Woolly Mammoths

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Speaker 23 The woolly mammoth, a great beast that has become synonymous with the ice age.

Speaker 23 More than 11 feet tall and 6 tons 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.

Speaker 23 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?

Speaker 23 How often were they hunted by humans?

Speaker 1 And why eventually did they go extinct?

Speaker 23 It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host.
Welcome to the first episode of a brand new miniseries this February all about the Ice Age.

Speaker 23 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.

Speaker 23 To kick off this new series, we're covering the woolly mammoth, this fan-favourite Ice Age animal. This episode will feature not one but two leading experts.

Speaker 23 First, a chat with the Natural History Museum's Professor Adrian Lister, a paleobiologist and leading expert on the woolly mammoth.

Speaker 23 Adrian will explain their origins and how they were built to survive in cold conditions from tusk to tail.

Speaker 23 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.

Speaker 23 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 northeast Siberia.

Speaker 23 I really hope you enjoy. First up is Professor Adrian Lister.

Speaker 1 Let's get into it.

Speaker 1 Adrian, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast today.

Speaker 19 Very nice to be here.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 The name and the word mammoth is still very popular today.

Speaker 19 Yes, the mammoth is a kind of iconic animal of the Ice Age, definitely.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 The 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 But prior to that, we know a whole sequence of fossil species that form a really interesting evolutionary sort of leading up to the woolly mammoth as the kind of final species species of the group and the most specialized species of the group.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 19 Well, I mean, you've only got to look at a mammoth to realize it's a kind of elephant. And, you know, in fact, you know, the mammoths were elephants, they were part of the elephant family.

Speaker 19 And the elephant family arose in Africa, just like the human family, actually.

Speaker 19 The first elephant fossils are about seven billion years old,

Speaker 19 found in East Africa and Southern Africa. And quite soon after the origin of the family, it split into three.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And the third line was the mammoth line. And the earliest fossils we've got are about five million years ago in South Africa.
So mammoths started off in Africa as a tropical species.

Speaker 19 You know, at that stage, they wouldn't have had the sort of hairy coat that, you know, we're familiar with.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And they very quickly spread across Asia and there are fossils of similar age about three million years ago from China.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 So you've got this sort of early mammoth ancestor right across Eurasia, you know, about 3 million years ago. And soon after that is when the ice ages started to clock in.

Speaker 19 You know, we recognise the beginning of the ice ages at about 2.6 million years ago.

Speaker 19 And what we see in the mammoth fossils, when we trace them up through time, starting at about 3 million years ago, right up to the last ice age, up till 10,000 years ago, getting on towards their final extinction.

Speaker 19 Through that period, we can see a change of adaptation, looking at these fossils. And

Speaker 19 they're gradually becoming adapted to the cold, open environments of the ice ages, culminating in the familiar woolly mammoth with its hairy coat and all the rest of it.

Speaker 1 So Adrian, it sounds there, and as you've highlighted the changing climate and how that influences it as well, but to reach the woolly mammoth from, as you say, those first mammoths that go out of Africa, it may be oversimplifying it, but it almost feels 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.

Speaker 19 Yes, it was a step-by-step process, but it wasn't just a single line because

Speaker 19 We ended up with quite a few different mammoth species actually.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And then in one area of Eastern Asia, probably in northern China, we pick up the next stage.

Speaker 19 There's been what we call in the jargon of speciation. In other words, one species is split into two.

Speaker 19 So

Speaker 19 in the Far East, you know,

Speaker 19 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 mammals had to become adapted to. So there was a split.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 So it is a stepwise change, but it's quite a complex one.

Speaker 1 It sounds quite similar to human evolution, doesn't it? It's not just one type to another, as if they're all these different lineages that link together.

Speaker 19 But

Speaker 1 like for a Joe Bloggs looking in, sometimes it's easy to oversimplify to be going from one species to the next to the next.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 1 And that presumably would include the woolly mammoth, was it? Was that one of the strongest, the best?

Speaker 19 Well it was the one that was the best adapted to the ice age environments you know whereas the ice age environments which saw much of the northern hemisphere cold, obviously, also forests gave way to grasslands.

Speaker 19 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 it means it fits that environment you know it that and that's why it survived and the the other species died out.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 19 Does that show any kind of great adaptations for that new climate 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 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 fly swat The woolly mammoth had a much shorter tail.

Speaker 19 And I think the reason for that is avoiding frostbite.

Speaker 19 If 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, then, you know, you've got to protect it from frostbite.

Speaker 19 And I'm going to switch to the far other far end of the animal, actually, and destroy your idea of going from back to front, because I think the ear of the mammoth actually tells the same story.

Speaker 19 Because obviously, as we all learn as children, elephants have great big ears that they flap

Speaker 19 and they flap them to lose heat.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Now, the mammoth living in an Arctic climate had the exact opposite problem.

Speaker 19 It wanted to conserve heat.

Speaker 19 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 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 that have basically been in a deep freeze in the permafrost since the ice age.

Speaker 19 That's how we know know about things like the tail length, the ear, other soft tissue features that we otherwise wouldn't know about because they didn't have bones in.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 You don't want to lose heat through them and you don't want them to get frostbite. So that's that.

Speaker 1 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 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

Speaker 19 well it's basically like an a living elephant in that you've got two great big tusks sticking out of the front end and they are they the tusks tusks are essentially modified incisor teeth.

Speaker 19 That's what elephant tusks are. That's what mammoth tusks were.
They're equivalent to our side incisors. So not the center two teeth at the front, but the ones right next to them.

Speaker 19 Obviously massively overgrown. And they're made of solid dentine,

Speaker 19 which is they have no enamel around the

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And the mammoth tusks differed from those of living elephants in that they don't just go sort of straight forward with a gentle curve like those of living elephants. They form a kind of spiral shape.

Speaker 19 The mammoth tusks have a kind of spiral shape. And in some individuals with very large tusks, they could even cross in the middle.

Speaker 19 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 as to how they were actually used.

Speaker 1 I was going to say, so do we know how they use these great tusks? Because I don't think they'll be used for digging up roots or anything like that.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 With most individuals, it was like that. And I think that was still the main function, but also for a sort of intimidating display.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 19 Oh yes no question about that if not fatal.

Speaker 1 Do we know much about the brain size, the eyes and the teeth? Should we go through those one by one?

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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

Speaker 19 and with that enormous weight of tusks at the front, if you think about it, actually the animal's got to be able to raise and lower its its head with these huge things sticking out of the front.

Speaker 19 And so it needed enormous power of muscle and tendon, very, very strong, and lots of them attaching to the back of the head.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Now, this was something that developed in the evolution that we talked about earlier, because the mammoth's ancestors lived mostly on the leaves of trees and shrubs, which if you are a herbivorous mammal, those are relatively soft to chew.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 It's also lower in nutrients, so you have to eat more of it. We think mammoths are probably eating for maybe like 18, 20 hours a day to get enough food.

Speaker 1 18 to 20 hours a day.

Speaker 19 Yeah. Wow.

Speaker 19 Yeah. They would have had to eat about 400 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

Speaker 19 so that they could last through the animal's life, even though they would be wearing down. gradually with this very tough food that

Speaker 19 the animal is eating. This is another reason why the head looks quite sort of long and short, because it had to house these very tall teeth.

Speaker 19 So you would have noticed that difference immediately on looking at a mammoth compared to an elephant.

Speaker 1 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. 20 hours.
Wow.

Speaker 19 So do we know much about the actual body of the woolly mammoth, Adrian, and the kind of not just the weight, but also you say that that whole structure of it 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 200 artistic reproductions of representations of mammoths by Ice Age artists.

Speaker 1 These are famous caves like Lasco and Chauvet.

Speaker 19 Yes, exactly, yes. And although obviously, you know, you have to allow for artistic license, but there are certain features of the animal that are repeated again and again in the art.

Speaker 19 One in particular that I would mention is that they're always shown with a very sloping back.

Speaker 19 So the mammoth had a sort of high shoulder hump and then the back sloped down gradually towards the tail end.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Again, compare with an Asian, living Asian elephant where the back is kind of arched shape, and an African elephant where the back is described as saddle-shaped, you know, hollow in the middle.

Speaker 19 So the mammoth was quite different in its overall body form, if you were to look at it from the side.

Speaker 19 High domed skull, big shoulder hump, sloping back down to the back end.

Speaker 1 And how thick was the fur coat of a woody mammoth?

Speaker 19 Very thick, yeah. I mean the long, we've got a lot of hair preserved from the permafrost and the main sort of outer coat, the longest hairs are about a metre long.
Those are the ones that mark

Speaker 19 on the back and hanging down from the belly like a bit of a curtain. And I've measured the width of those hairs under the microscope.
They're about six times the thickness of an average human hair.

Speaker 19 So living elephants, although they sort of appear naked from a distance, you know, close up, they do have a sparse covering of hair.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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 was a bit like cotton wool actually,

Speaker 19 as a second kind of insulating. layer then there was a fab layer underneath the skin so they were well protected against the cold.

Speaker 1 What do we know about mammoth feet?

Speaker 19 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 anti-free substances you know in their blood that stop them from freezing up.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Now, hemoglobin, of course, is the molecule in our blood that transports oxygen from the lungs to all the tissues of our body.

Speaker 19 And what they did was that, 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.

Speaker 19 So these people actually found the gene from the mammoth DNA that codes for hemoglobin.

Speaker 19 They then in the lab, in the test tube effectively, created mammoth hemoglobin

Speaker 19 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

Speaker 19 that enabled it to work at lower temperatures.

Speaker 19 When I say work, they took the mammoth hemoglobin now to five degrees C and it was still able to pick up oxygen and then release the oxygen because that's how hemoglobin works.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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 so on,

Speaker 19 you still need to be able to get oxygen to the tissues of the feet, the muscles and all the rest of it.

Speaker 19 And so the hemoglobin of the mammoth was adapted to be able to do that even in virtually zero temperatures.

Speaker 19 So what we're learning about these animals now goes beyond what traditional study of bones and even soft tissues to the molecular level.

Speaker 1 I mean, 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 a 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 structure and analyze more about how they functioned.

Speaker 19 Yes. Another nice outcome, actually, we're talking about the mammoth's coat, is about the colour because

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 But 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.

Speaker 19 And actually recent DNA work has has tended to confirm that.

Speaker 19 And we now think based on some hair samples which are a much darker sort of chocolatey brown 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.

Speaker 19 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.

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Speaker 1 Adrian, one last question on the body.

Speaker 1 You also mentioned earlier when talking about the teeth, how they're having to eat for much of the day.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 19 Almost certainly, yes.

Speaker 19 The answer is yes. Especially because all elephants, and that would have included mammoths, have actually a relatively inefficient digestion.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 So answer your question is yup.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 1 Adrian, you've 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 19 Well, first of all, we make a kind of analogy with living elephants, you know, where 60 or 70 is really the top duration.

Speaker 19 Secondly, we do have a kind of a record in the tusks.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 They also wore down at the tip, you know, through use.

Speaker 19 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 was at the tip, would have worn away.

Speaker 19 So we never get the complete lifespan. But the longest that we've counted is, I think, 47 years.

Speaker 19 So in other words, there was one mammoth tusk where 47 annual rings were counted.

Speaker 19 And the fact that we haven't got any up to 60 or 70 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 47 preserved so my guess is it probably similar to a living elephant at about 60 or 70 if they were doing well so this is the mammoth equivalent of tree rings is it yeah exactly yes 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?

Speaker 19 Well, the woolly mammoth had an enormous range. I mean, it is bigger than either of the living species.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And then

Speaker 19 we tend to, in, you know, in paleontology, we think of the Americas as actually to the east

Speaker 19 of Asia, because although, you know, we're 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.

Speaker 19 But the way that animals actually spread was eastward.

Speaker 19 across the Bering Strait, which is, you know, the sea that now separates Siberia from Alaska, was dry land.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 The mammoths 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.

Speaker 19 So I don't know how many square kilometers that is, but it's absolutely vast.

Speaker 1 And it's been estimated that at their peak there were at least 10 million mammoths living in that area 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 that is correct yes adrian you have fantastically given us a great introduction to the woolly mammoth at its height and what we should envisage.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 19 It's been a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.

Speaker 23 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.

Speaker 23 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.

Speaker 23 It's the story of woolly mammoths in Siberia and North America that we're going to focus in on now with Dr. David Miltzer.

Speaker 23 We'll explore how humans interacted with mammoths when they first reached the Americas. Did they actively hunt these great beasts?

Speaker 23 We'll also look at woolly mammoth extinction and their final enclaves in the Arctic only 4,000 years ago. Are humans to blame for their extinction?

Speaker 1 Well, let's find out.

Speaker 1 David, as always, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

Speaker 19 Thanks for having me back. It's fun.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And now talking about one of the, can we say one of the most significant beasts of the Ice Age, the woody mammoth. There's something about the woody mammoth that we always come back to.

Speaker 1 We love the woody mammoth.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 It may not have been fun to be a woolly mammoth because they are gone, but it's something that

Speaker 19 has intrigued scientists and the lay public for quite literally centuries.

Speaker 1 So is it because you mentioned there, so the size, the 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.

Speaker 19 Well, and unlike dinosaurs, people did once see them. People were on the landscape with them.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 1 Now, talking about the archaeological record, talking about the record in general, David.

Speaker 1 How rich a record do you have as archaeologists when examining woolly mammoths, their interactions with humans, and also just their general lifestyle, how far they spread, and so on.

Speaker 19 We actually have a number of species of mammoths. The woolly mammoths are occupants, denizens of the Arctic and subarctic regions.

Speaker 19 But as you get further south, there's other mammoth species, and in fact, other proboscidian species, that is to say, other elephants.

Speaker 19 These are all distant animal relatives of African elephants and Asian elephants, which of course are still surviving today.

Speaker 19 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.
Wow.

Speaker 19 And they're found, well, pretty much across Europe, Eurasia, the far north of the Americas, but even into temperate regions as well, not just Arctic regions.

Speaker 19 And they've been around for a very long time. Certainly mammoths were in Eurasia well before humans got up into that region, you know, far northeastern Eurasia.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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?

Speaker 19 We certainly know that they did from time to time, but a lot of 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And what we mean by that is that these are animals that have a really profound effect on the ecosystem around there.

Speaker 19 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 cycling, dispersal of plant remains, disrupting or creating succession sequences.

Speaker 19 You pull them out of a landscape and things go to hell because their influence is so profound.

Speaker 19 So these are important animals, not just from sort of a human history, but also in terms of ecological history and environmental history.

Speaker 1 So archaeological record, I'm guessing bones, skeletons. But do we also have things like DNA or poo?

Speaker 1 Sometimes people overlook poo, but poo is also a big thing here, I'm guessing.

Speaker 19 Oh, listen, I'm into poo. I will quickly clarify what I mean by that,

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And by the way, I should just add, too, it ain't just bones. We have freeze-dried mammoth carcasses.
Oh, wow. Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 The pond would freeze, the area would become glaciated, frozen, permafrost, tundra.

Speaker 19 And when they would melt out 30,000 years later, you'd have a perfectly preserved mammoth.

Speaker 19 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 just because it was a handy source of protein for their animals.

Speaker 19 Would I want a mammoth steak that had been sort of freeze-dried for 30,000 years? I'd try it.

Speaker 19 Whether I like it is a different issue. So we have this really remarkable record of these animals.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 It essentially gives us a window into their extinction.

Speaker 1 Well, that word extinction is said we will get to, but you also mentioned words there like Beringia and Siberia.

Speaker 1 So that area of Northeast Asia and what was once that kind of land bridge area connecting North America with Northeast Asia, was that area of the world one of the richest focal points of woolly mammoths back in the Ice Age?

Speaker 19 Maybe not the richest, but certainly an area that was occupied by mammoth.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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,

Speaker 19 well, basically across most of northern Eurasia.

Speaker 1 They called it the mammoth steppe, do they?

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 These are all animals that, well, rhino to a a lesser extent, but certainly horse, bison, and mammoth are animals that love large grasslands.

Speaker 19 And they're there in abundance, large, relatively dry underfoot grasslands as well.

Speaker 1 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 for your speciality, David.

Speaker 1 Do we know roughly when the woolly mammoth spread into the Americas and North America and become that dominant animal in that environment?

Speaker 19 Mammoths have been in North America south of the Arctic starting around 1.35 million years ago. Oh, wow.
So they've been here for a very long time.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 1 And what's that? Sorry, for someone who was terrible at grading biology.

Speaker 19 Oh, kingdom, phylum, order, family, class, genus, species, right?

Speaker 19 Your scientific ID card, as it were.

Speaker 1 And so they arrive in the Americas. They're not sure which particular type of mammoth.
And then obviously they spread far and wide.

Speaker 19 And before the arrival of humans, are they at the 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 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.

Speaker 19 And so that's why they sort of had that role as a keystone species.

Speaker 19 And they could be very destructive on a landscape too, knock down trees as they're mooking around, chewing up the landscape as they're grazing, that kind of thing.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But do we have many footprints of woolly mammoths surviving in the archaeological record?

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 There's mammoth footprints all over the place. I had to have them point it out to me that these are mammoth footprints.
I mean, to me, they look, well, they look like large, round

Speaker 19 patterns on the landscape. Okay, I'll buy it that those are mammoth footprints.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 1 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 you go on.

Speaker 1 So is it at least two, or the woolly mammoths, I'm presuming, further north and the Colombian mammoths further south?

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 1 And so how does the arrival of humans on the stage, late in the game, if you're saying that mammoths have 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?

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 But in some of those cases, it looks like humans were simply scavenging already dead animals.

Speaker 19 We can actually see primarchs where they were sort of pulling apart bones to sort of gnaw on them, I suppose. So, yeah, humans had an effect, but was it consequential or not?

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And what makes this challenging, of course, is that it was the end of the Pleistocene.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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?

Speaker 19 Or, in my view, more likely, are we looking at climatic and environmental change playing a role?

Speaker 1 Do we have the surviving evidence which shows that there was regular active hunting of these mammoths?

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 19 Going after an aircraft carrier with a stick with a sharp rock. So let's just make it even more frightening than it might have been.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Maybe it's 16. That's the actual number that we're comfortable with, are sometimes found near water.

Speaker 19 So one of the things that happens with, you know, large mammals like this, these have water-cooled engines.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 So it may well be that human hunting was sort of along the lines of ambush hunting. The problem is, is you don't want to take down an elephant when it's in the water.

Speaker 19 Because if it sinks into the water, what are the odds of getting a waterlogged mammoth weighing six tons, now probably 10 tons?

Speaker 19 I'm exaggerating to make a point, out of that muck and the mud of the pond.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 There, you're done. Low risk hunting, by the way.

Speaker 1 You mentioned these sites. So are these these so-named kill sites, these mammoth kill sites that you have in the archaeological record?

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 1 And do we know much else about those sites?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Are there other clear sites?

Speaker 1 And I've got one, I think, in my notes, it's from South Dakota, where it's almost like these mammoth have suffered from a natural disaster or they've fallen into something and not died from the human attack.

Speaker 19 Well, exactly right. That site that you mentioned is called Mammoth Hot Springs and it's basically a sinkhole.

Speaker 19 And it goes back, I think the current estimates of its age are around 65,000, which puts it pre-humans in the Americas.

Speaker 19 And natural death assemblages, you know, animals had to die and they had to die even before humans showed up.

Speaker 19 And so we do have these localities where there are, in some cases, natural disasters from the point of of view of a mammoth. And we have an accumulation of skeletons in one spot.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And you can actually see where a mom mammoth, a mammoth mom, was trying to push its calf out of the hole. It's a wonderful.

Speaker 19 and tragic moment in mammoth history where this poor, presumably nursing mammoth mother was trying to save her baby. Didn't work.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 19 Well, in fact, some of those freeze-dried mammoths are babies. Wow.
And there's one that came out of Siberia. dates to,

Speaker 19 I think, around 38,000, 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 So, yeah, this poor thing was just incapable of caring for itself and died because of it.

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Speaker 1 So we have humans and woody mammoths coexisting during this later period of the Ice Age, David.

Speaker 1 And during that time, humans would have known woody 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.

Speaker 1 Would they not just be getting the meat off the mammoth? Would they be using almost every part of this giant that has fallen?

Speaker 19 Well, six tons of meat, that's an awful lot to eat.

Speaker 19 You remind me of a famous quote about the meat packing plants in Chicago at the turn of the century, where they used everything from

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Bison are huge at the end of the ice age. 3,000, 4,000 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.

Speaker 19 And by that, I mean the bones that had good meat on them.

Speaker 19 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 gonna haul around a skull with you.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 But if you kill a six-ton animal,

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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 by human hunters.
Again, low risk, right?

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And it looks as though in Wyoming, and this is an interpretation by the eminent archaeologist George Frizen, wonderful fellow, recently passed away.

Speaker 19 And George interpreted this site as winter's coming. It's Wyoming.
It's really cold.

Speaker 19 You kill a couple of or more immature mammoths, and then you sort of stack up the meat over the course of the winter. It's going to freeze.
It'll stay just fine. It's your Pleistocene refrigerator.

Speaker 19 And over the course of the winter and into the spring, as it warms up, you've got a ready source of meat for a long time.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 and take advantage of all the meat such a kill would provide.

Speaker 1 And so if we go to the end end of the ice age, David, the big question is, I mean, what happens to the woolly mammoth?

Speaker 1 And what are the theories as to why this great beast, this behemoth of the ice age, does go extinct?

Speaker 1 Primarily, let's focus first of all on the mainland continents, on, let's say, America, but also in Asia.

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 19 So getting back to the issue of the Pleistocene is coming to an end. Environments are changing.
They're changing dramatically.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 So it's not a sort of one size fits all. Climate changes, therefore everybody goes extinct.
Thirdly, extinctions is not synchronous across all these taxa.

Speaker 19 So some animals are going, are disappearing earlier, some are disappearing later.

Speaker 19 It all depends on their individual ecological tolerances, the thresholds that they can handle of climate change and ecological change. And so as a consequence, mammoth will survive really late,

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 So for example, far northern Siberia on the Timer Peninsula, we have a record, and this is work that was led by my colleague Eski 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 up until around 4,000 years ago.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 1 And is this a pattern that you see?

Speaker 1 So the fauna is changing, the climate is going up, and the woolly mammoths, are they almost like the biggest casualty OVID amongst a whole range of other animals that are caught up in this in that area, let's say of America, America, south of the ice sheets.

Speaker 19 Well, they're the heaviest that disappears, but no, they're just one of 38 different genera that will disappear.

Speaker 19 And those general will range from these six, seven, eight ton animals down to a bunny, the Aztellan rabbit disappears at the same time. And presumably,

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 People always think about the end of the Pleistocene and all these big animals disappearing, and that's true.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 So bison, giant bison of the Pleistocene within a few thousand years years are basically shrinking, right? Because the environment is changing. They're having to adjust.
They're having to respond.

Speaker 19 And it's causing significant evolutionary change within the species.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 We know they're occurring across a wide range of animals. We know they're a part of a spectrum of changes that are taking place in the environment.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 We got some bones here. We got some bones here.
We have some proxies that tell us something about the climate.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 We can see their genetic diversity being reduced over time. We can see changes in their diet, changes in their ability to cope with their environment.
So

Speaker 19 literally now, and for just really the last 10 years or so, we're finally in a position to get past the impasse.

Speaker 19 that has prevented us from really getting a good handle on the why question and and linking cause and effect.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It looks like they're eating mammoth or at least times. They must therefore have a big responsibility in the extinction of the mammoth.

Speaker 19 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 cases are alike.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 The story of these mammoths in the Arctic, but particularly on the islands, as well as this particular peninsula you've already highlighted.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 19 Yeah, so this is something that could only be done with ancient DNA, because with ancient environmental DNA, I should clarify, because

Speaker 19 we have a record, not just of mammoth DNA, but we have a detailed record of the vegetation.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 So we've got a nice direct relationship between plant and animal.

Speaker 19 And what we see, is that prior to the last glacial maximum, that is to say the depths of the most recent episode of glaciation, yeah, 25,000, 20,000 years ago, we've got mammoth all around the sort of high Arctic.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 But as the climate is warming and as environments are changing, mammoth are starting to disappear.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 It's disappearing. 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

Speaker 19 Western Europe all the way around to far Northeast Asia into the Americas. Those different and widely scattered lineages of mammoth are just disappearing one by one as the environment is changing.

Speaker 19 And the last mammoths standing are the ones who are in that far northern enclave where the vegetation is hanging on.

Speaker 19 And what makes this remarkable is that we've known for a number of years that mammoth actually survived on offshore islands in the Siberian and Beringian seas and ultimately would go extinct later there.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 But on the northern Timer Peninsula, they're going extinct, and humans clearly could have walked out there and seen them.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 So

Speaker 19 we have evidence of humans on that landscape at a time when, well, the pyramids are being built. I mean, it's just kind of blows your mind to think about this.

Speaker 19 There was a terrible, terrible movie about mammoths building the pyramids that came out some years ago, 10,000 BC or something like that.

Speaker 19 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. Fair enough.

Speaker 1 Ashi, I must admit, before we did this recording, one of my colleagues did mention 10,000 BC and mammoths building the pyramids. So I'm glad that you mentioned it there.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 1 Well, David, this has been great.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Is it possible, do you think, that the woolly mammoth might come back?

Speaker 19 No, what you'll get is an Asian elephant with a bit of hair.

Speaker 19 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 going to do.

Speaker 19 Sorry to disappoint your listeners, but they're not coming back. They're gone and they ain't coming back.

Speaker 1 Well, David, on that note, I think we'll wrap up today's episode. This has been wonderful, as always.

Speaker 1 You've written several books, but talk to us about the book where you focus in on, among many things, Ice Age America, shall we say, the humans in Ice Age America, but of course the woody mammoths play a big part in that whole environment.

Speaker 19 Yeah, thanks. The book is First Peoples in a New World.

Speaker 19 populating Ice Age America, and it takes the reader through the whole peopling process, what the 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.

Speaker 22 Brilliant.

Speaker 1 Well, David, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast today.

Speaker 19 It's my pleasure, Tristan, as always.

Speaker 23 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.

Speaker 23 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.

Speaker 23 Yes, that's right.

Speaker 23 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.

Speaker 23 You don't want to miss that one.

Speaker 23 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 favor.

Speaker 23 Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hit's podcasts at free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/slash subscribe.

Speaker 2 Hi, this is Robert Mays from the Athletic.

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