Age. He's back on the show to explain the story of woolly mammoths in and around North America, including a fascinating study that revealed mammoths still alive 4,000 years ago in the remote Arctic of North East Siberia. I really hope you enjoy. First up is Professor Adrian Lister. Let's get into it.

• 5:43Tristan Hughes?

  Adrian, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast today.

• 5:46Speaker 03

  Very nice to be here.

• 5:47Tristan Hughes?

  Now, the woolly mammoths, but also, I guess, mammoths in general in prehistoric times. I mean, surely they must be one of the most iconic prehistoric animal groups to have ever roamed this Earth. The name and the word mammoth is still very popular today.

• 6:03Speaker 03

  Yes, the mammoth is a kind of iconic animal of the Ice Age, definitely. You know, these animals of the Ice Age were way more recent than dinosaurs, you know, dinosaurs of the other kind of iconic prehistoric beast, but much closer to us in time and indeed coexisting with humans. Mammoth is, you know, the best known of what was, though, a very diverse Ice Age fauna with lots of other species alongside the mammoth, like the woolly rhino and cave bears and so on.

• 6:32Tristan Hughes?

  This seems important to highlight straight away, Adrian. We're focusing in particular on the woolly mammoth today, but mammoths as a group. So is the woolly mammoth just one of many different types?

• 6:44Speaker 03

  Yes, the woolly mammoth is the one we know far the best. It was the one that was spread right across the northern hemisphere throughout the last Ice Age and probably the Ice Age before that. But prior to that, we know a whole sequence of fossil species that form a really interesting evolutionary of leading up to the woolly mammoth as the kind of final species of the group and the most specialised species of the group.

• 7:09Tristan Hughes?

  Well, you've kind of preempted my next question then, Adrian. So what do we know about the origins of the woolly mammoth and these other species that come before?

• 7:17Speaker 03

  Hmm. Well, I mean, you've only got to look at a mammoth to realise it's a kind of elephant. And, you know, in fact, the mammoths were elephants. They were part of the elephant family. And the elephant family arose in Africa, just like the human family, actually. The first elephant fossils were about seven billion years old, in, in, found in East Africa and Southern Africa. And quite soon after the origin of the family, it split into three. One was the African elephant line, which obviously stayed in Africa. One was the line which eventually left Africa and moved east into Asia and became the living Asian elephant. And the third line was the mammoth line. And the earliest fossils we've got are about

• 8:00Speaker 03

  five million years ago in South Africa. So mammoths started off in Africa as a tropical species. You know, at that stage, they wouldn't have had the sort of hairy coat that, you know, we're familiar with. But about three and a half million years ago, mammoths moved north out of Africa, because that's when we first pick up their fossils in Europe. And they very quickly spread across Asia and there are fossils of similar age, about three million years ago from China. So at that point, they were still relatively warm adapted, forest living, elephant-like species, although we can tell from particular features of their skulls and teeth that they were actually on the mammoth line. So you've got this sort

• 8:44Speaker 03

  of early mammoth ancestor right across Eurasia, you know, about three million years ago. And soon after that is when the Ice Ages started to clock in. You know, we recognise the beginning of the Ice Ages at about 2.6 million years ago. And what we see in the mammoth fossils, when we trace them up through time, starting at about three million years ago, right up to the last ice age, up till 10,000 years ago, getting on towards their final extinction. Through that period, we can see a change of adaptation. Look at these fossils and, you know, they're gradually becoming adapted to the cold, open environments of the ice ages, culminating in the familiar woolly mammoth with its airy coat and all the rest of it.

• 9:28Tristan Hughes?

  So Adrian, it sounds there, and as you've highlighted, the change in climate and how that influences it as well. But to reach the woolly mammoth from, as I say, those first mammoths that go out of Africa, it may be oversimplifying it, but it almost was like step by step by step in that evolutionary process until you reach that kind of transformed mammoth, which was the woolly mammoth we are familiar with today.

• 9:54Speaker 03

  Yes, it was a step by step process, but it wasn't just a single line. Because we ended up with quite a few different mammoth species, actually. So, for example, I think the most important step in that process happened about two million years ago, when we still had this relatively original type, you know, warm adapted mammoth, early mammoth, right across Eurasia. And then in one area of Eastern Asia, probably in Northern China, we pick up the next stage, you know, there's been what we call in the jargon a speciation. In other words, one species is split into two.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  So in the Far East, you know, the, because the environment had become colder and more open and grassy in that part of the world. And those are the things that the more advanced mammoths had to become adapted to. So there was a split. So for a while, there were two different species. And then the more advanced one kind of took over. So all through these three million years, it's quite a complex process like that. So it is a stepwise change, but it's quite a complex one.

• 11:04Tristan Hughes?

  It sounds quite similar to human evolution, doesn't it? It's not just one type to another. As I said, there are all these different lineages that link together. But like for a Joe Blogs looking in, sometimes it's easy to oversimplify it where you're going from one species to the next to the next.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  The story of what we've understood about mammoths is very similar to, as you say, the human story where the idea of a single lineage. Which I'm afraid a lot of people may still have in their mind that that's how evolution works. It is more like a branching bush. With, you know, less successful species dying out, you know, so they only get like halfway up the bush and then others arise and then, you know, you end up with the most strongly adapted species kind of at the top.

• 11:47Tristan Hughes?

  And that presumably would include the woolly mammoth, was it? Was that one of the strongest, the best?

• 11:51Speaker 03

  Well, it was the one that was the best adapted to the Ice Age environments, you know, as the Ice Age environments, which saw much of the northern hemisphere cold, obviously. Also, forests gave way to grasslands. And so the earlier mammoth species that, you know, were adapted more to living in forests and eating that kind of vegetation, got restricted in their distribution to small areas and then eventually died out, while the mammoth, you know, became, had to become adapted to this different kind of environment. So we would tend not to say that one is like better than the other, but it, you know, it's the survival of the fittest thing. It means it fits that environment, you know, and that's why it survived and the other species died out.

• 12:37Tristan Hughes?

  Well, Adrian, let's now talk through the bodily structure of a woolly mammoth so we can really understand how it adapted to best survive in these new Ice Age environments. And we can either go tusk to tail or tail to tusk, but I've got in my notes tail to tusk. So let's start at the back end. I mean, first of all, Adrian, I mean, what do we know about the back end of a woolly mammoth, about its tail? Can we talk about that for a bit? Does that show any kind of great adaptations for that new climate?

• 13:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, you know, it's quite useful to compare the woolly mammoth with a living elephant because, you know, we know what an elephant looks like. We know that it's adapted to a tropical environment and the early mammoths were adapted to that environment as well. So if we take the tail, for instance, the living elephant has a very long tail. It comes all the way down to sort of ankle with hairs at the end, which it uses as a kind of fire swap. Woolly mammoth had a much shorter tail. And I think the reason for that is avoiding frostbite. You've got a very sort of thin organ like that hanging loose out of the back end of your body in a very cold environment where it would have been way below freezing in the winter. You know, different from anything that a living elephant in its natural habitat would encounter.

• 13:51Speaker 03

  Then, you know, you've got to protect it from frostbite. And I'm going to switch to the far, other far end of the animal actually and destroy your idea of going from

• 13:59Tristan Hughes?

  Okay.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  back to front, because I think the ear of the mammoth actually tells the same story. Because obviously, as we all learn as children, elephants have great big ears that they flap. And they flap them to lose heat because elephants living in India or Africa are living in a very hot environment. And their ears are full of blood vessels and they flap these very big ears to actually lose heat because they don't want to overheat. Now, the mammoth, living in an Arctic climate, had the exact opposite problem. It wanted to conserve heat. And so the mammoth ears are much smaller. They're about 10% of the area of that of a living elephant. We know this from the frozen carcasses, by the way.

• 14:44Speaker 03

  One should interject, you know, that for most fossil species, all we have is bones and teeth. Because that's normally all that survives, right? But the mammoth is very special in this regard. Because we have these complete carcasses that have been found under the ground in Siberia. They've basically been in a deep freeze in the permafrost since the Ice Age. That's how we know about things like the tail length, the ear, other soft tissue features, you know, that we, we otherwise wouldn't know about. Because they don't, they didn't have bones in. I think the ear and the tail are part of the same story of reducing the area of small, thin organs outside the body. In a cold environment, you don't want to lose heat through them and you don't want them to get frostbite.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  So that's that.

• 15:30Tristan Hughes?

  It is extraordinary that you have that much information to learn about the woolly mammoths. As you say, that rich archaeological record, which isn't just bones, but also these mammoths preserved in the permafrost.

• 15:42Tristan Hughes?

  You've taken us from the tail straight away to the head and the ear. So I think rather than jumping back, let's focus on the head and then we'll go down to the body. So we've talked about the ear, but I mean, the overall structure of the mammoth's head, Adrian. I mean, how was it designed?

• 15:57Speaker 03

  Well, it's basically like a living elephant in that you've got two great big tusks sticking out of the front end. And they are, the tusks are essentially modified incisor teeth. That's what elephant tusks are, that's what mammoth tusks were. They're equivalent to our side incisors, so not the centre two teeth at the front, but the ones right next to them. Obviously massively overgrown and they're made of solid dentine, which is, they have no enamel around the, so our teeth enamel on the outside. But the sort of more creamy coloured dentine on the inside, ivory, which is what tusks are, is solid dentine.

• 16:36Speaker 03

  And the mammoth tusks differed from those of living elephants in that they don't just go sort of straightforward with a gentle curve like those of living elephants, they form a kind of spiral shape. Mammoth tusks have a kind of spiral shape and in some individuals with very large tusks, they could even cross in the middle. Because they came down out of the skull, round to the side and then spiral inwards and could even kind of cross in the middle. Which leads to interesting questions of how they were actually used.

• 17:07Tristan Hughes?

  I was gonna say, so do we know how they use these, these great tusks? Because I don't think they'd be used for digging up roots or anything like that.

• 17:13Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, mainly these kinds of organs, whether it's tusks, horns and so on, are for fighting. I mean, that is their original use. Exactly how that worked in the cases where the tusks ended up, you know, crossing over each other in the middle. Because the points normally should point forward if you're going to be fighting with them. But most individuals, it was like that and I think that was still the main function. But also for a sort of intimidating display.

• 17:38Tristan Hughes?

  In that Ice Age world where other famous fauna, let's say saber toothed tigers maybe or others, I guess it's not the sharp point or another mammoth, but it's also, it must be the great weight of the mammoth as well. So even a hit with the side of one of those tusks presumably could have been very, very damaging.

• 17:55Speaker 03

  Oh, yes, no question about that, if not fatal.

• 17:59Tristan Hughes?

  Do we know much about the brain size, the eyes and the teeth? Shall we go through those one by one?

• 18:05Speaker 03

  Well, the head of the mammoth is different from that of living elephants, it's got a very high dome. Very high single dome at the top, it's got a sort of a high skull. And I think the reason for that is because the muscles and tendons that hold up the head originate on the back of the head and go back and attach to the top of the back. And with that enormous weight of tusks at the front, you think about it to actually, the animal's got to be able to raise and lower its head with these huge things sticking out of the front. And so it needed enormous power of muscle and tendon, very, very strong and lots of them attaching to the back of the head.

• 18:47Speaker 03

  So I think partly that's why the head is actually very high, because it's giving more area at the back for that purpose. Also, the mammoth had very high crowned teeth. Now, this was something that developed in the evolution that we talked about earlier, because the mammoth ancestors lived mostly on the leaves of trees and shrubs, which, if you are a herbivorous mammal, those are relatively soft to chew. They don't wear down your teeth very quickly. Now, in the Ice Age, the mammoth was forced to eat mostly grass, which is much tougher to chew. It's also lower in nutrients, so you have to eat more of it.

• 19:32Speaker 03

  We think mammoths are probably eating for maybe like eighteen, twenty hours a day to get enough food.

• 19:38Tristan Hughes?

  Eighteen to twenty hours a day?

• 19:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, they would have had to eat about four hundred kilos of this relatively low nutrient food to feed their large bodies. And so part of the adaptation to that was they developed teeth with very high crowns so that, you know, they could last through the animal's life, you know, even though they would be wearing down gradually with this very tough food that the that the animal was eating. This is another reason why the the head looks quite long and short, because it had to house these very tall teeth. So you would have noticed that difference immediately on looking at a mammoth compared to an elephant.

• 20:16Tristan Hughes?

  You mentioned that great weight of the mammoth and the amount of food that a woolly mammoth would need to eat to maintain its strength and its body weight at twenty hours, wow. So do we know much about the actual body of the woolly mammoth Adrian and the kind of, not just the waist, but also you said that that whole structure of it?

• 20:36Speaker 03

  Yes, we do. We have, you know, many complete skeletons, also the carcasses. And the other really interesting line of evidence that we have is actually the cave art. Because the drawings of mammoths in caves, mostly in France, we've got, I think, about two hundred artistic reproductions of representations of mammoths by Ice Age artists.

• 21:00Tristan Hughes?

  And these are famous caves like Lascaux and Chauvet, are they?

• 21:03Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly, yes. And although obviously, you know, you have to allow for artistic licence and, but there are certain features of the animal that are repeated again and again in the art. One in particular that I would mention is that they're always shown with a very sloping back. So the mammoth had a sort of high shoulder hump and then the back sloped down gradually towards the tail end. And that's actually quite difficult to figure, even from looking at the vertebral column, which I have done, you know, piecing all the bones together. It's quite hard to twig that that was the case, but it's shown in all the cave paintings. And so I guess it was the case. Again, compare with an Asian, living Asian elephant, where the back is kind of arched shape.

• 21:46Speaker 03

  An African elephant, where the back is described as saddle shaped, hollow in the middle. So the mammoth was quite different in its overall body form. If you were to look at it from the side. High domed skull, big shoulder hump, sloping back down to the back end.

• 22:03Tristan Hughes?

  And how thick was the fur coat of a woolly mammoth?

• 22:07Speaker 03

  Very thick, yeah. I mean, the long, we've got a lot of hair preserved in the, from the permafrost. And the, the main sort of outer coat, the longest hairs are around a metre long. Those are the ones that

• 22:19Tristan Hughes?

  A metre long, wow.

• 22:20Speaker 03

  On the, on the back and hanging down from the belly like a bit of a curtain. And I've, I've measured the width of those hairs under the microscope. They're about six times the thickness of an average human hair. So, living elephants, although they sort of appear naked from a distance, you know, close up, they do have a sparse covering of hair. So the hair was there to evolve into the thicker coat of the mammoth, you know, through that period of time that we were talking about. So they had this very thick outer coat and then closer to the skin, there was a much finer hair, a sort of underwool, it's a bit like cotton wool actually, as a second kind of intulating layer, then there was a fad layer underneath the skin, so they were well protected against the cold.

• 23:05Tristan Hughes?

  What do we know about mammoth feet?

• 23:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, they did have fur on, but they're not, it wasn't specially long fur. And I think probably like Arctic animals today that we can study in real time, like reindeer, for example, they actually keep their feet very cold, relatively cold, and they have antifreeze substances, you know, in their blood that stop them from freezing up. But actually, this does lead me to a really fantastic bit of research that's been done on woolly mammoths, right down to the molecular level, because a study was made a few years ago by Canadian scientists of mammoth hemoglobin. Now, hemoglobin, of course, is the molecule in our blood that transports oxygen from the lungs to all the tissues of our body.

• 23:50Speaker 03

  And what they did was, you know, we're now managing to extract DNA from mammoth tissues and we're learning a lot more about their anatomy and their physiology from the DNA. So these people actually found the gene from the mammoth DNA that codes for hemoglobin. They then in the lab, in the test tube effectively, created mammoth hemoglobin and then just ran it through tests, just like you would in a medical lab. And what they found was that the mammoth hemoglobin had certain differences from elephant hemoglobin. That enabled it to work at lower temperatures. When I say work, they took the mammoth hemoglobin now to five degrees C

• 24:35Speaker 03

  and it was still able to pick up oxygen and then then release the oxygen because that's how hemoglobin works. It picks up oxygen in our lungs and it releases it to the tissues like muscle tissues. The modern elephant hemoglobin stopped working before you got down to those low temperatures. In other words, going back to your question about the feet, if you've got pretty cold feet, as the mammoth would have done, standing in the snow and ice and salt. You still need to be able to get oxygen to the tissues of the feet, the muscles and all the rest of it. And so the hemoglobin of the mammoth was adapted to be able to do that even in, you know, virtually zero temperatures.

• 25:14Speaker 03

  So what we're learning about these animals now goes beyond what, you know, traditional study of bones and even soft tissues to the molecular level.

• 25:24Tristan Hughes?

  Adrian, I was about to say, this is absolutely fascinating because with the dinosaurs, for instance, paleontologists, we can give a rough, they can give a rough idea of the Tyrannosaurus rex from its bones, as you say, and get quite a bit of an idea. But there's still, there's a lot of debate around certain parts of the Tyrannosaurus rex. But with the woolly mammoth, I think one of the things that does make it so amazing to learn about is the fact that you can, with the surviving evidence, with that quality of archaeological evidence surviving, you can research, examine even these small parts of a mammoth's structure and analyse more about how they function.

• 26:02Speaker 03

  Yes. Another nice outcome, actually, we're talking about the mammoth's coat, is about the colour. Because many popular illustrations of mammoths show them with a kind of orangey coloured coat. And the reason for that is that much of the hair that comes out of the permafrost with the carcasses is that orange kind of colour. But I I've suspected for a long time that this is not natural and that it's because pigment has actually leached out of the hair, you know, through the thousands of years of burial. And actually, recent DNA work has tended to confirm that. And we now think, based on some hair samples, which are a much darker, sort of a chocolatey brown

• 26:43Speaker 03

  colour, the DNA actually confirms that because we can get some of the genes which code for hair colour. And we know from living animals, you know, which variants of those genes code for brown hair, blonde hair, ginger hair. And sure enough, all those orange pictures of mammoths need to be redone with kind of a chocolatey brown colour, which was probably the original colour.

• 27:15Speaker 04

  Granger knows, if you're a procurement manager at an industrial manufacturing facility, you're balancing inventory and budget while sourcing critical supplies across the operation. Too much inventory? Costs climb. Too little? Production slows. Granger's $2 billion in on-hand inventory helps you get what you need when you need it, so you can help keep budgets balanced and lines moving. Call 1-800-GRANGER, click Granger.com or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Hannah Berner from Giggly Squad and the holidays are around the corner, which means I'm officially entering my Hostess Hannah era with Arm & Hammer Hardball Cat Litter. You guys know I love cats and fostering, but when I'm hosting, I do not want my house smelling like cats. I want people focusing on my hosting skills. That's why I love Arm & Hammer Hardball Cat Litter. It delivers long-lasting odour control and forms compact clumps that make cleanup easy, so that's one less thing I need to worry about when people come over. Be guest-ready with Arm & Hammer Cat Litter. Find it now at Walmart or Amazon.

• 28:20Speaker 05

  Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us The tactics and skills needed not only to survive but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week.

• 29:17Tristan Hughes?

  Adrian, one last question on the body. You also mentioned earlier when talking about the teeth, how they're having to eat for much of the day. So if they're ingesting all of this food, all of these grasses, and they're getting energy from this food and it goes all around the body to ensure that the mammoth can survive. But does that also mean that a woolly mammoth is eating for much of the day? Is a woolly mammoth also pooing for much of the day too?

• 29:45Speaker 03

  Oh, most certainly, yes. The answer is yes, especially because all elephants, and that would have included mammoths, have actually a relatively inefficient digestion. Unlike something like a deer or a cow, which has got a much more complicated stomach. And you know, they chew the cud and so on, so they're getting the absolute max out of the food. So there's less left to come out of the rear end. The mammoth probably, like living elephants, probably only got about 30, 40% of the nutrients out of its food. Partly because that sort of grassy food is not terribly nutritious. There's an awful lot of bulk that is not going to be digested that would have come out of the rear end.

• 30:28Speaker 03

  So answer to your question is, yep. And you know, fertilizing the ground, very important part of the ecosystem, actually, to be fertilizing the ground in that way. And so more plants grow up and then they eat more plants and so on.

• 30:42Tristan Hughes?

  Adrian, you have brilliantly given us a really clear picture, an exciting picture of the woolly mammoth, what we should envisage and the great research that has gone into learning more about this Ice Age species.

• 30:56Tristan Hughes?

  I have a couple of other questions I'd like to ask. One of them is, from all that research that has been done, do we have any rough idea for how long a woolly mammoth would have lived for?

• 31:04Speaker 03

  Well, first of all, we make a kind of analogy with living elephants, you know, where sixty or seventy is really the the top duration. Secondly, we do have a kind of a record in the tusks, because the tusks have annual growth rings. You know, the tusks grew each year. They kind of pushed out of the skull and they grew longer each year. They also wore down at the tip, you know, through use. But we can count the rings, we can count the growth rings. Now, in a very old animal, the sort of earliest part of the tusk, which is at the tip, would have worn away. So we never get the complete lifespan, but the longest that we've counted is, I think, forty seven years. In other words,

• 31:49Speaker 03

  there was one mammoth tusk where forty seven annual rings were counted. And the fact that we haven't got any up to sixty or seventy, which is the kind of expectation, is because the old ones have worn away at the tip. So you never get the total lifespan. But it kind of fits, you know, we've got forty seven preserved. So my guess is it's probably similar to a living elephant at about sixty or seventy if they were doing well.

• 32:14Tristan Hughes?

  So this is the mammoth equivalent of tree rings, is it?

• 32:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Yes.

• 32:18Tristan Hughes?

  And at their height in the Ice Age, Adrian, how far and wide should we be imagining herd of woolly mammoths roaming across the world?

• 32:29Speaker 03

  Well, the woolly mammoth had an enormous range. I mean, it was bigger than either of the living species. You could start in the West, in Ireland, if you like, through Britain, across Britain, through almost all of Europe, down to a kind of latitude of northern Spain, let's say the northern Mediterranean, right the way across Asia, right up to the Arctic Ocean, all the way across to northern China, northern Japan. And then, we tend to, in, you know, in paleontology, we think of the Americas as actually to the east of Asia, because although, you know, we, in this country at least, we're used to seeing a map of the world with America on the left and the Atlantic Ocean in the middle. But

• 33:14Speaker 03

  the way that animals actually spread was eastward.

• 33:19Speaker 03

  Across the Bering Strait, which is, you know, the sea that now separates Siberia from Alaska, was dry land. And so the mammoths and other species, including people, by the way, spread from Siberia into North America. So continuing my geographical story, we ended up in Eastern Asia. The mammoth spread right across into Alaska, and then all the way to the Atlantic seaboard of North America, and roughly down to the level of the Great Lakes in the United States. So I don't know how many square kilometres that is, but it's absolutely vast. And it's been estimated that at their peak, there were at least 10 million mammoths living in that area.

• 34:01Tristan Hughes?

  10 million mammoth. And you also mentioned in passing, North Japan, Britain, Ireland, places that we think of being islands today, but I'm guessing back then at their height, they were connected to each other. So there was a land bridge between them.

• 34:14Speaker 03

  That is correct, yes.

• 34:15Tristan Hughes?

  Adrian, you have fantastically given us a great introduction to the woolly mammoth at its height and what we should envisage. And it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time out of your schedule to come on the podcast today.

• 34:27Speaker 03

  It's been a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.

• 34:29Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there was Professor Adrian Lister, leading expert on the woolly mammoth, giving you an introduction to this giant of the Ice Age, its origins, size, and spread. Now, as Adrian mentioned, at their height, some 10 million woolly mammoths roamed the Ice Age world, whether that be in Europe, Siberia, or North America. It's the story of woolly mammoths in Siberia and North America that we're going to focus in on now with Dr. David Meltzer. We'll explore how humans interacted with mammoths when they first reached the Americas. Did they actively hunt these great beasts? We'll also look at woolly mammoth extinction and their final enclaves in the Arctic only 4,000 years ago. Are humans to

• 35:12Tristan Hughes?

  blame for their extinction? Well, let's find out.

• 35:20Tristan Hughes?

  David, as always, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

• 35:24Speaker 06

  Thanks for having me back. It's fun.

• 35:26Tristan Hughes?

  It is always good fun and your topics always seem to get a huge reception. We've done the first Americans and Ice Age America. And now, talking about one of the, can we say one of the most significant beasts of the Ice Age, the woolly mammoth. There's something about the woolly mammoth that we always come back to. We love the woolly mammoth.

• 35:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, you know, there's a label for these large, now extinct animals. They call them charismatic fauna. And it's not because they had really pleasing personalities. It's just that you can't stop thinking about the damn things. They're so big, they're so interesting. And they're so gone. It's just a really, it's a fun topic to think about. It may not have been fun to be a woolly mammoth because they are gone, but it's something that is, that has intrigued scientists and the lay public for quite literally centuries.

• 36:15Tristan Hughes?

  So is it because, you mentioned, so the size, significance on the ecosystems, the fact that, as you say, you don't see woolly mammoths anymore, kind of like the dinosaurs. But they once had a huge impact on the world.

• 36:26Speaker 06

  Well, and unlike dinosaurs, people did once see them. People were on the landscape with them. It must have really been something to come around the corner and see one of these sort of aircraft carriers of the animal kingdom lumbering by. I mean, what a sight.

• 36:42Tristan Hughes?

  Now, talking about the archaeological record, I'm talking about the record in general, David. How rich a record would do you have as archaeologists when examining woolly mammoths, their interactions with humans? And also that just their general lifestyle, how far they spread and so on.

• 36:57Speaker 06

  We actually have a number of species of mammoths. The woolly mammoths are occupants, denizens of the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions. But as you get further south, there's other mammoth species and in fact, other proboscidean species, that is to say, other elephants. These are all distant animal relatives of African elephants and Asian elephants, which of course are still surviving today. And these are animals that, oh golly, some of the largest ones would be 14, 16 feet at the shoulder. They'd weigh six, eight tons.

• 37:37Tristan Hughes?

  Wow.

• 37:38Speaker 06

  And they're found, well, pretty much across Europe, Eurasia.

• 37:44Speaker 06

  The far north of the Americas, but even into temperate regions as well, not just Arctic regions. And they've been around for a very long time. Certainly mammoths were in Eurasia well before humans got up into that region, in far northeastern Eurasia. They were in the Americas before humans got here. So they lay claim to these landscapes, more so than we have a claim to these landscapes. And humans interacted with them over time. Now, of course, there's been lots of discussion about what the nature of that relationship was. Was it strictly platonic? Did humans admire them from a distance, or did humans want them for dinner? We certainly know that they did from time to time. But a lot of

• 38:28Speaker 06

  the question sort of revolves around the intensity of use of these animals, the risk involved in going after these animals, their role in the diet. But it's also important to come back to something you mentioned earlier, their impact on the landscape. These are animals that are what are known as keystone species. And what we mean by that is that these are animals that have a really profound effect on the ecosystem around there. They sneeze and everybody else gets a cold, as it were, because these are animals that play a role in species interactions, ecosystem connectivity, changing patterns of nitrogen

• 39:09Speaker 06

  cycling, dispersal of plant remains, disrupting or creating succession sequences. You pull them out of a landscape and things go to hell because their influence is so profound. So these are important animals, not just from sort of a human history, but also in terms of ecological history and environmental history.

• 39:32Tristan Hughes?

  So archaeological record, I'm guessing bones, skeletons. But do we also have things like DNA or poo? Sometimes people overlook poo, but poo is also a big thing, I'm guessing.

• 39:42Speaker 06

  Oh, listen, I'm into poo. I will quickly clarify what I mean by that. Because I don't want anybody to get the wrong idea. These are animals that are constantly shedding DNA, whether through poo or urinating on the landscape. And that becomes a really interesting source of information about where these animals were, when these animals were, and when they went extinct. So it's important to recognize, and by the way, I should just add too, it ain't just bones. We have freeze dried mammoth carcasses.

• 40:18Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, wow.

• 40:19Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. These things started to get dug up and discovered in the, I think, late 1800s in Siberia. Because what would happen is that these animals would, on occasion, fall into a pond. The pond would freeze. The area would become glaciated, frozen, permafrost, tundra. And when they would melt out 30,000 years later, you would have a perfectly preserved mammoth. And evidently, the story I heard from a one time professor of mine, Dave Hopkins, the sort of giant of Beringian studies, said that Siberian fur trappers would feed mammoth meat to their dogs

• 41:04Speaker 06

  just because it was a handy source of protein for their animals. Would I want a mammoth steak that had been sort of freeze dried for 30,000 years? I'd try it. Whether I like it is a different issue. So we have this really remarkable record of these animals. And the DNA part is especially important because all of that stuff that they're shedding on the landscape, as I mentioned, does really give us a good sense of populations, their population dynamics, the tailing off of their numbers over time. It essentially gives us a window into their extinction.

• 41:39Tristan Hughes?

  Well, that word extinction, as I said, we will get to. But you also mentioned words there like Beringia and Siberia. So that area of North East Asia and what was once that kind of land bridge area connecting North America with North East Asia. Was that area of the world one of the richest focal points of woolly mammoths back in the Ice Age?

• 42:00Speaker 06

  Maybe not the richest, but certainly an area that was occupied by mammoth. You know, you have mammoth across pretty much a large chunk of North Eurasian real estate. And Beringia was simply one part of it. We think of the land bridge as a sort of separate entity, but in reality, it was a continuous element of the so-called Beringian mammoth steppe, this vast grassland that stretched from essentially western Alaska to, well, basically across most of northern Eurasia.

• 42:36Tristan Hughes?

  They call it the mammoth steppe, do they?

• 42:38Speaker 06

  Exactly right, because it was the most prominent animal in the landscape. But it wasn't just them. Woolly rhinos, horses, giant bison were out there as well, because these are all grazers. These are all animals that, well, rhino to a lesser extent, but certainly horse, bison, and mammoth are animals that love large grasslands, and they're there in abundance. Large, relatively dry, underfoot grasslands as well.

• 43:09Tristan Hughes?

  If we go to North America, and we'll focus in largely on sites in North America with the woolly mammoth, because I know that's a main area of your speciality, David, do we know roughly when the woolly mammoth spread into the Americas and North America and become that dominant animal in that environment?

• 43:27Speaker 06

  Mammoths have been in North America, south of the Arctic, starting around 1.35 million years ago.

• 43:37Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, wow.

• 43:38Speaker 06

  So they've been here for a very long time. Now, what species of mammoth that was is not altogether clear, because there are two species of mammoths in the Americas. And it's sort of difficult, we, when we go that far back, we tend to work at the genus level in the Linnaean hierarchy, for those listeners who remember Linnaeus and all that other stuff that you had to memorize in eighth grade biology.

• 44:00Tristan Hughes?

  And what is that, sorry, for someone who was terrible at grade A biology?

• 44:04Speaker 06

  Oh, kingdom, phylum, order, family, class, genus, species, right? Your scientific ID card, as it were.

• 44:14Tristan Hughes?

  And so they arrive in the Americas, they're not sure which particular type of mammoth. And then I'm guessing they spread far and wide. And before the arrival of humans, are they at the top of the food chain in the Americas? And do we know from the archaeological record, do we know how far and wide they spread?

• 44:30Speaker 06

  Well, they were highly mobile. We know that actually from isotopic evidence in their bones that they would graze over vast areas. They were not at the top of the food chain insofar as predators are going to be hovering above herbivores. So your carnivores are going to be up there at the top. But they were certainly the large herbivore on that landscape. And so that's why they sort of had that role as a keystone species. And they could be very destructive on a landscape, too. Knock down trees as they're moving around, chewing up the landscape as they're grazing, that kind of thing.

• 45:06Tristan Hughes?

  So I'd like to also ask about footprints because we talked about DNA. We talked about bones and briefly talked about poo as well. But do we have many footprints of woolly mammoths surviving in the archaeological record?

• 45:18Speaker 06

  I've seen mammoth footprints, okay? I can't tell by their sneakers whether it was a mammoth or a Colombian, a woolly mammoth or a Colombian mammoth. There's actually a science of footprints. And for the life of me, I can't remember what the ology, this particular ology is of studying footprints. But yeah, there's mammoth tracks that have been found in a number of areas. And I've seen them out on the White Sands Missile Range, which is actually quite close to the White Sands archaeological site, which I think we've talked about, where we have these human footprints. There's mammoth footprints all over the place. I had to have them pointed out to me that these are mammoth footprints. I mean, to me, they look, well, they look like large, round patterns on the landscape. Okay, I'll buy it that those are mammoth footprints.

• 46:03Speaker 06

  They look like other kinds of geological features to me, but smarter people than me assured me that they were footprints. And I was happy to go along with that. Whether they were mammoths of, well, they were probably Colombian mammoths, just given the range and where they were found. So yeah, these things have turned up in a number of places.

• 46:20Tristan Hughes?

  Sorry, I completely forgot, of course, as you highlighted earlier, that there are those two different main types of mammoth, aren't there, in the Americas as it go on? So is it at least two, or the woolly mammoths is, I'm presuming, further north, and the Colombian mammoths further south?

• 46:33Speaker 06

  Exactly right. And there's been a certain amount of arguing about the number of taxa of mammoths, but generally, at the moment, we're going with just those two.

• 46:42Tristan Hughes?

  And so how does the arrival of humans on the stage, late in the game, if you're saying that mammoths had already been in America for more than a million years, how does the ultimate arrival of humans in America, but I guess it could also be used as a case study for elsewhere in the world, how does it affect woolly mammoths?

• 47:00Speaker 06

  That's the big question, isn't it? There's been a debate for over a century as to whether humans were responsible for their extinction. And the challenge and the complication here is that we actually have very little evidence that humans were actively preying upon these species. We do know that they did. We have, you know, a dozen or more sites where we have evidence of human artifacts, mammoth bones, suggesting that there was some sort of activity going on there. But in some of those cases, it looks like humans were simply scavenging already dead animals. We can actually see primarchs where they were sort of pulling apart bones to sort of gnaw on them, I suppose.

• 47:41Speaker 06

  So yeah, humans had an effect, but was it consequential or not? And it's also important to note, and we perhaps mentioned this in our past conversations, that mammoths were simply one of over three dozen animals that will go extinct at the end of the Pleistocene. And what makes this challenging, of course, is that it was the end of the Pleistocene. So we have this confluence of animals disappearing, humans arriving, and all the massive changes that are taking place in the climate and the environment as the Ice Age comes to an end. So it's not entirely clear, which way are the causal arrows pointing? Are they pointing at humans being responsible for all of these changes, or? In my view, more likely, are we looking at climatic and environmental change playing

• 48:26Speaker 06

  a role?

• 48:27Tristan Hughes?

  Do we have the surviving evidence which shows that there was regular active hunting of these mammoths? And what types of hunting these humans were doing to try and down what was, as you say, the aircraft carrier of Ice Age animals?

• 48:43Speaker 06

  Going after an aircraft carrier with a stick with a sharp rock. So let's just make it even more frightening that it might have been. Well, look, the evidence that we have in terms of these sort of activities that might have taken place, one of the things that's kind of striking is that a lot of these sites, again, there's not that many of them, a dozen or so, make it 16, that's the actual number that we're comfortable with, are sometimes found near water. So one of the things that happens with, you know, large mammals like this, these have water-cooled engines. When body temperature goes up, when they're ill, when they're dying, head to a pond, head to a lake. That makes them vulnerable. So it may well be that human hunting was sort of along the lines of ambush hunting.

• 49:28Speaker 06

  The problem is, is you don't want to take down an elephant when it's in the water. Because if it sinks into the water, what are the odds of getting a waterlogged mammoth weighing six tons, now probably 10 tons, I'm exaggerating to make a point, out of that muck and the mud of the pond? So, you know, one senses and suspects that if in fact these animals were near death or dying, that it would have been easier just to wait, let them die, and then just scavenge. You know, cut off a couple of mammoth steaks, put them on the barbecue, there you're done. Low-risk hunting, by the way.

• 50:06Tristan Hughes?

  You mentioned these sites. So are these the so-named kill sites, these mammoth kill sites that you have in the archaeological record?

• 50:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, some of them may just be scavenging. We know that hunter-gatherers, you know, there's two things they like to do in terms of reducing risk. One is reducing the risk of coming home empty-handed, and the other is reducing the risk of coming home dead. And so having an elephant die for you, very convenient.

• 50:29Tristan Hughes?

  And do we know much else about those sites? You've got those kill sites there where it seems that, well, maybe not, if they're just scavenging on a dead mammoth, maybe humans weren't directly involved in killing that mammoth. Are there other clear sites? And I've got one, I think, in my notes, it's from South Dakota, where it's almost like these mammoths have suffered from a natural disaster, or they've fallen into something and not died from a human attack?

• 50:54Speaker 06

  Well, exactly right. That site that you mentioned is called Mammoth Hot Springs, and it's basically a sinkhole. And it goes back, I think the current estimates of its age are around 65,000, which puts it pre-humans in the Americas. And natural death assemblages, you know, animals had to die, and they had to die even before humans showed up. And so we do have these localities where there are, in some cases, natural disasters from the point of view of a mammoth, and we have an accumulation of skeletons in one spot. And it's really striking, when you go to that site, and it's actually a really cool site to visit, is they have a museum that they built over this big pit, and you can

• 51:39Speaker 06

  actually see where a mom mammoth, a mammoth mom, was trying to push its calf out of the hole. It's a wonderful and tragic moment in mammoth history, where this poor, presumably nursing mammoth mother was trying to save her baby. Didn't work.

• 51:58Tristan Hughes?

  And do we therefore also know quite a lot about young juvenile baby mammoths from the surviving archaeological record alongside the fully grown adults, the bulls, the males and the females that we usually think of when someone says mammoth?

• 52:11Speaker 06

  Well, in fact, some of those freeze-dried mammoths are babies.

• 52:15Tristan Hughes?

  Wow.

• 52:15Speaker 06

  And there's one that came out of Siberia, dates to... I think around 38, 40,000 years ago, don't quote me on it. And it had clearly not been weaned and it didn't know how to feed itself. And so when they opened up its stomach contents, the poor thing had been grabbing rocks and twigs in an effort to feed itself, not knowing what was food. So yeah, this poor thing was just incapable of caring for itself and died because of it.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Hannah Berner from Giggly Squad and the holidays are around the corner, which means I'm officially entering my Hostess Hannah era with Arm & Hammer Hardball Cat Litter. You guys know I love cats and fostering, but when I'm hosting, I do not want my house smelling like cats. I want people focusing on my hosting skills. That's why I love Arm & Hammer Hardball Cat Litter. It delivers long-lasting odor control and forms compact clumps that make cleanup easy so that's one less thing I need to worry about when people come over. Be guest-ready with Arm & Hammer Cat Litter. Find it now at Walmart or Amazon.

• 53:27Speaker 04

  Granger knows, if you're a procurement manager at an industrial manufacturing facility, you're balancing inventory and budget while sourcing critical supplies across the operation. Too much inventory? Costs climb. Too little? Production slows. Granger's $2 billion in on-hand inventory helps you get what you need, when you need it, so you can help keep budgets balanced and lines moving. Call 1-800-GRANGER, click Granger.com, or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done.

• 54:11Tristan Hughes?

  So we have humans and woolly mammoths coexisting during this later period of the Ice Age, David. And during that time, humans would have known woolly mammoths, as you say, scavenging these carcasses, maybe actively hunting some of them as well with these techniques, trying to take down the aircraft carriers of the Ice Age. Would they not just be getting the meat of the mammoth? Would they be using almost every part of this giant that is for them?

• 54:37Speaker 06

  Well, six tons of meat, that's an awful lot to eat. And you remind me of a famous quote about the meatpacking plants in Chicago at the turn of the century where they used everything from the squeal to the tail on an animal. Look, there's only so much that pedestrian hunter-gatherers can carry. And so my suspicion is, well, let me use a bison kill as an example and a potential analog. Bison are huge at the end of the Ice Age. Three thousand, four thousand pounds, not a problem. And what we see in bison kills is that humans would butcher the animals and they'd take all the high utility bones. And by that, I mean the bones that had good meat on them.

• 55:20Speaker 06

  They would dry the meat, they'd get it ready for transport, and then they'd go and they'd probably end up leaving behind a lot of the carcass. You're not going to haul around a skull with you. These are highly mobile people, right? And so as highly mobile people and as highly mobile people without wheeled vehicles or, you know, you have dogs, they can help you drag stuff. But if you kill a six-ton animal, you'll, you'll get what you need, you'll dry the meat, you'll take as much as you can carry, and you'll move on. And so we suspect that you could cash it. And let me explain that. There's a site in Wyoming called the Colby Site. And it looks for all the world as though a number of immature animals were dispatched

• 56:05Speaker 06

  by human hunters. Again, low risk, right? Go after a baby mammoth that's wandered away from the herd. Yeah. A lot less scary. And there was stacking of the bones when the site was found. And it looks as though in Wyoming, and this is an interpretation by the eminent archaeologist George Frisen, wonderful fellow, recently passed away. And George interpreted this site as winter's coming, it's Wyoming, it's really cold, you kill a couple of or more immature mammoths, and then you sort of stack up the meat for over the course of the winter. It's going to freeze, it'll stay just fine, and it's your Pleistocene refrigerator. And over the course of the winter and into the spring, as it warms up, you've got a ready

• 56:50Speaker 06

  source of meat for a long time.

• 56:51Tristan Hughes?

  So one kill, as you say, you could come back to it at a later date. It's if the group that you're with go back to that place regularly or once or twice a year, they could remember where it is?

• 57:02Speaker 06

  Oh, absolutely. In fact, there's two caches at Colby, and one of them appears to have been reopened. So the other one was just, oh, okay, fine, we got, we got all we need. And then, of course, over the next summer, it's probably going to spoil and you're not going to come back to it again. But that was certainly a handy way to exploit and take advantage of all the meat such a kill would provide.

• 57:22Tristan Hughes?

  And so if we go to the end of the Ice Age, David, the big question is, I mean, what happens to the woolly mammoth? And what are the theories as to why this great beast, this behemoth of the Ice Age, does go extinct? Primarily, let's focus first of all, on the mainland continents, on, let's say, America, but also in Asia.

• 57:42Speaker 06

  Yeah. So getting back to the issue of the Pleistocene's coming to an end. Environments are changing, they're changing dramatically. And one of the things that's important to stress is that the changes are not sort of uniform across time and space. Second, each species is responding individually to those changes. So it's not a sort of one size fits all. Climate change is therefore everybody goes extinct. Thirdly, extinctions is not synchronous across all these taxa. So some animals are going, are disappearing earlier, some are disappearing later. It all depends on their individual ecological tolerances, the thresholds that they can handle of climate change and ecological change.

• 58:27Speaker 06

  And so it's a, as a consequence, mammoth will survive really late. Perhaps as late as maybe 4,000 years ago. It's really quite astonishing. In certain areas, areas that, for all intents and purposes, the Pleistocene hasn't come to an end in terms of the environment. So for example, far northern Siberia on the Tamer Peninsula, we have a record, and this is work that was led by my colleague, Eskie Willerslev, at the Center for Geogenetics in Copenhagen, which showed that the vegetation in this far northern portion of Siberia essentially retained that mammoth steppe look.

• 59:11Speaker 06

  Up until around 4,000 years ago, not surprisingly, mammoths hung on up until 4,000 years ago. In North America, south of the ice sheets, they're gone by 10,000. Okay? So they're disappearing a lot earlier, but also in sync with significant changes in the environment and the climate of North America, which of course are not sort of carrying over that nice Pleistocene setting that they love so much.

• 59:38Tristan Hughes?

  And is this a pattern that you see? So the fauna is changing, the climate is going up, and the woolly mammoths, are they almost like the biggest casualty of it amongst a whole range of other animals that are caught up in this, in that area, let's say of America, south of the ice sheets?

• 59:55Speaker 06

  Well, they're the heaviest that disappears. But no, they're just one of 38 different genera that will disappear. And those genera range from these six, seven, eight-ton animals down to a bunny, the est aland rabbit disappears at the same time. And presumably, there's a tree that goes extinct, there's a bunch of birds that go extinct, some reptiles, some tortoises. Extinctions, and this is one of the important things to stress, people always think about the end of the Pleistocene and all these big animals disappearing, and that's true. But that's only one end of a continuum of changes, of a continuum, a spectrum of extinctions that are taking place in all these different animals.

• 1:00:39Speaker 06

  And some are surviving, but are undergoing intense selective pressure. Okay? So they're not going extinct, but they're getting hammered in other ways. So bison, giant bison of the Pleistocene, within a few thousand years, are basically shrinking, right? Because the environment is changing, they're having to adjust, they're having to respond, and it's causing significant evolutionary change within the species. So there's a whole lot of things that are happening that, to be honest, we don't fully understand, and we cannot fully link. Cause to effect. We know extinctions are occurring. We know they're occurring across

• 1:01:20Speaker 06

  a wide range of animals. We know they're a part of a spectrum of changes that are taking place in the environment. But getting all of that disentangled and figuring out cause is challenging. And it's been challenging in part because for so many years, we didn't have the tools. All we had was the fossil record. We got some bones here. We got some bones here. We have some proxies that tell us something about the climate. But with ancient DNA, which I know we've talked about before, it's so very important because with ancient DNA, we can actually see species start to decline in number. We can see their genetic diversity being reduced over time. We can see changes in their diet, changes

• 1:02:05Speaker 06

  in their ability to cope with their environment. So literally now, and for just really the last 10 years or so, we're finally in a position to get past the impasse that has prevented us from really getting a good handle on the why question and linking cause and effect.

• 1:02:25Tristan Hughes?

  And this is something we've definitely chatted about in both of our last two chats. This idea, as you say, it's too simple an answer to then see humans are also living here. It looks like they're eating mammoth, or at least times, they must therefore have a big responsibility in the extinction of the mammoth.

• 1:02:42Speaker 06

  Yeah. So extinctions is a global phenomenon. You see it in Australia, but much earlier. You see it in New Zealand, but much later. Not all of these cases are alike. In fact, none of these cases are alike. You've got different sets of animals. You've got different sets of environmental, ecological and climatic contexts. And yeah, people are around for all of those things, but so is climate. And so it's really important to Take each of these cases individually and try and understand what's going on and why.

• 1:03:17Tristan Hughes?

  But also this extraordinary enclave where it seems that mammoths last a bit longer. I'd like you to talk a bit more about this because it is extraordinary. The story of these mammoths in the Arctic, but particularly on the islands, as well as this particular peninsula you've already highlighted. Can you explain to us a bit more about the work up there, David? And how it's revealed what was happening with mammoths there and why they last longer?

• 1:03:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, so this is something that could only be done with ancient DNA. Because with ancient, ancient environmental DNA, I should clarify. Because we have a record, not just of mammoth DNA, but we have a detailed record of the vegetation. When you take a sample of environmental DNA from a core that you drive into the ground, you're getting not just the DNA fragments of the mammoth, but you're getting all of the DNA from all of the plants that were growing in that environment. So we've got a nice, direct relationship between plant and animal. And what we see is that prior to the last glacial maximum,

• 1:04:22Speaker 06

  that is to say, the depths of the most recent episode of glaciation, yeah, 25, 20,000 years ago, we've got mammoth all around the sort of high Arctic. So if you're looking from straight down on the North Pole, you would see a circle of mammoths. Getting into the LGM, the last glacial maximum, they're still all around. But as the climate is warming and as environments are changing, mammoth are starting to disappear. And the reason they're disappearing, and we see this in the vegetation record, is that the vegetation itself, that wonderful complex of that mammoth steppe that they loved so much, is becoming fragmented. It's disappearing.

• 1:05:03Speaker 06

  And so what's happening is that we know that there were actually multiple lineages, multiple genetic lineages of mammoths that were scattered from far western Europe all the way around to far northeast Asia into the Americas. Those different and widely scattered lineages of mammoth are disappearing one by one as the environment is changing. And the last mammoths standing are the ones who are in that far northern enclave where the vegetation is hanging on. And what makes this remarkable is that we've known for a number of years that mammoth

• 1:05:44Speaker 06

  actually survived on offshore islands in the Siberian and Beringian seas and ultimately would go extinct later there. And the argument there was, well, they're on these small islands, they run out of food, they run out of good water, of course, they're going to go extinct without humans. But on the northern timer peninsula, they're going extinct and humans clearly could have walked out there and seen them. But they're still there and they hang on till 4,000 years ago, which of course is well after humans have reached into this portion of northern Siberia.

• 1:06:22Speaker 06

  So we have evidence of humans on that landscape at a time when, well, the pyramids are being built. I mean, it just kind of blows your mind to think about this. There was a terrible, terrible movie about mammoths building the pyramids that came out some years ago, 10,000 B.C. or something like that. In every terrible movie, maybe there's just a little grain, a little nugget of truth that mammoths were around at the time the pyramids were being built.

• 1:06:52Tristan Hughes?

  Fair enough. Actually, I must admit, before we did this recording, one of my colleagues did mention 10,000 B.C. and mammoths building the pyramids. So I'm glad that you mentioned it there. And do we think that these mammoths, I mean, very quickly, David, do we think that they die out just because of vegetation, of change in that regard?

• 1:07:08Speaker 06

  That's it, that's it. There's absolutely no evidence of humans hunting these animals. They died of their own free will, as it were.

• 1:07:17Tristan Hughes?

  Well, David, this has been great. I've only got one more question to ask you, which of course is something that you see on the news time and time again with regards to woolly mammoth DNA and elephants today. Is it possible, do you think, that the woolly mammoth might come back?

• 1:07:34Speaker 06

  No, what you'll get is an Asian elephant with a bit of hair. No, I mean, we don't have, we don't have living cells. We can't clone them. You can insert some mammoth DNA into a modern day elephant, but that's about all you're gonna do. Sorry to disappoint your listeners, but they're not coming back. They're gone and they ain't coming back.

• 1:07:54Tristan Hughes?

  Well, David, on that note, I think we'll wrap up today's episode. This has been wonderful as always. You've written several books, but talk to us about the book where you're focusing on, among many things, Ice Age America, shall we say, the humans in Ice Age America, but of course the woolly mammoths play a big part in that whole environment.

• 1:08:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, thanks. The book is First Peoples in a New World Populating Ice Age America, and it takes the reader through the whole peopling process, what the environment was like, who the people were, when they showed up, what they encountered, how they dealt with it, and the role, if any, of large mammals like mammoth in their subsistence strategies as they dispersed out across the continent.

• 1:08:39Tristan Hughes?

  Brilliant. Well, David, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast today.

• 1:08:44Speaker 06

  It's my pleasure, Tristan, as always.

• 1:08:49Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was Professors David Meltzer and Adrian Lister talking all the things the woolly mammoth. I hope you enjoyed the episode. This is the first in our brand new Ice Age series this February. The next episode will be released next Sunday, and we're heading down under to explore the awesome story of Ice Age Australia. Yes, that's right. In the next episode, we're going to be exploring the stories of these amazing and unique Ice Age giants, or megafauna, that roamed Australia tens of thousands of years ago, including killer wombats and massive kangaroos. You don't want to miss that one.

• 1:09:25Tristan Hughes?

  Thank you for listening to this episode of The Ancients. Please follow this show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hit's podcasts ad-free, and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 1:09:54Speaker 04

  Granger knows, if you're a procurement manager at an industrial manufacturing facility, you're balancing inventory and budget while sourcing critical supplies across the operation. Too much inventory? Costs climb. Too little? Production slows. Granger's $2 billion in on-hand inventory helps you get what you need, when you need it, so you can help keep budgets balanced and lines moving. Call 1-800-GRANGER, click Granger.com or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done.