May 6, 2025 • 11 mins
These cold-adapted cousins of modern elephants coexisted with humans for thousands of years. Learn what we know (and don't know) about them -- and why we shouldn't bring them back -- in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://animals.howstuffworks.com/extinct-animals/woolly-mammoth.htm
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey brain Stuff
Lauren Vohlabam. Here travel back in time around four thousand
years to a remote Russian Arctic island, and you might
see a few shaggy brown quadrupeds with trunks tugging up
tufts of grassy ground cover and shoving them into their
(00:22):
tusked mouths. But despite their four stout legs and thin
whipping tails, you would never mistake them for hairy elephants.
Sure if your glasses broke on the trip, you might
miss the distinctive downward slope of their backs, the finger
like grippers on the ends of their trunks, and their small,
cold adapted tail and ears. But no amount of astigmatism
(00:46):
could make you miss the fact that these animals aren't
much taller than you. You have found the Wrangel Island mammoths,
the dwarf descendant of the wooly mammoth. They are the
last of their Kindlike the twenty five percent larger woolies
that in their heyday numbered in the several millions across
Eurasia and North America, these diminutive descendants survived the roughly
(01:10):
north to south Domino of extinction that had finished off
so many large mammals more than six thousand years earlier.
They walked Wrangle Island when humans were building pyramids in
Egypt and constructing Stonehenge in Great Britain, but soon, perhaps
done in by the same forces that killed their ancestors,
a likely climate change, human hunting, or some combination of
(01:32):
the two, time would catch up with them as well.
We probably know more about wooly mammoths and mammos in
general than we do about any other extinct species. Compared
to the last dinosaurs, which died out around sixty five
million years ago, Mammoths only recently shuffled off this mortal coil,
(01:54):
recently enough that ancient humans hunted them, ate them, used
their ivory for tools, and depicted them in some of
the earliest known sculpture in cave art. They are well
preserved remains, which at times consist of complete carcasses, pickled
and frozen anaerobic soils can contain muscle, blood, teeth, bone, tusk,
and even brain. We've even recovered and sequenced mammoth DNA.
(02:20):
What's more, we have three living, albeit distant cousins to
compare them with the African bush and African forest elephant,
and the Asian elephant, which is the mammoth's closest living relative.
By combining what we know about modern elephants with evidence
from the wooly mammth fossils, preserved stool and gut contents,
and other physical evidence, we can confidently paint a picture
(02:41):
of what these wooly wonders were really like and how
they worked. So today, let's jump back in that time
machine and see what life was like when mammoths roamed
the earth. Wooly mammoths roamed landscapes unlike any that exist today.
During many parts of the Pleistocene, an epoch lasting from
one point seven million to eleven thousand, five hundred years
(03:04):
ago and ending with the most recent Ice Age, a
mixture of rich and varied grasses, herbs, and sedges spread
from Ireland to Siberia, across the Bearing Land Bridge and
too much of modern Canada. This mammoth step was supported
by a different climate. As growing glaciers locked up, water
sea levels dropped, exposing great swaths of land dominated by
(03:28):
clear and breezy blue skies. Grazing across this landscape in
a twenty hour a day pursuit of food were vast
numbers of wooly mammoths and creatures about the size of
modern elephants. The males grazed alone, each standing around nine
to eleven feet tall that's three to four meters and
weighing about six tons. They ranged near matriarchal family groups
(03:52):
of around ten to twenty smaller females and calves. They
withstood the chill of their northern climes through number of adaptations,
including a four inch layer of fat that's ten centimeters
and an inch of thick oily skin. They had a
wooly undercoat layered with coarser guard hairs ranging from a
few inches up to three feet that's one meter long,
(04:15):
with the longest hanging in a skirt along the animal's
flanks and belly. Even their hemoglobin had heat retaining properties,
a trait echoed in many modern cold adapted mammals. Wooly
mammoths shared these lands with other massive mammals, including grazers
like wily rhinoceros and long horde bison, and predators like
sabertoothed cats and cave hyenas. Given their bulk and massive tusks,
(04:39):
health the adult mammoths could take all comers in a fight,
especially if gathered in a protective group, so predators likely
preyed on sick or injured adults or picked off the
occasional straggling calf. If, as experts suspect, mammoths were similar
to today's elephants, then they were likely highly social, educating their
(04:59):
cat and maybe even guarding and burying their dead. They
may have periodically come together in great migratory herds and
could probably swim to islands a few miles off shore.
Mammoth calves were mostly born in spring, when fresh growth
could support lactating mothers. A twenty two month gestation period
meant that conception occurred in the late summer. The competing
(05:23):
males would demonstrate their fitness via tusk displays, the ritualistic
sparring or out and out fights. Beyond fighting, a mammoth's twisted,
inward curling tusks were also handy for stripping and felling
trees or shovel plowing through dirt and snow. Evolved from
the mammoth's upper incisors, these tusks would grow throughout the
(05:44):
animal's lifetime. The rest of its teeth consisted of foot
long molars with side to side grooves that aided in
breaking down its tough food. Like today's elephants, a mammoth
would go through six sets of teeth in its sixty
year lifespan, but typically dying after the last set wore out.
A wooly mammoths are one of a number of large herbivores,
(06:07):
including mastodons, elephants, and other mammoth species descended from the
primitive Probosideans, named for a Greek word meaning nose, which
all split off from the general ma million tree around
fifty five million years ago. The first mammoths showed up
in Africa around five to six million years ago, but
they weren't wooly. The probable ancestor of the wooly mammoth,
(06:29):
the step mammoth, may have originated in northeastern Eurasia around
two million years ago. It was the largest of its kind,
standing fourteen feet that's four point three meters and weighing
at least ten tons. It sported smallish ears and tail,
and a bit of a shaggy coat. Primarily a grazer,
it also supplemented its diet with trees and shrubs. The
(06:52):
comparatively smaller wooly mammoth, established around four hundred thousand years ago,
likely resulted from specializations suited for the chill of Siberia,
and it was from this ice box that botanist Michael
Adams recovered the first wooly mammoth carcass in eighteen oh six.
But the species spread as far as modern Ireland and
crossed the Bering Strait to continue across Canada to the
(07:15):
eastern coast of North America. Their population was highly adaptable
to the fluctuations in climate that characterized the Pleistocene, yet
within the brief period spanning from fourteen thousand to ten
thousand years ago, they and most other large mammal species
in the northern Hemisphere died out. But why Paleontologists have
(07:40):
advanced several theories, including meteors, diseases, climate change, and human hunting,
but there's no evidence of meteor strikes, and any potential
disease that killed megafauna likely would have affected other animals too,
so that leaves climate and hunting. According to the climate hypothesis,
(08:02):
mammoth's very specialization that let them thrive in their step
environment may have doomed them to isolization and starvation. As
the climate shift melted glaciers and raised sea levels, cotton
and shrength and wetter conditions prevailed. Their food sources dwindled,
and mammoth populations declined with them. The hunting hypothesis emphasizes
(08:25):
the fact that mammoths shockingly fast decline coincides with the
generally accepted arrival of humans in North America from thirteen thousand,
three hundred to twelve eight hundred years ago. We know
that humans used mammoth firs, meat and ivory, and that
both Neanderthals and Stone Age humans constructed buildings from mammoth bone,
(08:46):
but many questions remain. Given that many humans could have
survived on a single mammoth, especially aided by natural refrigeration,
and that early humans venerated the animals in cave art,
it's possible that they traded mammoths with the reverence and
restraint that Native Americans had for buffalo. Either way, hunter
(09:07):
gatherers likely had a varied diet and relied on small
to medium game for meat, so how often they actually
hunted mammoths versus scavenging their remains is unclear. Ultimately, the
limitations of large mammals like mammoths, with their low birth
rates and vast need for sustenance, might well have hastened
(09:27):
to their end, worsening the effects of isolation, habitat, loss,
and predation. But could we bring the wooly mammoth back?
DNA is fragile and has a limited shelf life. We
could never clone dinosaurs a la Jurassic Park, but given
the excellent preservation and recent age of some mammoth remains,
(09:50):
we could theoretically clone a mammoth or breed one through
in vitro fertilization using elephant ovum modified or fertilized with
mammoth genetic material. Both approaches entail complex ethical and practical concerns.
After all, the environment that wooly mammoths lived in is gone,
(10:11):
so where would they live? What would they be able
to eat? If we bring them back just to keep
them as curiosities and zoos? What kind of life is that?
If we look at their living cousins, the elephants, they're
a keystone species in their ecosystems. Their movements and activities
create habitat for other animals and natural fire breaks, and
(10:33):
their dung feeds. Numerous species spread seeds and changes the
makeup of the soil. When an animal like that dies out,
it sends thunderous impacts throughout the ecosystem, and bringing such
an animal back would be equally thunderous. It seems more
practical and more kind to focus on preserving the amazing
(10:55):
species that we have alive today and honoring the extinct
ones by further extinctions. Today's episode is based on the
article how Wooly Mammoth's worked on how stuffworks dot com,
written by Nicholas Jarbis. Brain Stuff is production by Heart
Radio in partnership with how stuffworks dot Com, and it's
(11:16):
produced by Tyler Klang. For more podcasts my heart Radio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey brain Stuff
Lauren Vohlabam. Here travel back in time around four thousand
years to a remote Russian Arctic island, and you might
see a few shaggy brown quadrupeds with trunks tugging up
tufts of grassy ground cover and shoving them into their
(00:22):
tusked mouths. But despite their four stout legs and thin
whipping tails, you would never mistake them for hairy elephants.
Sure if your glasses broke on the trip, you might
miss the distinctive downward slope of their backs, the finger
like grippers on the ends of their trunks, and their small,
cold adapted tail and ears. But no amount of astigmatism
(00:46):
could make you miss the fact that these animals aren't
much taller than you. You have found the Wrangel Island mammoths,
the dwarf descendant of the wooly mammoth. They are the
last of their Kindlike the twenty five percent larger woolies
that in their heyday numbered in the several millions across
Eurasia and North America, these diminutive descendants survived the roughly
(01:10):
north to south Domino of extinction that had finished off
so many large mammals more than six thousand years earlier.
They walked Wrangle Island when humans were building pyramids in
Egypt and constructing Stonehenge in Great Britain, but soon, perhaps
done in by the same forces that killed their ancestors,
a likely climate change, human hunting, or some combination of
(01:32):
the two, time would catch up with them as well.
We probably know more about wooly mammoths and mammos in
general than we do about any other extinct species. Compared
to the last dinosaurs, which died out around sixty five
million years ago, Mammoths only recently shuffled off this mortal coil,
(01:54):
recently enough that ancient humans hunted them, ate them, used
their ivory for tools, and depicted them in some of
the earliest known sculpture in cave art. They are well
preserved remains, which at times consist of complete carcasses, pickled
and frozen anaerobic soils can contain muscle, blood, teeth, bone, tusk,
and even brain. We've even recovered and sequenced mammoth DNA.
(02:20):
What's more, we have three living, albeit distant cousins to
compare them with the African bush and African forest elephant,
and the Asian elephant, which is the mammoth's closest living relative.
By combining what we know about modern elephants with evidence
from the wooly mammth fossils, preserved stool and gut contents,
and other physical evidence, we can confidently paint a picture
(02:41):
of what these wooly wonders were really like and how
they worked. So today, let's jump back in that time
machine and see what life was like when mammoths roamed
the earth. Wooly mammoths roamed landscapes unlike any that exist today.
During many parts of the Pleistocene, an epoch lasting from
one point seven million to eleven thousand, five hundred years
(03:04):
ago and ending with the most recent Ice Age, a
mixture of rich and varied grasses, herbs, and sedges spread
from Ireland to Siberia, across the Bearing Land Bridge and
too much of modern Canada. This mammoth step was supported
by a different climate. As growing glaciers locked up, water
sea levels dropped, exposing great swaths of land dominated by
(03:28):
clear and breezy blue skies. Grazing across this landscape in
a twenty hour a day pursuit of food were vast
numbers of wooly mammoths and creatures about the size of
modern elephants. The males grazed alone, each standing around nine
to eleven feet tall that's three to four meters and
weighing about six tons. They ranged near matriarchal family groups
(03:52):
of around ten to twenty smaller females and calves. They
withstood the chill of their northern climes through number of adaptations,
including a four inch layer of fat that's ten centimeters
and an inch of thick oily skin. They had a
wooly undercoat layered with coarser guard hairs ranging from a
few inches up to three feet that's one meter long,
(04:15):
with the longest hanging in a skirt along the animal's
flanks and belly. Even their hemoglobin had heat retaining properties,
a trait echoed in many modern cold adapted mammals. Wooly
mammoths shared these lands with other massive mammals, including grazers
like wily rhinoceros and long horde bison, and predators like
sabertoothed cats and cave hyenas. Given their bulk and massive tusks,
(04:39):
health the adult mammoths could take all comers in a fight,
especially if gathered in a protective group, so predators likely
preyed on sick or injured adults or picked off the
occasional straggling calf. If, as experts suspect, mammoths were similar
to today's elephants, then they were likely highly social, educating their
(04:59):
cat and maybe even guarding and burying their dead. They
may have periodically come together in great migratory herds and
could probably swim to islands a few miles off shore.
Mammoth calves were mostly born in spring, when fresh growth
could support lactating mothers. A twenty two month gestation period
meant that conception occurred in the late summer. The competing
(05:23):
males would demonstrate their fitness via tusk displays, the ritualistic
sparring or out and out fights. Beyond fighting, a mammoth's twisted,
inward curling tusks were also handy for stripping and felling
trees or shovel plowing through dirt and snow. Evolved from
the mammoth's upper incisors, these tusks would grow throughout the
(05:44):
animal's lifetime. The rest of its teeth consisted of foot
long molars with side to side grooves that aided in
breaking down its tough food. Like today's elephants, a mammoth
would go through six sets of teeth in its sixty
year lifespan, but typically dying after the last set wore out.
A wooly mammoths are one of a number of large herbivores,
(06:07):
including mastodons, elephants, and other mammoth species descended from the
primitive Probosideans, named for a Greek word meaning nose, which
all split off from the general ma million tree around
fifty five million years ago. The first mammoths showed up
in Africa around five to six million years ago, but
they weren't wooly. The probable ancestor of the wooly mammoth,
(06:29):
the step mammoth, may have originated in northeastern Eurasia around
two million years ago. It was the largest of its kind,
standing fourteen feet that's four point three meters and weighing
at least ten tons. It sported smallish ears and tail,
and a bit of a shaggy coat. Primarily a grazer,
it also supplemented its diet with trees and shrubs. The
(06:52):
comparatively smaller wooly mammoth, established around four hundred thousand years ago,
likely resulted from specializations suited for the chill of Siberia,
and it was from this ice box that botanist Michael
Adams recovered the first wooly mammoth carcass in eighteen oh six.
But the species spread as far as modern Ireland and
crossed the Bering Strait to continue across Canada to the
(07:15):
eastern coast of North America. Their population was highly adaptable
to the fluctuations in climate that characterized the Pleistocene, yet
within the brief period spanning from fourteen thousand to ten
thousand years ago, they and most other large mammal species
in the northern Hemisphere died out. But why Paleontologists have
(07:40):
advanced several theories, including meteors, diseases, climate change, and human hunting,
but there's no evidence of meteor strikes, and any potential
disease that killed megafauna likely would have affected other animals too,
so that leaves climate and hunting. According to the climate hypothesis,
(08:02):
mammoth's very specialization that let them thrive in their step
environment may have doomed them to isolization and starvation. As
the climate shift melted glaciers and raised sea levels, cotton
and shrength and wetter conditions prevailed. Their food sources dwindled,
and mammoth populations declined with them. The hunting hypothesis emphasizes
(08:25):
the fact that mammoths shockingly fast decline coincides with the
generally accepted arrival of humans in North America from thirteen thousand,
three hundred to twelve eight hundred years ago. We know
that humans used mammoth firs, meat and ivory, and that
both Neanderthals and Stone Age humans constructed buildings from mammoth bone,
(08:46):
but many questions remain. Given that many humans could have
survived on a single mammoth, especially aided by natural refrigeration,
and that early humans venerated the animals in cave art,
it's possible that they traded mammoths with the reverence and
restraint that Native Americans had for buffalo. Either way, hunter
(09:07):
gatherers likely had a varied diet and relied on small
to medium game for meat, so how often they actually
hunted mammoths versus scavenging their remains is unclear. Ultimately, the
limitations of large mammals like mammoths, with their low birth
rates and vast need for sustenance, might well have hastened
(09:27):
to their end, worsening the effects of isolation, habitat, loss,
and predation. But could we bring the wooly mammoth back?
DNA is fragile and has a limited shelf life. We
could never clone dinosaurs a la Jurassic Park, but given
the excellent preservation and recent age of some mammoth remains,
(09:50):
we could theoretically clone a mammoth or breed one through
in vitro fertilization using elephant ovum modified or fertilized with
mammoth genetic material. Both approaches entail complex ethical and practical concerns.
After all, the environment that wooly mammoths lived in is gone,
(10:11):
so where would they live? What would they be able
to eat? If we bring them back just to keep
them as curiosities and zoos? What kind of life is that?
If we look at their living cousins, the elephants, they're
a keystone species in their ecosystems. Their movements and activities
create habitat for other animals and natural fire breaks, and
(10:33):
their dung feeds. Numerous species spread seeds and changes the
makeup of the soil. When an animal like that dies out,
it sends thunderous impacts throughout the ecosystem, and bringing such
an animal back would be equally thunderous. It seems more
practical and more kind to focus on preserving the amazing
(10:55):
species that we have alive today and honoring the extinct
ones by further extinctions. Today's episode is based on the
article how Wooly Mammoth's worked on how stuffworks dot com,
written by Nicholas Jarbis. Brain Stuff is production by Heart
Radio in partnership with how stuffworks dot Com, and it's
(11:16):
produced by Tyler Klang. For more podcasts my heart Radio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
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