Mammoths, considered the ancestors of today’s elephants, lived happily in North America and Eurasia for hundreds of thousands of years, and even managed to adapt and thrive in Siberia, where well-preserved mammoth bodies have been recovered from the ice. They were even exported DNA of these well-preserved mammoths and a research effort is underway to bring them back to life in a project that has also caused significant reactions for several reasons.
It is estimated that the last mammoths lived around ten thousand years ago and the cause of the extinction of these animals has not been determined, with several causes having been proposed, the main ones being climate change on the planet and human hunting or possibly a combination of these two. factors. The biggest mystery surrounding mammoths and their extinction lies in their last population, which scientists determined to be on an isolated island in Siberia, Wrangel Island.
Apparently some ice age created an ice bridge between the land and the island, allowing some mammoths to be there ten thousand years ago and become trapped when the bridge melted. The discoveries that exist have led to the conclusion that the mammoth population in Wrangler lived there isolated from the rest of the world for at least six thousand years and that mammoths lived there until four thousand years ago, which were the last mammoths on the planet.
The refutation
The disappearance of the mammoths on Wrangler is a mystery to experts, and the only possible cause suggested is that the island’s mammoths became extinct due to a situation of “genetic inbreeding” that resulted from the isolation of the mammoth population. animals. According to this idea, this process continually reduced the mammoth population to extinction. But the research team with Publication in the review “Cell” also overturns this scenario, deepening the mystery.
“We can now safely reject the idea that the population was simply too small and was doomed to extinction for genetic reasons. That means it was probably just some random event that killed them, and if that random event hadn’t happened, then we would still have mammoths today,” says Love Dalen, an evolutionary geneticist at the Center for Paleogenetics in Stockholm, who leads the research team that will continue the study collecting results to find answers to the disappearance of the planet’s mammoths.
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