Climate Change, Humans, and the Extinction of the Woolly Mammoth

Abstract

Woolly mammoths inhabited Eurasia and North America from late Middle Pleistocene (300 ky BP [300,000 years before present]), surviving through different climatic cycles until they vanished in the Holocene (3.6 ky BP). The debate about why the Late Quaternary extinctions occurred has centred upon environmental and human-induced effects, or a combination of both. However, testing these two hypotheses—climatic and anthropogenic—has been hampered by the difficulty of generating quantitative estimates of the relationship between the contraction of the mammoth's geographical range and each of the two hypotheses. We combined climate envelope models and a population model with explicit treatment of woolly mammoth–human interactions to measure the extent to which a combination of climate changes and increased human pressures might have led to the extinction of the species in Eurasia. Climate conditions for woolly mammoths were measured across different time periods: 126 ky BP, 42 ky BP, 30 ky BP, 21 ky BP, and 6 ky BP. We show that suitable climate conditions for the mammoth reduced drastically between the Late Pleistocene and the Holocene, and 90% of its geographical range disappeared between 42 ky BP and 6 ky BP, with the remaining suitable areas in the mid-Holocene being mainly restricted to Arctic Siberia, which is where the latest records of woolly mammoths in continental Asia have been found. Results of the population models also show that the collapse of the climatic niche of the mammoth caused a significant drop in their population size, making woolly mammoths more vulnerable to the increasing hunting pressure from human populations. The coincidence of the disappearance of climatically suitable areas for woolly mammoths and the increase in anthropogenic impacts in the Holocene, the coup de grâce, likely set the place and time for the extinction of the woolly mammoth.

EcoClimate: a database of climate data from multiple models for past, present, and future for macroecologists and biogeographers

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“…Quantifying and mapping historical climate signatures in relation to spatial (Araújo et al, 2008) and temporal (Lyons and Wagner, 2009) biodiversity patterns, for example, is a general issue in macroecology to which ecoClimate data have much to offer. In the "new" paleobiology, a research field integrating paleontologists and evolutionary theorists, paleoclimatic simulations have provided opportunities for testing climatic controls on macroevolutionary patterns (Eronen et al, 2009;Myers and Saupe, 2013).…”

Ancient DNA reveals late survival of mammoth and horse in interior Alaska

“…We recommend, therefore, that sedaDNA analyses should be conducted concurrently with direct dating of macrofossils, rather than as a replacement for it, especially in settings where postdepositional reworking of sediments and fossils cannot be discounted. Nevertheless, coupling the sedaDNA approach with that of recent climatic niche modeling, which can identify likely target areas for late survival of extinct species (38), offers a powerful tool to reexamine when, where, and why various late Quaternary species went extinct.…”

Informative Potential of Multiscale Observations in Archaeological Biominerals Down to Nanoscale

“…Tracing the geographical origin of the artefact's material can also reveal trading routes and societal organizations of ancient cultures. Finally, the genetic analysis of these biological remains and artifacts can also shed light on the phylogeny and phylogeography of the respective animals which body parts are witnesses of past events (Nogués-Bravo et al 2008;Haile et al 2009;Enk et al 2011).…”