Scientists say a strange event has killed woolly mammoths

Scientists conducting a new genomic study claim that the last woolly mammoths on Earth became extinct due to an extreme storm or plague. If the species had not become extinct, they might still be there today.

These giant Ice Age beasts roamed the then tundras of North America, Europe and Asia until as long as 300,000 years ago. They later became extinct around 4,000 years ago on an isolated island off the coast of Siberia in the Arctic Ocean.

The latest analysis shows that a few hundred woolly mammoths were confined to tiny Wrangel Island for about 6,000 years, but scientists say they did not die due to inbreeding, The Guardian reported.

The long-held theory was that woolly mammoths eventually induced enough damaging genetic mutations to cause a “genomic meltdown.”

“We can now confidently reject the idea that the population was simply too small and that they were doomed to extinction for genetic reasons,” said evolutionary geneticist Love Dalén of the Center for Paleogenetics, a partnership between Stockholm University and the Swedish Museum of Natural History.

“This means it was probably just a random event that killed them, and if that random event hadn’t happened, we would still have mammoths today,” he continued.

Dalén and his colleagues analyzed the genomes of 21 mammoth specimens found on Wrangel Island and mainland Siberia, representing 50,000 years of existence.

They found that the prehistoric creatures found themselves in a ‘severe bottleneck situation’ when they became trapped on Wrangel Island, due to rising sea levels caused by global warming.

At one point during the Holocene (11,500 years ago to present), the total population was eight or less.

“These findings suggest that Wrangel Island may have been settled by a single herd of woolly mammoths,” the study said.

According to the study authors, you would normally expect a species to undergo “accelerated genomic decline,” but that’s not what happened.

“The population recovered rapidly after the bottleneck and remained stable thereafter. More precisely, we find evidence that the recovered population was large enough, or perhaps changed its behavior, to avoid inbreeding with close relatives … during 6,000 years of island isolation,” the study said.

So if they were able to avoid inbreeding in the end, what killed them all?

It’s not clear, and it will probably never really be known with exact specificity, but Dalén believes something like bird flu could have doomed the species.

‘Perhaps the mammoths would have been vulnerable to this, given the reduced diversity we identified in the genes of the immune system. Alternatively, something like a tundra fire, a volcanic ash layer or a very bad weather season could have caused a very bad growing year for the plants at Wrangel.”

“Given the small size of the population, it was vulnerable to this kind of random event,” Dalén said, adding, “It seems to me that the mammoths were just unlucky.”

The paper’s lead author, Marianne Dehasque of Uppsala University, told the Guardian that this new story of how mammoths became extinct holds a lesson for the world today, as biodiversity continues to decline every year.

The World Wildlife Fund’s 2022 Living Planet Report shows that wildlife populations have declined by an average of 69 percent over the past fifty years.

“Mammoths are an excellent system for understanding the ongoing biodiversity crisis and what happens from a genetic perspective when a species goes through a population bottleneck, because they reflect the fate of many contemporary populations,” Dehasque said.