Stuff You Should Know - How Woolly Mammoths Worked

Episode Date: August 16, 2016

It was only 11000 years ago that the last true woolly mammoths died out, close enough to the modern age that humans lived alongside them. But were humans the cause of mammoths' sudden extinction or was climate change to blame? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

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Go to squarespace.com and set your website apart. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there. So this is Stuff You Should Know. Howdy. Before we get started, I want to say best of luck

to mine and Yumi's wonderful, great, best friends, Braden and Laurel, who are at this moment in the delivery room. Whoa. Laurel's water broke. They're expecting their first born child. Wow. So by the time this releases, the kid

will be like six years old. Yeah, pretty much. Because we have a six-year pot. Yeah. So good luck, guys. Well, that's great. You should tell them that personally, so they actually hear this.

I recorded it. That's enough. Gotcha. They'll give what they get and be happy with it. All righty. Yeah, you excited about woolly mammoths? I am. Are you not?

No, I think they're wonderful. Woolly. Woolly anything. Plus also like a woolly mammoth, they were sweet, good-natured. They could take a joke at their own expense, but they weren't self-deprecating. They just had a good sense of humor.

Yeah. Anything related to an elephant is OK in my book. Yeah, agreed. I have a very big love for that animal. Sure. Well, it's a big animal. It deserves a lot of love. They're just wonderful in every way.

That they grieve over their dead. Oh, my god. There's this one story about Domini, I believe, is the name of the elephant. That I think he or she was in a zoo and had a best friend. And the best friend died. And this elephant could not get over it.

And she died of, I think the zookeeper is like, she died of a broken heart. Yeah, can't take that stuff. She grieved herself to death. Yeah. And I think the story is even more tragic than that. I'm not doing it justice. But just go research Domini the elephant, D-A-M-A-N-I.

You're like, whatever, it's kind of funny. Right? It'll tickle your ribs. I don't know if I did it justice. Did it come across as funny? Stupid elephant. Well, you know what's even cuter than a woolly mammoth. Oh, yeah.

Well, what's cuter than an elephant is an elephant with hair. Sure. So that's a woolly mammoth. Or a mastodon, as we'll talk about a little bit. Those are different. Totally different. Yeah, but they have hair. Not as much.

Yeah, but they have hair. Yeah, but you wouldn't look at it and be like, oh, that's woolly. You'd just be like, that's kind of hairy. Stubbly. But the only thing cuter than a hairy elephant is a tiny hairy elephant. And there was a place, well, there still is a place, called Wrangel Island, and they don't have them

anymore, but at one point, not too long ago, in the grand scheme of the history of everything, the Wrangel Island mammoths roamed the earth. And they are, how tall are they? Like a human height, right? At the shoulder, they were four to six feet tall. Oh, man. So yeah, it's like a mini woolly mammoth.

Give me one. And they were directly descended from the woolly mammoths. They just ended up on this island. And the island is pretty good size. It's the size of Delaware, from what I understand. Oh, that's huge. But that's small enough. But that's small enough, well, for an island, you know.

But it's small enough that they became dwarf. They went under that, what's that process called, where a population lands on an island and it immediately begins to diminish in size? Oh, I don't know. I haven't heard of that. Island fever, something weird like that. It's because they wanted to ride the roller coasters.

Oh, no way, you'd have to be bigger. Maybe they were scared of roller coasters. That's what I meant. They're like, we're getting out of here and we're going to shrink. So we couldn't possibly go on a roller coaster. But they yet. I butchered that one.

They were around for, you butchered them, like a wrangle island woolly mammoth. So they were around until about 3,000 years ago. Something like 3,600 years ago. I think they were the last of their kind who were on wrangle island in 1650 BC. And dude, by that time, the pyramids were already 1,000 years old.

Yeah, like people, they shared territory with people. But most, I shouldn't say most, a lot of the woolly mammoths, especially the ones that lived at the end of the Pleistocene. Pleistocene, that's a tough one to say. I'd say Pleistocene, is it not? Yes, I think that's right. But I always want to take continents and switch them around and shuffle it up.

Well, you're an anarchist. Yeah, especially with words. I even hate the word anarchist. You call it anarchist. Yeah, yeah. But man, that threw me off. Sorry. Yeah, man, what was I saying?

Pleistocene. Oh, yeah, they did coexist with humans. Yeah. Like, it's the one thing the Flintstones were right about. Oh, yeah. When you see a big woolly mammoth in Fred Flintstone, that was entirely possible. That's right.

The dinosaurs, the brontosaurus, all that stuff, just fantasy. And if that woolly mammoth on the Flintstones was used to wash a car or some other household chore, completely real. Right. Yeah, they were very helpful. In addition to having a great sense of humor, they would help you out around the house.

That was one of my favorite parts of the Flintstones. I remember when I was a kid watching that and just being so tickled every time a bird's beak was used to play a record. And they were always just like so willingly like, just tilt me down and I'll play your record. Yeah. I love that stuff.

And then every once in a while, they would thank the animal and the animal would be like, sod-eye. Right. Oh, man, those were the days. So the Wrangel Island mammoths were around until about 3,600 years ago. And they survived the extinction of the rest of the mammoths about 4,000 years earlier, right?

Yeah, and if we're talking like, if you look at the dinosaurs, they left us 65 million years ago. So this is all very recent stuff. Like, people hunted bully mammoths and ate them and used their bones and tusks and wore their skin. Yeah, I imagine. And not worshiped, well, we don't really know for sure, but at least revered them enough to put them in their cave

art. So this is all kind of really cool stuff to me. We know a lot about them compared to a lot of other extinct species. Right, but where they went remains a mystery. I bet. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely not definitive.

And there's a lot of theories, but there's really... They melted. Remember that one? Yeah. What was that from? It was from one of our earlier podcasts. That was my personal theory on where the proto-humans went or something.

I don't even know. They melted. Yeah, I forgot all about that. Yeah, it's an old one. Man. And not only that, my friend. We have... they have relatives, distant cousins, still roaming the earth today.

Because if you look at the African bush and the African forest elephants and the Asian elephant, it's actually the closest relative. Yeah. It's very close. Yeah. I mean, it's close and distant, if that makes sense. It doesn't.

How do you mean? Well, I mean, it's close enough to say it's the closest relative, but they're still distant cousins. I see. Oh, okay. They don't have the hair or the high-sloping back or the curly tusk. Right.

Or yeah, with the finger-like grippers. Yeah. Yeah. But they're still pretty close. Close enough that some mad scientists are like, we can resurrect woolly mammoths using the Asian elephant. Yeah, because we have DNA. Right.

Like when they found, and they have found a lot of these carcasses, some of them really intact, I mean, enough like there's brain and bone and blood and... Yeah, basically the whole thing is just slightly mummified, so there's like water loss, but other than that, it's all there. Yeah. Like there's one called... Man, this is tough word to say. And there's another continent switcheroo my brain wants to pull. Leuba, it means love in Russian.

Was this the little guy? Yeah. The little baby. Yeah. This was not a miniature. It was actually a calf. Right. So baby woolly mammoth, I think maybe like a month old or something

like that, but it was still... 33 inches. Yeah. And then in life would have weighed about 100 kilos or 220 pounds. Now 100 pounds, 50 kilos. That's missing half of its weight in water. Oh, you mean while it was alive. Yeah. When you'd want to pick it up.

Sure. And hug it. Now you just kind of pat it on the head and be like, you stay over there. Yeah. When was that found 2007? Yeah. And it was found perfectly preserved because apparently she had been colonized by some sort of lactic acid producing bacteria that effectively pickled her.

So it preserved her, but it also made her very unappetizing to scavengers too. She tasted weird. Yeah. Yeah. Right? So she's a really good example of a woolly mammoth. I can't remember how many tens of thousands of years old she is, but she's pretty old. Yeah.

So we do have this access to all these great specimens and they've figured out that about the shelf life of viable DNA is a million years. So there's plenty of woolly mammoths whose DNA we have access to that's much younger than a million years old. Sure. And yeah, we'll talk about it, but some people are like, let's bring them back, let's de-extinct them. Yeah.

Yeah. Tricky territory. Oh yeah. But it's a woolly mammoth. Pretty cute. It's not a saber-toothed tiger. Right. That's not tricky.

You just don't do that. But kind of the long and the short of all this with the distant cousins and all of the preserved carcasses we found is that we have a really robust picture of how these things lived and what they were like. And I guess we'll take a break here and we'll get a little bit into their, you know, their nine to five job. We'll go back to the mammoths world. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, frosted tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. You ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

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If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to frosted tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right. So if you picture in your mind a woolly mammoth, you might think, all right, frozen wasteland and like Siberia. Right.

They just eat like a snow. Right. Wrong. Snow cones. That's wrong. Sure, they appreciated a good snow cone. They like Italian nights more than the snow cone. They're a little more European.

But what was actually going on is they were trotting upon land, it was called a mammoth step, S-T-E-P-P-E, not the S-T-E-P variety. Sure. There's an extra P-E. Yeah. Like a steppy. Boy, it's not pronounced steppy, is it? No.

Okay. No. That's not the word it is. Right. And this was basically, it was sort of a unique time in the history of planet Earth in that it was rich, these areas were rich with stuff for them to eat, just like overloaded with vegetation. Right.

Yeah. One thing about it. And they were veggie eaters. Yeah, they were. They were actually grassland grazers, you can call them. So they ate long grasses, sedges, which is like a fake grass, but for all intents and purposes. Yeah.

They came upon a basil field, man. It was all over. And they were like, oh man, it's Italian night. So they ate grasses and they were herbivores and they ate this pretty specific diet and it certainly wasn't snow-based. No. It was definitely colder, which is I think another reason why people think they lived in a frozen wasteland.

Right. Well, because they needed that coat. They did. And the reason why is because they were living in the Pleistocene, which was definitely, it was a series of ice ages, right? Yeah. So it was colder. It was like five to 10 degrees Celsius colder than it is globally now, but the whole ecosystem

was just utterly different than what it is today. Yeah. So like if you did manage to bring back a woolly mammoth and you put them on the Siberian step, they'd be like, well, I'm going to starve. Yeah. There's nothing here for me to eat. Yeah. Things have changed too much.

If you put them in Arizona or New Mexico or someplace where it might kind of look the same with this shrubbery and brush and grasses, they would say, no, can't live here either. Gonna die here too. It's too hot. Why did you bring me back? You guys really didn't think this through. That's right. But what you also had though is a pretty nice, I mean, it was colder, but it was kind of

nice weather for a woolly mammoth. It was, the sea levels had dropped. So it exposed all this great land for them to roam. Yeah. And it was very breezy and clear and kind of lovely. Easy breezy, beautiful. Easy breezy, beautiful for a woolly mammoth. Yeah.

Because again, well, we'll talk about their code. Actually, we can talk about it right now. So their coat was, are you familiar with the musk ox? Oh, yeah. It was like that. It was like a skirt of long hair, but beneath that was a woolly undercoat that really kept them warm. Yeah.

The outer coat, and we've talked about a lot of mammals. Most of them have like layers of different kinds of fur. But the outer coat was the guard fur and then under, like you said, was the woolly undercoat. And below that, they had an inch of skin, very oily. And below that, they had three to four inches of fat. And all of this stuff made them nice and cozy and warm. Oh, but they were delicious. To eat?

Mm-hmm. Oh, man. Oily skin, inches of fat. Yeah. I'm just going to ignore that. All right. 20 hours a day, they spent eating, I guess, fattening themselves up for me. For you.

So they would just roam around and eat, man, and get along with each other. They were, you know, I was about to say peaceful, which they kind of were unless they were infringed upon and you don't want to mess with the woolly mammoth alone. Right. No, this article puts it that in a standing fight, they could take all commerce. They were definitely like, they could defend themselves. And for the most part, apparently the major predators of the day would not have taken a healthy adult mammoth on.

No. They would have like maybe followed a herd, because the mammoths were, if you saw a single mammoth, it was a male. Or if you saw a herd of them, it was females and calves. Female calves, yeah. Right. Or it could be male calves that were in nursing still before they went off on their own. Oh, I get the sense that they sent them off pretty young now, the males at least.

I think maybe starting when they were teenagers, okay. And either way, no short faced bear or saber tooth tiger is going to take on one of these guys by themselves. It'd be like a calf that fell behind. Yeah. Toast. Yeah. Or like a one that was sick or dying or trapped in like a tar pit.

You would leap out with your clover spear. My knife and fork. And have dinner. My neck and tie it around my neck. And they were, they did, you know, share their area with these fearsome creatures like the saber tooth tiger. And there's actually something called a woolly rhinoceros, which is exactly what you think it is.

Yeah. I'll bet you would not want to mess with that. I'd want to scratch him behind the ear. Oh, rhinoceros are tough and mean. I know that's the problem with me is I see these things and I think like a big tiger. I think all that guy needs is, he looks like my cat, you know, you should not go live among the grizzly bear. It's just to give him a good scratch behind the ear and they're like, Oh, why can't I

like this guy? He's not out to get me. That's not what they do. I know. But that's why I don't take safaris. I'd be the dope that, you know, tried to pet the cheetah. Oh my God, did you see the video of the woman who got out of her car in a tiger preserve and was like, there's like a, it's like a, like a security camera.

So it's a steady shot. And I don't know what the lady was doing out of the car. I think maybe in China, one of those awful, uh, and she's just standing there one second and then all of a sudden a tiger comes in frame and just pulls her right out of frame. Wow. And then like, uh, her sister and husband get out of the car. And I think her sister was killed as well and the husband like just runs back and dives into the car.

Yeah. But what were they doing out of the car and like this huge tiger, at least the size of the woman just comes and just grabs her. It was nuts. Well, they're really disturbing. Yeah. I don't want to see that then. You probably shouldn't.

You'd still be like, I'd still pet that tiger. No, I wouldn't pet that tiger. Do you have another one? What was the name of the grizzly man, Timothy Treadwell or Treadway? I think Treadwell. Man. Yeah. That was a disturbing, uh, the best.

You should destroy this thing. That was the best part was runner her dog. That was a terrible her dog. He should narrate everything. He should. He should do every commercial voiceover, every, uh, documentary, just, you name it. He should do this podcast. They should go back and redo the voiceover that Alec Baldwin did for the Royal Tannenbombs

with Werner Herzog. Put a different spin on things, I think. Royal was born in Acha Avenue. No, that's a good her dog. It's not bad. All you have to do is try and do it like an evil mad German scientist or something. Colonel Klink. Yeah.

Colonel Klink. Um, where were we? We were talking about how, um, they could defend themselves. Oh, right. You'd still want to pet them and they'd probably be okay with you petting them. They would just accidentally trample you. Yeah. Exactly.

Like a real elephant. Uh, those little calves were borns in the springtime, uh, and here's something that'll come into factor later when they were wiped from the planet. They have a very long gestation period. It's 22 months. So you know, they're not pumping out these calves with great regularity. It takes a long time. Right.

Almost two years. Yeah, that's, it's a while. So they would have been impregnated, I guess, uh, summer, late summer, a year previous. And then born in the spring because they adapted to do that because it was more to eat. You know? Yeah. That makes sense. It's like, it's lovely.

There's stuff blooming everywhere. Look at that basal field. Right. And so we don't know exactly what their society was like, but just based on modern elephants, paleontologists have surmised that they were very social, most likely. There's mammoth trackways that we've found, fossilized footprints, um, that show a number of mammoths walking side by side and amongst one another, um, and they're clearly different size footprints.

Yeah. So there's different generations all walking together, which would indicate that they probably have similar societies to elephants, right? Right. Like bury their dead and stuff like that. Yeah. Defend their dead. Grieve over them.

Man. It's really tough. Um, and that they probably came together in annual migrations, although the evidence for that is still lacking. Right. And if they did migrate, I think I saw somewhere that they probably didn't go more than 400 miles, which is still, yeah, that's, I don't go more than 400 miles when I walk. I don't need there anymore.

So hats off to the mammoths for walking that far. Uh, when they would go into, uh, heat, the female, like many mammals and many animals, there would be a competition of sorts among the men, uh, everywhere from, you know, puffing their chest out and flaunting to just straight up fighting with one another. Right. I guess sometimes we're tough. There weren't a lot of ladies around and, and that is a lot like the modern elephant as well.

Uh, and, and that they had what's called a must gland and US th not musk, which is easy to say. Yeah. Must. Must. It's even harder with the air. It's like saying musk when you've been drinking a lot. I know.

That's exactly what it sounds like. Like if you're Cindy Brady, right? Or if you're missing a tooth, two weeks, by the way, two weeks, oh yeah, you getting psyched. I am getting psyched and, uh, I'm also was like, can I just get it done before this? Like I'm going to Paris for three days for God's sakes and I was reading about Paris and they're like, if you don't want to stand out, you know, Americans are kind of, if you want to blend in America, uh, French or Parisians kind of chic, like, you know, you should be,

you know, clean cut and, you know, you shouldn't wear t-shirts and shorts and tinny shoes and dead. It's like, man, I'm going to be the most American dude there. Yeah. You guys will just go with it. We're like, there's nothing chic about me. Yeah. Just walk around in your me undies and ill fitting t-shirt and flip flops.

Is it like born in the USA t-shirt? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. With an American eagle on your head. Yeah. And on the back, it says, have you seen my tooth? You're going to love you.

Yeah. We'll see. I know. You'll be fine. Well, we're also going to the land of bad dentistry. So where is that in the UK? They're going to welcome us with me with open arms. Oh, yeah.

They're going to be like, he's one of us. Is that a thing still? I thought, no, I'm sure it's gotten better, but it's still a joke that we can make. Oh, gosh. I think so. Or Mike Myers can. We'll find out. We have no idea how our humor is going to go over there.

Probably fall flat. Sure, we'll see. All right, so they have the must gland and that secretes fluid, which, and I think that just sort of, it says here, it establishes their mating hierarchy. It's like a pheromone gland. Yeah. So whoever has the best must. It's a secreted musk.

Not must. Oh, it does secrete musk? I'm sure. You could call it that. Or it secretes must. Well, let's talk about their tusks because here's something I didn't know. The tusks actually have evolved from their incisors. I didn't mean it makes perfect sense.

It's like Lisa Simpson with that where she didn't have a dental plan. So like her tooth was going to grow up through her face. Do you remember that? Did they have like a projection or something? Yeah. That's exactly what it's like actually. But these grow outward. Yeah.

And they twist around. You know, if you've seen pictures of mammoths before, if not look one up and it's not like a standard just curvy elephant tusk, it's just beautiful the way it swoops around. Yeah. I believe like they could get up to like 16 feet long. Woo. It's enormous. Wow.

That's a big tusk. And we'll talk a little more about how they were used, but here to me is one of the saddest things, they go through, well, first of all, their other teeth are a foot long, their molars, which is remarkable. And they go through six sets of teeth like the modern elephant over a 60 year lifespan and they die after the last set of teeth is worn out. Yeah. And that's just like the saddest thing ever.

They eat their last prune and keel over. Yeah. I mean, to me, as a human, I assume they sense this like these, this is it. Well that, and then they see me stalking them with my knife and fork and napkin cause I wouldn't kill a mammoth. I just eat it after a diet of natural causes. Oh, well, that's different. Sure.

You just wait it out until they had a loss of teeth. I'm like a jackal or a vulture. Would herbivore taste better or worse than a beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Chuck, let's take a break and we'll come back and we're going to talk about where woolly mammoths come from, came from past tense.

All right, we're back. They're going to finish strong, my friend. So you know woolly mammoths resemble elephants? Sure. They have a common ancestor. And what's that? There's a very primitive elephantine animal, a type of animal called the probocidian. And actually, if you look at the woolly mammoth, the mastodon, some of those old ancient ones,

their order they belong to. I think it goes species, genus, order, no, species, genus, family order. Yeah. The order they belong to is probocidia. And it's like a bug has a probiscus. Proboscis. Same thing. That's basically a Greek for a nose, I believe.

Yeah, it is. So the Greeks are just poking fun at their noses. Yeah. And this split off from the – 55 million years ago, it split off from the mammalian tree. It was a long time ago. Right. And all this is happening in Africa.

The elephant family, the probocidians, they all were found in Africa. That's where they evolved. And then they eventually spread out of Africa up into the Sinai and over into Europe and then up into Asia, just like humans did. And I think something like 7 million years ago, the first mammoths developed in Africa – Yeah, they weren't wooly. No, they weren't.

And we'll get to why in a second. Yeah. They were like – they were mammoths, but they – yeah, they weren't wooly, like you say. They hung around in Africa for about 4 million years. About 3 million years ago, they started to spread. And then about 1.7, 1.8 million years ago, the earth changed dramatically. It entered the Pleistocene.

And again, the Pleistocene was characterized with huge dips in global temperature. It had been a hot house up to that point. And all of a sudden, it's like getting cold and there's like glacial periods and all that. And now the mammoths are starting to adapt to the cold. Now they became wooly and kind of differentiated from southern mammoths and became wooly mammoths. Yeah. There was one in particular, the largest one of all, the step mammoth.

And this sucker was 14 feet. And that's always at the shoulder, right? Yes. Isn't that correct? I wonder why they don't measure from the top of the head. Because you can like make yourself seem taller by lifting your head up. And they would do that when you – Yeah. Mammoths, great sense of humor, delicious, really uncooperative at the doctor.

Right. Wanted to be taller. And this one they think originated in northeastern Eurasia and was the ancestor most likely of the wooly mammoth. It's shaggy, but not wooly. No, it wasn't wooly. And the wooly mammoth actually is the smallest of them all. Right.

So not only did they adapt to the cold with their wooly coat, right? Mm-hmm. They actually had some really interesting adaptations with their blood. And one of the things they figured out was that the wooly mammoth had this pretty cool system where their arteries, which carried warm blood from the heart to the extremities, were really close to their blood vessels, which brought deoxygenated cold blood from the extremities back to the heart. Yeah.

Well, the fact that the arterial blood vessels were close to the veins means that the warm blood would actually warm the blood in the veins on the way back to the heart. Pretty neat. So that the heat never really made it out of the core. It kept the core very warm, which is important. And it meant the extremities were very cold, which is much less important as long as you still have blood flow. Longs you have socks.

Right. And then they also had this hemoglobin that could... So hemoglobin clumps onto oxygen and delivers it throughout the body, right? Yeah. So there's a little bit of heat energy to get the hemoglobin to let go of the oxygen, but you want as much heat energy as you can possibly have if you're a wooly mammoth on the steps. Yeah.

Right? So they figured out, get this, by taking 43,000-year-old wooly mammoth DNA, isolating the genes that expressed hemoglobin, or that led to the expression of hemoglobin, and then inserting it into E. coli bacteria, and getting the E. coli to manufacture wooly mammoth hemoglobin, and then analyzing that hemoglobin. And the researchers were saying, if we had a live... Well, if we built a time machine and went back in time 43,000 years and took blood hemoglobin from this wooly mammoth, it would be this exact same substance.

We've brought back wooly mammoth hemoglobin, and from studying it, they found out things like it required less heat energy to release oxygen, so thus conserving more heat. Well, and they're not the only ones either. They speculate at least they're a lot of cold-adapted animals that had that same feature. Pretty cool. Yeah. All right. So we're finally at the smaller wooly mammoth, right?

Yeah. They're the smallest of all the mammoths. Yeah. 400,000 years ago. And the first one of those was actually found in 1806, in Siberia, from a botanist named Michael Adams. And these dudes, like, they were widespread. They went as far as modern-day Ireland.

Yeah. And then across the Bering Land Bridge, or sorry, the Bering Strait was the Bering Land Bridge. Mm-hmm. Yeah, the straits, the water. Yeah. And then they roamed the east coast of the United States, and up into Canada and down into Mexico.

They went even, yeah, they went west in the United States and North America. How far west did they get? Pretty far west. Oh, they did? Yeah. Okay. West and a little bit south, because at the time, some of the glacialization would come as far south as, like, covering Chicago entirely in a glacier.

So they were a little further south. And they loved the Great Plains, because the Great Plains were still the Great Plains back then. Right. And, yeah, they would eat the grasses. But they also coexisted or shared the North American continent with another type of woolly mammoth that was indigenous to North America, the Colombian or Jefferson mammoth. Yeah, that's the one that actually spent time in Mexico.

And Nicaragua, I think, as far south as Nicaragua. Yeah, which is, yeah, it's pretty amazing. Of course, the weather was different back then. Yeah. Like we said. But still, I mean, they were closer to the equator, and it was definitely warmer. So they were a different species of woolly mammoth or of mammoth. Yeah.

They were very closely related. And I think they were actually descended from the step mammoth as well. Yeah. And they were, you know, they didn't need the weather just to be one thing. They were pretty adaptable. Not completely, as we'll see, because climate change probably did factor in, although not specifically because of, like, the temperature. Well, we might as well talk a little bit about that, huh?

Are we there yet? With the temperature? Well, no. Like maybe where they went. Oh, well, it's a big mystery, like I was saying. No one knows. Case closed. Yeah.

Well, they have some ideas. And one of them is climate change, but like I was hinting at, not necessarily like the temperature was something that affected them. It was more how the temperature affected their habitat, shrinking their habitat is what ultimately I think had a lot to do with it. I think so too. There's, well, there's, so there are a number of theories. One was like meteorite, never found any evidence for that.

Nope. Maybe like a superbud got them. Doubtful. Yeah. And so it came down to humans overhunting them, which is called the overkill hypothesis. And then climate change hypothesis. And I think of those two, if I had to choose, I'm with you, I think the climate change is what got them.

I think it's a little bit of both. I think ultimately it is too, but I think humans finished off something that was a process that was already inevitable. Yeah. Like here, here's what happens. Here's a bad thing. If you're a mammal or any animal, it's a bad man, bad mammoth day. If you're, uh, if your ecosystem is shrinking and you're available, food source is shrinking

and you continue to move where that is, you become isolated and your area is smaller and that eventually is super bad news. What you want if you're a wide-ranging mammal like that is. Especially a big one that needs like 400 pounds of food a day. Yeah. You want to be able to travel a long way to get as much food as you can because you're eating 20, 20 hours a day. But if your habitat is shrinking, uh, yeah, that's what I meant habitat, not ecosystem.

Although that works. Yeah, it definitely works. So the climate, uh, climate change melted those glaciers, sea levels rose, and then the land shrank became covered with water and the woolly mammals like, eh, things are looking so good. Well, plus not only that, with the change in climate and the warming of the earth or the climate, I should say, um, their, their food supply, not just the amount of food, but the type of food available diminished.

Like I said, you couldn't take them and put them on the, the Siberian step today. It's different plants that are there. They weren't necessarily adapted to eat those things. You need certain enzymes to break down certain types of sugars and stuff like that to gain energy from it. And as their food changed, they got to be in big trouble. Yeah. Um, that's the climate change hypothesis.

Yeah. The overkill hypothesis says that somewhere around 12 to 13,000 years ago, humans showed up in North America and right about the same time within a thousand years, there were no more woolly mammoths and not just woolly mammoths. There's something called the, um, North American megafauna extinction where mammals, I think 90 genera, so not even species, but genera, the next level up in classification, a lot of animals, 90 of them weighing over, um, I think 90 pounds, 44 kilograms, um, just all died off around the same time.

Yeah. I think we covered this in the extinction. Yeah. Um, or like the Clovis one, maybe, um, and a lot of people say, well, clearly it was humans. And it makes a lot of sense, it has some legs, it's humans, a lot of people do think humans did show up around that time in North America, um, the fact that it happened so quickly. Yeah.

And then the point that I think about the overkill hypothesis that really drives it home to me, although I'm, I'm more on the climate change fan wagon, um, is that these North American mammoths would not have co-evolved with humans. Yeah. Like African ones did. So the African ones survived the elephants down there. Yeah. They survived because they co-evolved with humans and came to understand that humans

are dangerous. The ones here in North America wouldn't have been innately afraid of humans and seen them as dangerous, and so could have been easy pickings for humans. The big problem is, is there's not that much evidence of humans mass hunting these things. Well maybe not mass hunting. They have found, um, they have found like these spears and things in mammoth bones, uh, the Clovis point, which is what we were talking about earlier. And we do know that they use their fur and they like to use their ivory and they like

to eat them. But the problem with that is that, um, a mammoth would have fed a lot of people. Right. Especially in that cold weather, you know, this natural preservation going on. So they could have lived and used that, that, like a single adult mammoth for a long time, which means they're not going to be hunting like five of them a day. Uh, and there's also evidence that they were revered somewhat by their cave art. So there are people who think that maybe it was like the Buffalo with the, uh, Native

Americans, maybe they respected it and managed it. Yeah. And didn't say, Hey, let's kill millions of these over a span of months. Right. This is a very Euro-American mentality. I mean, that's where the Buffalo almost went, except it was when Euro-Americans came over and said, let's start shooting. That doesn't mean that that's what Native Americans did.

And plus also there were plenty of mammoths that went extinct or the mammoth species in the steps and in Europe went extinct too, and there are humans over there for a long time. Yeah. So it's not like the humans suddenly arrived everywhere, right? But yet the mammoths died out at about the same time throughout the world. Yeah. Plus mostly people hunted, uh, smaller game, small to medium game back then, like dogs,

maybe. But, uh, you know, a mammoth like what it, it was probably an intimidating kill, first of all. Right. Uh, and, you know, what do we do with all that stuff? Yeah. So, I mean, it's, it's like we were saying, it is a mystery still exactly what happened to them.

I, I, I, again, my bets on climate change, but obviously humans did kill or at least butcher mammoths. Yeah. But I don't think they killed them out of existence, so I agree. Uh, and then that, that leads us to that last point though, about bringing them back. Good idea, bad idea. I mean, it's always a bad idea, isn't it? I think so, but you can also make the case, but do they, I mean, that's a pretty fatalistic

view. Like you can also make the case that if you believe that humans hunted them to extinction, well then maybe it's our moral obligation to bring them back if we can. That's true. So that's the view I think of, remember the 10,000 o'clock, 10,000 year clock episode we did. Oh yeah. So the Long Now Foundation, they're big into that.

The people who made the 10,000 year clock, they're big into the de-extinction movement. Oh, to bringing things back. And there's two ways you can do it. You could take a, you could take as much viable DNA from a woolly mammoth as you can get your hands on and insert it into an Asian elephant's DNA. Yeah, a little IVF treatment. Yeah. And then make a hybrid.

Yeah. And then over time you breed out the Asian elephant stuff through a breeding program until you have a pure woolly mammoth. And then the other one is to take the nucleus of a woolly mammoth cell and implant it into an embryo. Well, that's IVF. Sorry. Yeah, you're right.

Yeah. And then you've just cloned a woolly mammoth after it just stays in a poor elephant who's like, what are you guys doing? I wonder if the elephant when it was born would be like, whoa. Right. That's what I'm saying. Look at this thing. Yeah.

This is a woolly mammoth, you guys realize. It's Rosemary's baby. Yeah. So they, I think there's groups working on both of those. And the ethics are questionable because I mean, like I'm sure it's going to sound preposterous to some people, but what about that elephant mom, like, you know, is she going to care for this baby? How is it going to affect her?

How will it affect the baby? It's just that it raises a lot of questions. And plus also everyone is pretty much in agreement that there's no way this thing could ever live in the wild. Right. So you'd be breeding them to live in captivity. Yeah. To charge people money to come see him.

So yeah. No. I agree with you. No. Yeah. So we teased about the mastodon earlier and you found this was a mental floss thing, right? Yeah. The difference between a mammoth and a mastodon.

Yeah. Because they coexisted here in the U.S. The mammoth is not a great metal band, first of all, right? Like Atlanta's own mastodon, who by the way, our old friend Chris, bass player in my band, he was at his, one of his kids, or not one of his kids, he only has one kid, his kid's soccer game, and the lead guy from mastodon was right there, his kid is on the same soccer team. The one with the face and neck tattoos?

Yeah. That guy? Mm-hmm. That's awesome. He was like, I know who you are by the way. Right. Big fan. Yeah, that's cool.

He's like, yeah, let's talk soccer. Did they? Yeah. Nice. Anyway, they're just like normal people. Sure they are. Kids that play soccer. Yeah.

Even though he's a metal god. Mm-hmm. But what does that have to do with the woolly mammoth, not much. Their teeth is where you can tell the big diff is, is that the only way? These days, it's pretty clear that that's the only way to tell. Well the hair was a little different and they don't have the high sloping back and their tusks are a little straighter. They look a lot more like elephants than a mammoth does.

Yeah. Because a mammoth looks elephant time, but it looks like, especially when you put it next to an elephant or a mastodon, it looks like a totally different animal. Yeah. Agreed. But the teeth is the giveaway. The elephant molars, I'm sorry, the mammoth has elephant-like molars and they are like cheese-graders.

Or like the soul of like a running shoe. Yeah. Sure. It's used to just grind through some, some leaves. Yeah. Grasses. Lovely. Right.

The mastodon, actually the word means nipple tooth. Or boob tooth. Which is a bit too, that was a lot of fun on the playground. Yeah. Nipple tooth. Right. It's because they have like conical bumps on their molars that reminded this anatomist from the, I think the early 19th century, Georges Cuvier, he said, well, these bumps

look like breasts, so we're going to name them breast tooth. And also I've been out alone with my journal for far too long. Help. Yeah. You got anything else, wasn't there something about Thomas Jefferson? He was into the mastodon. They were actually, the mastodon. He collected them.

People. The bones. He was convinced that there was a mammoth still alive out west, remember in our Lewis and Clark episode? Yeah. That was one of the reasons Lewis and Clark went out west was to look for mammoths. It's a pretty famous thing. Because he was just convinced they were out there.

And he thought they were meat-eaters though. He did. And I think he was part of that train, Ben Franklin was like, I think you could probably also eat branches and stuff, which is what mastodons ate. But the mastodon became like the earliest symbol of America. Yeah. An American like, yeah, let's mess stuff up, let's kick some butt. Yeah.

It came from the mastodon. And the mastodon also, this is like a hundred years before they were finding mammoths. They, it proved for the first time the idea of extinction. Before that, everybody was like, the earth was created 6,000 years ago. Everything was in the Garden of Eden. There was a flood, so we lost some things. But everything else is exactly the way it's supposed to be. And the mastodon teeth that they were finding, and eventually the bones proved that there

were things that had lived before that were not alive any longer and extinction became a scientific thought. Amazing. That's a nice little cherry on top. Yes. Told you we'd finish strong. We did, didn't we? And by we, I mean you.

Us, Chuck, us. If you want to know more about mammoths, you should type that word in the search bar at howstuffworks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for Listen to Mail. Hey guys, this is my first time emailing because I was waiting for an opportunity to tell you some stuff you should know. It finally came today in the form of Book Talk with Josh and Chuck. Remember that?

Yeah. In the Moonwalk episode? I think so. And you said that I had said previously I didn't give a book much, and I was like, I don't think I said that. Turns out I did say that. I just don't remember because I'd rarely read books that I'd have to put down. Right.

I want to say also one other thing, I'm sorry. The guy who wrote Head Full of Ghosts, Paul Tremblay, I believe, somebody tweeted to him and said, hey, you got a mention in this episode, and I guess he went and listened. And he was like, that was great. And now I know how to Moonwalk. Nice. And then he tweeted sometime later, he's like, okay, it's been eight hours and I still am not Moonwalking well.

And I guess they're making a movie out of his book with Robert Downey Jr. Oh, wow. It's going to be big. Well, I wonder if that was because of us. Probably. They were like, we're kind of on the fence, and then they heard our Moonwalk episode and they green-lighted it. Wow.

So guys, I was excited to hear you rambling about books, something I loved dearly in a nice change of pace for movie talk with Josh and Chuck. Not that I don't love movie talk. Or booze talk with Josh and Chuck. Yeah, those are the only three things we talk about. You talked about how long each give a book before you give up on it. Did you know there is a rule for that? Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50.

Have you ever heard of this? She says, I assume Nancy is a woman. If you're younger than 50, you should read 50 pages before deciding to give up. And for every year older than 50 that you are, subtract one page, so 51, 49 pages and so on. At 100, you judge a book by its cover, literally. How about that? Who's this?

Nancy from Hart? Nancy Wilson? Nope. I'm going to see Hart soon, though. Are they opening for somebody or are they headlining? Their cheap trick is opening in Joan Jett or opening for Hart. Awesome. Triple Bill.

That's a heck of a bill. I can't wait. So Nancy Pearl says, yeah, 50 and then subtract a page because obviously life is getting short. You don't have enough time to waste time. So by the time you're 100, you just look at it and go, no. And you could keel over just looking at a book. You could. Also, if you haven't heard of Nancy Pearl, she's great.

She's probably the most famous librarian. Oh, okay. There you go. I love that. Well, is there more than one famous librarian? There's got to be. If she's the most famous, then there have to be other famous ones. John Dewey invented the Dewey Decimal System.

That's right. She says at least she's up there and she even has her own action figure, librarian action figure. That's awesome. I just got my master's in library science last year, so I'm a Nancy Pearl fan. Multiple professors of mine have had the action figure in their offices. I love this story. Chris Palette.

He wanted to become a librarian. Oh, yeah. He deserves an action figure, too. Oh, I bet he's probably got a Nancy Pearl one. Former host of tech stuff. And early host of stuff you should know before I snuffed him out. I didn't kill him. I just chloroformed him and he woke up in a library.

Yeah. I guess I'll get a degree. Yeah, that's exactly how it went. Anyway, I hope this email wasn't too long. I thought you'd like to know about the rule of 50. All the best, Erica in Boston. P.S. See you in Boston in October.

All right. Thanks a lot. We're doing a show there. We sure are. October 27th at the Wilber Theater. Yep. We can still get tickets at S-Y-S-K live.com. Bam.

Thanks for the setup, Erica. Yep. If you want to set us up to plug our shows, we'd love that. You can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast. You can join us on facebook.com. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of

the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you listen to podcasts.