Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Rise, Fall, and Possible Rise of the Wooly Mammoth

Starting point is 00:00:00 Thousands of years ago, enormous furry elephants roamed the northern latitudes of Europe, Asia, and North America. While these animals are now extinct, they were actually around much more recently than most people realize. And because of where and when they existed, we know a shocking amount about them. Learn more about mammothous, aka the woolly mammoth, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? throughline is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now.

Starting point is 00:00:53 Time travel with us every week on the Thurline podcast from NPR. It's really too bad that the woolly mammoth has gone extinct because they would have been amazing animals to see. The woolly mammoths are close relatives to modern elephants, both mammoths and elephants. Both mammoths and elephants belong to the same family, Elephant Tide. Today, there are only two species of elephants on Earth, the African and Asian elephants. However, hundreds of thousands of years ago, there were many more species of mammoths and elephants on the planet. In particular, there was at least one species of mammoth which roamed on the Asian steppes. The woolly mammoth was a branch of the step mammoth which developed adaptations for colder northern climates.

Starting point is 00:01:37 According to DNA analysis of the woolly mammoth, its closest living relative would be the Asian elephant. and more on its DNA in just a bit. So, what exactly is the difference between a woolly mammoth and a modern elephant? The most obvious difference is the amount of hair, which is the reason why it's called a woolly mammoth. Modern elephants have very little hair because they live in tropical latitudes. Many of the adaptations of Asian and African elephants are designed to cool their bodies and to dissipate heat. Hair would just increase insulation, and it's pretty useless when it's hot. Woolly mammoths had a very thick layer of long hair, with shorter layers of hair

Starting point is 00:02:12 underneath. The closest thing I can compare it to today would be a musk ox. Fun fact, musk ox fur, known as kiviot, makes some of the warmest knitted clothes in the world. I visited a musk ox sanctuary once in Alaska where they collected the fur that gets shed every spring. They would then use these to knit hats. It's extremely light, extremely warm, and extremely expensive. But anyways, in addition to their hair, woolly mammoths had other adaptations as well. Their ears were much smaller than modern elephants. The reason why Tropical elephants have such large ears is that there's more surface area for them to dissipate heat. They basically serve as radiators. Likewise, woolly mammoths had smaller ears to preserve heat and to

Starting point is 00:02:52 avoid frostbite. By the same token, the tail of the woolly mammoth was also smaller to preserve heat and to avoid frostbite. However, their tails did have very long strands of hair at the end, which were probably used to swat flies. Beyond hair, the other major difference was the size of their tuss. Woolie mammoths had enormous curved tusks. They were so large and curved that they couldn't have been used for piercing. It's believed that they may have been used for sparring with other mammoths for mates and territory, defending from predators, and manipulating objects. Another more subtle difference was the hump which was found above the shoulders of a woolly mammoth.

Starting point is 00:03:27 This was a large fat deposit that was used as an energy source during the winter and also for insulation. Woolly mammoths also had a unique cobra-like hood at the tip of their trunk. It's believed that this may have been used for manipulating objects, to close their trunk to preserve heat, or perhaps to melt snow or ice so they could drink water in the winter. An adult woolly mammoth would have been about the same size or slightly larger than a modern African elephant. We also know that, like elephants, they were herbivores. Their diet consisted mostly of grass, sedges, moss, as well as other plants and shrubs. All of these facts about woolly mammoths are interesting, but to be honest, they aren't the most interesting

Starting point is 00:04:07 thing about woolly mammoths. What's really interesting is how we know all this stuff. While woolly mammoths are extinct, they aren't extinct in the same way that dinosaurs are extinct. Dinosaurs died millions of years ago, and all we really have to go on are fossilized skeletons. In the case of woolly mammoths, we aren't studying fossils. We are studying actual woolly mammoths. Because of how recently they went extinct and the fact that they would have died in very cold latitudes, we have found many fully intact frozen mammoths. That means we have full samples of their hair, muscles, and DNA. We know what they ate because we have literally been able to find food in their digestive tracts in various stages.

Starting point is 00:04:47 Not only that, but in one mammoth which was found in Siberia, they found fecal matter in the digestive tract. Now that's interesting because elephants exhibit the same behavior. They do it to ingest microbes for their gut biome. This is a type of detail that would be impossible to know for almost any other extinct species. We know that mammoth calves were birthed in the spring or the summer, which is not surprising at all, and we know that baby mammoths were probably weaned on milk for about two to three years before being transitioned over to plants. So when did the woolly mammoth die out? It's believed that the last woolly mammoth probably died about 4,000 years ago on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean in what is today Russia.

Starting point is 00:05:27 That means that the pyramids in Egypt were already 500 years old when the last mammoth died. There's a great deal of overlap between humans and mammoths. In fact, mammoths are the third most common animal depicted in cave art after horses and bison. There have been over 500 woolly mammoth drawings made by humans which have been found that were created between 11,500 and 35,000 years ago. It isn't hard to see why early humans love to hunt mammoths. A single mammoth could probably feed 30 people for two weeks. And that is on top of the usefulness of the hide bones and ivory.

Starting point is 00:06:03 Over 70 huts made almost exclusively of mammoth bones, tuss, and hides have been found in Europe. The tuss were used to form an opening for the hut, whereas the large bones formed the foundation, and it was then covered by skins. The age of the bones found in these huts can vary by over a thousand years, which means that humans were probably scavenging older bones, as well as using bones from hunting. There is evidence of humans hunting them with spears, but there's also cave images of them falling into traps, as well as evidence of humans scavenging. kills made by other animals. Frozen mammoth carcasses have been known and documented for centuries. There were enough bodies that have been found that mammoth meat was something that people in Siberia would sometimes claim to eat if they happened upon it. In fact, supposedly in 1951, at a banquet at the Explorers Club in New York, the members were notified after the fact that they

Starting point is 00:06:54 had been served, mammoth meat. Today, there is still a black market for woolly mammoth ivory. There have been rumors that a massive woolly mammoth tusk can fetch as much as a million dollars in China. So, why did the woolly mammoth die out? There are several theories as to why the mammoth went extinct. One is that they were hunted to extinction by humans. There certainly might be some truth to this. However, we know that mammoths were on some islands in the Arctic with few or no humans, and those populations also went extinct. The other leading theory is that the climate changed. Something happened with the end of the most recent glaciation which caused the habitat of the mammoth to disappear. Yet another theory based on DNA samples,

Starting point is 00:07:33 is that there could have been genetic mutations that cropped up, especially after the population had gotten very small. With all this talk of intact woolly mammoth DNA and tissue samples, you might be thinking the same thing that many scientists are thinking. Could we possibly bring back the woolly mammoth? The answer is that we probably can't do it today, but there are people out there thinking about it and working on it right now. In 1921, $15 million was raised by a company called Colossil to attempt to do just that.

Starting point is 00:08:03 The first attempt might not be a literal clone of a woolly mammoth, but rather some sort of hybrid of a mammoth and an Asian elephant. The hope is that if they could bring back the woolly mammoth, of which we probably have more DNA than for any other extinct animal, we might be able to do it for other species. There are a lot of problems that need to be solved before anything like this happens. There has never been live eggs taken from an elephant before, nor has an elephant in vitro fertilization ever been tried before, just to name a few of the hurdles which would need to be overcome. There are some people who are against doing this on ethical grounds. And also, they aren't entirely certain that it would work, even if we could bring the mammoth back. Upper latitudes where they once lived are now mostly moss and not grassland like they used to be. The forces which killed the mammoth might very well prevent them from running wild again.

Starting point is 00:08:51 There are probably still thousands of woolly mammoth remains waiting to be discovered underneath the surface in Siberia and Alaska. And as they're discovered, we might learn even more about these formerly, Majestic Creatures. Everything Everywhere Daily is an Airwave Media podcast. The executive producer is Darcy Adams. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. Today's first review comes from listener D.D. Decker 2 over at Podchaser. They write, I love this podcast.

Starting point is 00:09:23 It has interesting and informative topics. I love learning something new each day. Keep up the good work, Gary. Thanks, D.D. Decker. I enjoy making the shows as much as I hope you enjoy listening to them. My second review today also comes from Podchase. Chaser. Listener, Mike Pickle writes, great podcast, always interesting, creative. Covers the topic in five to ten minutes that I would not have known about.

Starting point is 00:09:44 Thank you, Mr. Pickle. Remember that condensing a topic down to five or ten minutes usually takes me about four to six hours. Remember, if you leave a review over at Podchaser until the end of April, they will make a donation to help feed Ukrainian refugees, which will be matched by several other podcasting companies.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Rise, Fall, and Possible Rise of the Wooly Mammoth

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