Climate change has been a threat for thousands of years, as shown by the disappearance of woolly mammoths on St. Paul Island due to a heat spell. The last known group of mammoths went extinct 4,000 years ago.
Global warming might seem like a recent phenomenon, but the truth is that climate change has been a threat to a variety of species for thousands of years. Even during an ice age, a warming planet can be devastating, as evidenced by the disappearance of one of the last known groups of woolly mammoths, some 5,600 years ago. Mammoths lived on St. Paul Island off the coast of present-day Alaska, surviving on what they could find in such a remote location, which included water from lakes. But scientists now believe that the water evaporated during a long heat spell and the mammoths didn’t make it. In a way, the mammoths on St. Paul’s Island had been lucky. Most of their species had died out 5,000 years earlier, likely from human hunting and other causes, but the isolated Bering Sea island group was more protected. According to one of the researchers, it seems likely that as the lakes shrank, the mammoths – as well as other creatures on the island – began to gather in droves around whatever watering holes they could find, which resulted in the destruction of the surrounding vegetation. In fact, they cut off their food supply as they clung desperately to water. The last known group of mammoths, on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean, went extinct just 4,000 years ago.
A woolly world:
Paleontologists can determine a woolly mammoth’s age and the season it died by examining the number of rings in its tusks and their color.
DNA research has confirmed that the Asian elephant is the closest living relative of the woolly mammoth.
Rouffignac Cave in France is known as “The Cave of a Hundred Mammoths” due to its large collection of woolly mammoth paintings and sculptures.
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