The Ancients - Woolly Mammoths

Episode Date: February 2, 2025

Towering over 11 feet tall and weighing 6 tonnes, the Woolly Mammoth ruled the Ice Age. But how did these mighty beasts thrive for over 100,000 years—and why did they disappear?In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes kicks off a brand-new Ice Age miniseries with two leading experts. Professor Adrian Lister from the Natural History Museum explores the mammoth’s origins, evolution and adaptation to the harsh Ice Age climate. Then, Professor David Meltzer reveals the story of mammoths in North America, their encounters with early humans, and the astonishing discovery that some still roamed the Arctic just 4,000 years ago.Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.The Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MKAll music courtesy of Epidemic Sound

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Acast.com. The woolly mammoth, a great beast that has become synonymous with the Ice Age. More than 11 feet tall and 6 tonnes in weight when fully grown, covered in thick fur and possessing two mighty curved tusks, woolly mammoths roamed across great grassy plains for over 100,000 years, before they ultimately went extinct. There have even been attempts to bring mammoths back through their DNA. They are an incredibly popular extinct animal that fascinates so many of us. So what do we know about these massive beasts? How often were they hunted by humans?

And why eventually did they go extinct? It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. Welcome to the first episode of a brand new mini-series this February all about the Ice Age. Every Sunday we'll be covering a story from this extraordinary epoch, from mammoths and other great megafauna that once roamed the Earth, to Neanderthals and extinctions at the end of the Ice Age. To kick off this new series,

we're covering the woolly mammoth, this fan-favourite Ice Age animal. This episode will feature not one but two leading experts. First, a chat with the Natural History Museum's Professor Adrian Lister, a paleobiologist and leading expert on the woolly mammoth. Adrian will explain their origins and how they were built to survive in cold conditions from tusk to tail. Following that, we have an interview with Professor David Meltzer from Southern Methodist University who has been on the podcast twice before to talk about Ice Age America and the first humans who settled that land during the Ice Age.

He's back on the show to explain the story of woolly mammoths in and around North America, including a fascinating study that revealed mammoths still alive 4,000 years ago in the remote Arctic of Northeast Siberia. I really hope you enjoy. First up is Professor Adrian Lister. Let's get into it. Adrian, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast today. Very nice to be here. Now the woolly mammoths, but also I guess mammoths in general in prehistoric times, surely they

must be one of the most iconic prehistoric animal groups to have ever roamed this earth. The name and the word mammoth is still very popular today. Yes, the mammoth is a kind of iconic animal of the Ice Age, definitely. These animals of the Ice Age were way. You know, these animals of the Ice Age were way more recent than dinosaurs, you know, dinosaurs of the other kind of iconic prehistoric beast, but much closer to us in time and indeed coexisting humans. Mammoth is the best known of what was though a very diverse Ice Age fauna with lots of other species alongside the mammoth like the woolly rhino and cave bears and so on. This seems important to highlight straight away, Adrian.

We're focusing in particular on the woolly mammoth today, but mammoths as a group. So is the woolly mammoth just one of many different types? Yes, the woolly mammoth is the one we know far the best. It was the one that was spread right across the Northern Hemisphere throughout the last Ice Age and probably the Ice Age before that. But prior to that, we know a whole sequence of fossil species that form a really interesting evolutionary leading up to the woolly mammoth as the final species of the group and the most specialised species of the group. Well, you've kind of preempted my next question then, Adrian. What do we know about the origins of the woolly mammoth and these other species that come before? ADRIAN Well, you've only got to look at a mammoth to realise it's a kind of elephant.

Mammoths were elephants. They were part of the elephant family. The elephant family arose in Africa just like the human family, actually. And the elephant family arose in Africa, just like the human family actually. The first elephant fossils were about 7 billion years old and found in East Africa and Southern Africa. And quite soon after the origin of the family, it split into three. One was the African elephant line, which obviously stayed in Africa. One was the line which eventually left Africa and moved east into Asia and became the living Asian elephant. And the third line was the mammoth line and the earliest fossils we've got are about five

million years ago in South Africa. So mammoth started off in Africa as a tropical species. You know at that, they wouldn't have had the hairy coat that we're familiar with. But about three and a half million years ago, mammoths moved north out of Africa because that's when we first pick up their fossils in Europe. And they very quickly spread across Asia, and there are fossils of similar age about three million years ago from China. So at that point, they were still relatively warm adapted forest living elephant-like species, although we can tell from particular features of their skulls and teeth that they were actually on the mammoth line.

So you've got this early mammoth ancestor right across Eurasia about 3 million years ago. And soon after that is when the Ice Ages started to clock in. We recognize the beginning of the Ice Ages at about 2.6 million years ago. And what we see in the mammoth fossils when we trace them up through time, starting at about 3 million years ago, right up to the last Ice Age, up till 10,000 years ago, getting on towards their final extinction. Through that period, we can see a change of adaptation. Look at these fossils. They're gradually becoming adapted to the cold, open environments of the Ice Ages, culminating in the familiar woolly mammoth with its airy coat and all the rest of it. So Adrian, it sounds there, and as've highlighted the changing climate and how that influences it as well,

but to reach the wooly mammoth from those first mammoths that go out of Africa, it may be oversimplifying it, but it almost was like step by step by step in that evolutionary process until you reach that transformed mammoth, which was the woolly mammoth we are familiar with today? Yes, it was a step by step process, but it wasn't just a single line, because we ended up with quite a few different mammoth species actually. So for example, I think the most important step in that process happened about two million years ago when we still had this relatively original type warm adapted early mammoth right across Eurasia. And then in one area of Eastern Asia, probably in northern China, we pick up the next stage. There's been what we call in the jargon of

speciation. In other words, one species is split into two. So in the Far East, because the environment had become colder and more open and grassy in that part of the world, and those are the things that the more advanced mammals had to become adapted to. So there was a split. So for a while there were two different species and then the more advanced one kind of took over. So all through these three million years, it's quite a complex process like that. So it is a stepwise change, but it's quite a complex one. ALICE It sounds quite similar to human evolution, doesn't it? It's not just one type to another so that all these different lineages that link together but like for Joe blogs looking in sometimes it's easy to oversimplify it with going from one species to the next to the next. The story of what we've understood about mammoths is very similar to as you say the human story where the idea of a single lineage.

the human story where the idea of a single lineage, which I'm afraid a lot of people may still have in their mind that that's how evolution works. It is more like a branching bush with less successful species dying out. You know, so they only get like halfway up the bush and then others arise and then you end up with the most strongly adapted species kind of at the top. And that presumably would include the woolly mammoth, was it? Was that one of the strongest, the best? Well, it was the one that was the best adapted to the Ice Age environments. As the Ice Age environments, which saw much of the Northern Hemisphere cold, obviously, also forests gave way to grasslands. And so the earlier mammoth species that were adapted more to

living in forests and eating that kind of vegetation got restricted in their distribution to small areas and then eventually died out, while the mammoth had to become adapted to this different kind of environment. So we would tend not to say that one is better than the other, but it's the survival of the fittest thing. It means it fits that environment, and that's why it survived and the other species died out. ALICE Well, Adrian, let's now talk through the bodily structure of a woolly mammoth so we can really understand how it adapted to best survive in these new ice age environments. And we can either go tus to tail or tail to tusk, but I've got in my notes, tail to tusk.

So let's start at the back end. I mean, first of all, what do we know about the backend of a woolly mammoth about its tail? Can we talk about that for a bit? Does that show any kind of great adaptations for that new climate? Yeah, I think, you know, it's quite useful to compare the woolly mammoth with a living elephant because we know what an elephant looks like, we know that it's adapted to a tropical environment, and the early mammoths were adapted to that environment as well.

So if we take the tail, for instance, the living elephant has a very long tail. It comes all the way down to the ankle with hairs at the end, which it uses as a kind of fly swat. William Mammoth had a much shorter tail. And I think the reason for that is avoiding frostbite. You've got a very sort of thin organ like that hanging loose out of the back end of your body in a very cold environment where it would have been way below freezing in the winter, different from anything that a living elephant in its natural habitat would encounter, then you've got to protect it from frostbite. And I'm going to switch to the

other far end of the animal actually and destroy your idea of going from back to front, because I think the ear of the mammoth actually tells the same story. Because obviously, as we all learn as children, elephants have great big ears that they flap and they flap them to lose heat because elephants living in India or Africa are living in a very hot environment and their ears are full of blood vessels and they flap these very big ears to actually lose heat because they don't want to overheat. Now the mammoth living in an arctic climate had the exact opposite problem. It wanted to conserve heat and so the mammoth is much smaller. They're about 10% of the area of that of a living

elephant. We know this from the frozen carcasses by the way. One should interject, you know, that for most fossil species all we have is bones and teeth, because that's normally all that survives. But the mammoth is very special in this regard, because we have these complete carcasses that have been found under the ground in Siberia, that have basically been in a deep freeze in the permafrost since the Ice Age. That's how we know about things like the tail length, the ear, other soft tissue features, you know, that we otherwise wouldn't know about because they didn't have bones in. I think the ear and the tail are part of the same story of reducing the area of small thin organs outside

the body in a cold environment. You don't want to loose heat through them and you don't want them to get frostbite. So that's that. It is extraordinary that you have that much information to learn about the woolly mammoths, as you say, that rich archaeological record, which isn't just bones, but also these mammoths preserved in the permafrost. You've taken us from the tail straightaway to the head and the ear. So I think rather than jumping back, let's focus on the head and then we'll go down to the body. So we've talked about the ear, but I mean the overall structure of the mammoth's head, Adrian, I mean how was it designed? Well, it's basically like a living elephant in that you've got two great big tusks sticking out of the front end and the tusks are essentially

modified in size of teeth. That's what elephant tusks are. That's what mammoth tusks were. They're equivalent to our side incisors. So not the center two teeth at the front, but the ones right next to them, obviously massively overgrown. And they're made of solid dentine, which is no enamel around the outside teeth, enamel on the outside, but the sort of more creamy color dentine on the inside ivory, which is what tusks are, is solid dentine. And the mammoth tusks differed from those of living elephants in that they don't just go sort of straightforward with a gentle curve like those of living elephants, they form a kind of spiral shape. The mammoth tusks have a kind of spiral shape. And in some individuals with very large tusks, they could even cross in the middle because they came down out of the skull, round to the side, and then spiral inwards and could even cross in the middle, which leads to interesting questions of how

they were actually used. I was going to say, so do we know how they use these great tusks? Because I don't think they'd be used for digging up roots or anything like that. Well, I mean, mainly these kinds of organs, whether it's tusks, horns, and so on, are for fighting. I mean, that is their original use. Exactly how that worked in the cases where the tusks ended up, you know, crossing over each other in the middle, because the points normally should point forward if you're going to be fighting with them. But most individuals, it was like that. And I think that was still the main function, but also for us of intimidating display.

In that Ice Age world where other famous fauna, let's say, Sabre-toothed Tigers, maybe, or others, I guess it's not the sharp point or another mammoth, but it's also it must be the great weight of the mammoth as well so even a hit with the side of one of those tusks was presumably could have been very very damaging. Oh yes no question about that if not fatal. Do we know much about the brain size the eyes and the teeth should we go through those one by one? Well the head of the mammoth is different from that of living elephants it's got a very high, very high single dome at the top. It's got a sort of a high skull. And I think the reason for that is because the muscles and tendons that hold up the head originate on the back of the head and go back and attach to the top of the back. And with that enormous weight of tusks at the front you think about

it to actually the animals got to be able to raise and lower its head with these huge things sticking out of the front and so it needed enormous power of muscle and tendon very very strong and lots of them attaching to the back of the head so I think partly that's why the head is actually very high because it's giving more area at the back for that purpose. Also, the mammoth had very high crowned teeth. Now, this was something that developed in the evolution that we talked about earlier, because the mammoth ancestors lived mostly on the leaves of trees and shrubs, which if you are a herbivorous mammal, those are relatively soft to chew. They don't wear down your teeth very quickly. Now in the Ice Age, the mammoth was forced to eat mostly grass, which is much tougher to chew. It's also lower in nutrients, so you have to eat more

of it. We think mammals are probably eating for maybe like 18-20 hours a day to get enough food. They would have had to eat about 400 kilos of this relatively low nutrient food to feed their large bodies. And so part of the adaptation to that was they developed teeth with very high crowns so that they could last through the animal's life, even though they would be wearing down gradually with this very tough food that the animal was eating. This is another reason why the head looks quite long and short, because it had to house these very tall teeth. You would have noticed that difference immediately on looking at a mammoth compared to an elephant. You mentioned that great weight of the mammoth and the amount of food that a woolly mammoth

would need to eat to maintain its strength and its body weight. 20 hours, wow. So do we know much about the actual body of the woolly mammoth Adrian and the kind of mammoths in caves, mostly in France, we've got, I think, about 200 artistic reproductions of representations of mammoths by Ice Age artists. And these are famous caves like Lascaux and Chaux. Yes, exactly. And although obviously you have to allow for artistic license, but there are certain

features of the animal that are repeated again and again in the art. One in particular that I would mention is that they're always shown with a very sloping back. So the mammoth had a sort of high shoulder hump, and then the back sloped down gradually towards the tail end. And that's actually quite difficult to figure even from looking at the vertebral column, which I have done, you know, piecing all the bones together. It's quite hard to twig that that was the case, but it's shown in all the cave

paintings. And so I guess it was the case. Again, compare with an Asian, living Asian elephant, where the back is kind of arched shape, and an African elephant, where the back is described as saddle shape, hollow in the middle. So the mammoth was quite different in its overall body form if you were to look at it from the side. High domed skull, big shoulder hump, sloping back down to the back end. And how thick was the fur coat of a woody mammoth? Very thick, yeah. I mean, we've got a lot of hair preserved in the, from the permafrost and

the main sort of outer coat, the longest hairs are around a meter long. Those are the ones that are on the back and hanging down from the belly like a bit of a curtain. And I've measured the width of those hairs under the microscope. They're about six times the thickness of an average human hair. So living elephants, although they sort of appear naked from a distance, you know, close up, they do have a sparse covering of hair. So the hair was there to evolve into the thicker coat of the mammoth, you know, through that period of time that we were talking about. So they had this very thick outer coat. And then closer to the skin, there was a much finer hair, sort of under wall,

it was a bit like cotton wool actually, as a second kind of insulating layer. Then there was a fat layer underneath the skin, so they were well protected against the cold. CB What do we know about mammoth feet? Yeah, I mean, they did have fur on, but it wasn't specially long fur. And I think probably like arctic animals today that we can study in real time, like reindeer, for example, they actually keep their feet very cold, relatively cold, and they have antifreeze substances in their blood that stop them from freezing up. But actually, this does lead me to a really fantastic bit of research that's been done on woolly mammoths right down to the molecular

level because a study was made a few years ago by Canadian scientists of mammoth hemoglobin. Now hemoglobin of course is the molecule in our blood that transports oxygen from the lungs to all the tissues of our body. And what they did was, you know, we're now managing to extract DNA from mammoth tissues and we're learning a lot more about their anatomy and their physiology from the DNA. So these people actually found the gene from the mammoth DNA that codes for hemoglobin. They then in the lab, in the test tube effectively, created mammoth hemoglobin and then just ran it through tests just like you would in a medical lab. What they found was that the mammoth hemoglobin had certain differences from elephant hemoglobin that enabled it to

work at lower temperatures. When I say work, they took the mammoth haemoglobin now to 5 degrees C and it was still able to pick up oxygen and then release the oxygen, because that's how haemoglobin works. It picks up oxygen in our lungs and it releases it to the tissues like muscle tissues. The modern elephant hemoglobin stopped working before you got down to those low temperatures. In other words, going back to your question about the feet, if you've got pretty cold feet, as the mammoth would have done standing in the snow and ice and salt, you still need to be able to get oxygen to the tissues of the feet, the muscles and all the rest of it. And so the hemoglobin of the mammoth was adapted to be able to do that even in

virtually zero temperatures. So what we're learning about these animals now goes beyond what traditional study of bones and even soft tissues to the molecular level. ALI I mean Adrian, I was about to say this is absolutely fascinating because with the dinosaurs, for instance, paleontologists, they can give a rough idea of the Tyrannosaurus rex from its bones, as you say, and get quite a bit of an idea. But still, there's a lot of debate around certain parts of the Tyrannosaurus rex. But with the woolly mammoth, I think one of the things that does make it so amazing to learn about is the fact that you can, with the surviving evidence, with that quality of archaeological evidence surviving, you can research, examine even the

small parts of a mammoth structure and analyse more about how they functioned. Yes. Another nice outcome actually, we're talking about the mammoth's coat, is about the colour because many popular illustrations of mammoths show them with a kind of orangey coloured coat. And the reason for that is that much of the hair that comes out of the permafrost with the carcasses is that orange kind of colour. But I've suspected for a long time that this is not natural and that it's because pigment has actually leached out of the hair through the thousands of years of burial. And actually recent DNA work has tended to confirm that. We now think based on some hair samples, which are a much darker, chocolatey

brown colour, the DNA actually confirms that because we can get some of the genes which code for hair color, and we know from living animals which variants of those genes code for brown hair, blonde hair, ginger hair. And sure enough, all those orange pictures of mammoths need to be redone with kind of a chocolatey brown color, which was probably their original colour. If you're like me and you love history, but in particular you love the smutty, salacious, gossipy history, then do I have the perfect podcast for you. If you fancy finding out about the slippery origins of lube or how Vikings linked sex and magic together, then listen no further. Join me, Kate Lister, on Betwixt the Sheets where I delve into the most outrageous, the most taboo and the downright sexiest parts of our history. It's the kind of history that you probably wouldn't bring up at a family lunch, but you might bring it up

down the pub. From the history of swear words to answering important questions like just how incestuous were Neanderthals? And so much more. Listen every Tuesday and Friday wherever it is that you get your podcasts. A podcast by HistoryHit. Adrian, one last question on the body. You also mentioned earlier when talking about the teeth, how they're having to eat for much of the day. So if they're ingesting all of this food, all of these grasses, and they're getting energy from this food and it goes all around the body to ensure that the mammoth can survive, but does that also mean that a woolly mammoth is eating for much of the day? Is a woolly mammoth also pooing for much of the day too?

Oh, most certainly, yes. The answer is yes, especially because all elephants, and that would have included mammoths, have actually a relatively inefficient digestion, unlike something like a deer or a cow, which has got a much more complicated stomach. And you know, they chew the cud and so on, so they're getting the absolute max out of the food. So there's less left to come out of the rear end. The mammoth probably, like living elephants, probably only got about 30-40% of the nutrients out of its food, partly because that sort of grassy food is not terribly nutritious. There's an awful lot of bulk that is not going to be digested that would have

come out of the rear end. So answer your question is, yep. And fertilising the ground, very important part of the ecosystem actually, to be fertilising the ground in that way and so more plants grow up and then they eat more plants and so on. Adrian, you've brilliantly given us a really clear picture, an exciting picture of the woolly mammoth, what we should envisage, and the great research that's gone into learning more about this Ice Age species. I have a couple of other questions I'd like to ask. One of them is, from all that research that has been done, do we have any rough idea for how long a woolly mammoth would have lived

for? Well, first of all, we make a kind of analogy with living elephants you know where 60 or 70 is really the the top duration. Secondly we do have a kind of a record in the tusks because the tusks have annual growth rings you know the tusks grew each year they kind of pushed out of the skull and they grew longer each year they They also wore down at the tip, you know, through use. But we can count the rings, we can count the growth rings. Now in a very old animal, the sort of earliest part of the tusk, which was at the tip, would have worn away. So we never get the complete lifespan, but the longest that we've counted is I think 47 years. In other words, there was one mammoth tusk

where 47 annual rings were counted. And the fact that we haven't got any up to 60 or 70, which is the kind of expectation, is because the old ones have worn away at the tip, so you never get the total lifespan. But it kind of fits, you know, we've got 47 preserved. So my guess is it's probably similar to a living elephant at about 60 or 70 if they were doing well. So this is the mammoth equivalent of tree rings, is it? Yeah, exactly. Yes. And at their height in the Ice Age, Adrian, how far and wide should we be imagining herd

of woolly mammoths roaming across the world? Well, the woolly mammoth had an enormous range. I mean, it was bigger than either of the living species. You could start in the West in Ireland, if you like, through Britain, across Britain, through almost all of Europe down to a kind of latitude of northern Spain, let's say the northern Mediterranean, right the way across Asia, right up to the Arctic Ocean, all the way across to northern China, northern Japan. And then we tend to, in paleontology, we think of the Americas as actually to the east of Asia because although, in this country at least, we're used to seeing a map of the world

with America on the left and the Atlantic Ocean in the middle but the way that animals actually spread was eastward across the Bering Strait which is you know the sea that now separates Siberia from Alaska was dry land and so the mammoths and other species, including people by the way, spread from Siberia into North America. So continuing my geographical story, we ended up in Eastern Asia, the mammoth spread right across into Alaska, and then all the way to the Atlantic seaboard of North America, and roughly down to the level of the Great Lakes in the United States. So I don't know how many square kilometers that is, but it's absolutely vast. And it's been estimated that at their peak there were at least 10 million mammoths living in that area.

10 million mammoth. And you also mentioned in passing North Japan, Britain, Ireland, places that we think of being islands today, but I'm guessing back then at their height, they were connected to each other, so there was a land bridge between them. That is correct, yes. Adrian, you have fantastically given us a great introduction to the woolly mammoth at its height and what we should envisage. It just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time out of your schedule to come on the podcast today.

It's been a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. Well, there was Professor Adrian Lister, leading expert on the woolly mammoth, giving you an introduction to this giant of the Ice Age, its origins, size and spread. Now, as Adrian mentioned, at their height some 10 million woolly mammoths roamed the Ice Age world, whether that be in Europe, Siberia or North America. It's the story of woolly mammoths in Siberia and North America that we're going to focus

in on now with Dr David Meltzer. We'll explore how humans interacted with mammoths when they first reached the Americas. Did they actively hunt these great beasts? We'll also look at woolly mammoth extinction and their final enclaves in the Arctic only 4,000 years ago. Are humans to blame for their extinction? Well, let's find out. David, as always, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. Thanks for having me back. It's fun. It is always good fun and your topics always seem to get a huge reception. We've done the first Americans and Ice Age America and now talking about one of the,

can we say one of the most significant beasts of the Ice Age, the woolly mammoth. There's something about the woolly mammoth that we always come back to. We love the woolly mammoth. There's a label for these large, now extinct animals. They call them charismatic fauna. And it's not because they had really pleasing personalities. It's just that you can't stop thinking about the damn things. They're so big, they're so interesting, and they're so gone. It's just a really, it's a fun topic to think about.

It may not have been fun to be a woolly mammoth because they are gone, but it's something that has intrigued scientists and the lay public for quite literally centuries. So is it because you mentioned the size, significance on the ecosystems, the fact that as you say, you don't see woolly mammoths anymore, kind of like the dinosaurs, but they once had a huge impact on the world? Well, and unlike dinosaurs, people did once see them. People were on the landscape with them. It must have really been something to come around the corner and see one of these aircraft carriers of the animal kingdom lumbering by. What a sight! Talking about the archaeological record, I'm talking about the record in general,

David. How rich a record do you have as archaeologists when examining woolly mammoths, their interactions with humans, and also just their general lifestyle, how far they spread and so on? David Cahn We actually have a number of species of mammoths. The woolly mammoths are occupants, denizens of the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions. But as you get further south, there's other mammoth species and in fact, other proboscidian species, that is to say, other elephants. These are all distant animal relatives of African elephants and Asian elephants,

which of course are still surviving today. And these are animals that, oh golly, some of the largest ones would be 14, 16 feet at the shoulder. They'd weigh six, eight tons. Wow. And they're found, well, pretty much across Europe, Eurasia, the far north of the Americas, but even into temperate regions as well, not just Arctic regions. And they've been around for a very long time. Certainly mammoths were in Eurasia well before humans got up into that region, far northeastern Eurasia. They were in the Americas before humans got here.

So they lay claim to these landscapes more so than we have a claim to these landscapes. And humans interacted with them over time. Now, of course, there's been lots of discussion about what the nature of that relationship was. Was it strictly platonic? Did humans admire them from a distance or did humans want them for dinner? We certainly know that they did from time to time, but a lot of the question sort of revolves around the intensity of use of these animals, the risk involved in going after these animals, their role in the diet. But it's also important to come back to something you mentioned earlier, their impact on the landscape. These are animals that are what are known as keystone species.

What we mean by that is that these are animals that have a really profound effect on the ecosystem around there. They sneeze and everybody else gets a cold, as it were, because these are animals that play a role in species interactions, ecosystem connectivity, changing patterns of nitrogen cycling, dispersal of plant remains, disrupting or creating succession sequences. You pull them out of a landscape and things go to hell because their influence is so profound. These are important animals, not just from a human history, but also in terms of ecological history and environmental history.

So, archaeological record, I'm guessing bones, skeletons, but do we also have things like DNA or poo? Sometimes people overlook poo, but poo is also a big thing, I'm guessing. Oh, listen, I'm into poo. I will quickly clarify what I mean by that, because I don't want anybody to get the wrong idea. These are animals that are constantly shedding DNA, whether through poo or urinating on the landscape. And that becomes a really interesting source of information about where these animals were, when these animals were and when they went extinct.

when these animals were and when they went extinct. So it's important to recognize, and by the way, I should just add too, it ain't just bones. We have freeze dried mammoth carcasses. Oh wow. Oh yeah, oh yeah. These things started to get dug up and discovered in the, I think late 1800s in Siberia,

because what would happen is that these animals would, on occasion, fall into a pond. The pond would freeze. The area would become glaciated, frozen, permafrost, tundra. And when they would melt out 30,000 years later, you would have a perfectly preserved mammoth. And evidently, the story I heard from a one-time professor of mine, Dave Hopkins, the sort of giant of Beringian studies, said that Siberian fur trappers would feed mammoth meat to their dogs just because it was a handy source of protein for their animals. Would I want a mammoth steak that had been sort of freeze-dried for 30,000 years? I'd try it, whether I like it is a different issue.

So we have this really remarkable record of these animals, and the DNA part is especially important because all of that stuff that they're shedding on the landscape, as I mentioned, does really give us a good sense of populations, their population dynamics, the tailing off of their numbers over time. It essentially gives us a window into their extinction. Well, that word extinction is something we will get to, but you also mentioned words there like Beringia and Siberia. That area of Northeast Asia and what was once that kind of land bridge area connecting

North America with Northeast Asia, was that area of the world one of the richest focal points of woolly mammoths back in the Ice Age? Maybe not the richest, but certainly an area that was occupied by mammoth. You have mammoth across pretty much a large chunk of North Eurasian real estate, and Beringia was simply one part of it. We think of the land bridge as a sort of separate entity, but in reality, it was a continuous element of the so-called Beringian mammoth steppe, this vast grassland that stretched from essentially Western Alaska to, well, basically across most of Northern Eurasia. They call it the mammoth steppe, do they?

Exactly right, because it was the most prominent animal in the landscape. But it wasn't just them. Woolly rhinos, horses, giant bison were out there as well because these are all grazers. These are all animals that, well, right now to a lesser extent, but certainly horse, bison, and mammoth are animals that love large grasslands. And they're there in abundance. Large relatively dry underfoot grasslands as well. If we go to North America and we'll focus in largely on sites in North America with the woolly mammoth,

because I know that's a main area of your speciality, David, do we know roughly when the woolly mammoth spread into the Americas and North America and become that dominant animal in that environment? Mammoths have been in North America, south of the Arctic, starting around 1.35 million years ago. Oh, wow. So they've been here for a very long time. Now, what species of mammoth that was is not altogether clear,

because there are two species of mammoths in the Americas. And it's sort of difficult. When we go that far back, we tend to work at the genus level in the Linnaean hierarchy for those listeners who remember Linnaeus and all that other stuff that you had to memorize in eighth grade biology. And what's that, sorry, for someone who was terrible at grading biology? Oh, kingdom phylum order family class genus species, right? Your scientific ID card, as it were. And so they arrived in the Americas and not sure which particular type of mammoth and

then I'm guessing they spread far and wide and before the arrival of humans, are they at the top of the food chain in the Americas? And do we know from the archaeological record, do we know how far and wide they spread? Well, they were highly mobile. We know that actually from isotopic evidence in their bones that they would graze over vast areas. They were not at the top of the food chain in so far as predators are gonna be hovering above herbivores.

So your carnivores are gonna be up there at the top, but they were certainly the large herbivore on that landscape. And so that's why they sort of had that role as a keystone species. And they could be very destructive on a landscape too. Knock down trees as they're moving around, chewing up the landscape as they're grazing, that kind of thing. So I'd like to also ask about footprints. Cause we talked about DNA, we talked about bones

and briefly talked about poo as well. But do we have many footprints of woolly mammoths surviving in the archaeological record? I've seen mammoth footprints, okay? I can't tell by their sneakers whether it was a mammoth or a Colombian, a woolly mammoth or a Colombian mammoth. There's actually a science of footprints and for the life of me, I can't remember what the ology, this particular ology is of studying footprints. But yeah, there's mammoth tracks that have been found

in a number of areas. And I've seen them out on the White Sands Missile Range, which is actually quite close to the White Sands Archaeological Site, which I think we've talked about, where we have these human footprints. There's mammoth footprints all over the place. I had to have them pointed out to me that these are mammoth footprints. I mean, to me, they look, well, they look like large round patterns on the landscape. Okay, I'll buy it that

those are mammoth footprints. They look like other kinds of geological features to me, but smarter people than me assured me that they were footprints and I was happy to go along with that. Whether they were mammoths of, well, they were probably Colombian mammoths, just given the range and where they were found. So yeah, these things have turned up in a number of places. Sorry, I completely forgot, of course, as you highlighted earlier, that there are those two different main types of mammoth, aren't there, in the Americas as you go on. So is it at least two or the woody mammoths is, I'm presuming, further north and the Colombian mammoths

further south? Exactly right. And there's been a certain amount of arguing about the number of taxa of mammoths, but generally at the moment we're going with just those two. And so how does the arrival of humans on the stage, late in the game if you're saying that mammoths have already been in America for more than a million years, how does the ultimate arrival of humans in America, but I guess it could also be used as a case study for elsewhere in the world, how does it affect woolly mammoths? That's the big question, isn't it? There's been a debate for over a century as to whether humans were responsible for their extinction. the challenge in the complication here is that we actually have very little evidence

that humans were actively praying upon the species we don't know that they did we have no doesn't or more sites where we have evidence of human artifacts mammoth bones suggesting that there was some sort of activity going on there. But in some of those cases, it looks like humans were simply scavenging already dead animals. We can actually see trimarks where they were sort of pulling apart bones to sort of gnaw on them, I suppose. So yeah, humans had an effect, but was it consequential or not? And it's also important to note, and we perhaps mentioned this in our past conversations,

that mammoths were simply one of over three dozen animals that will go extinct at the end of the Pleistocene. And what makes this challenging, of course, is that it was the end of the Pleistocene. So we have this confluence of animals disappearing, humans arriving, and all the massive changes that are taking place in the climate and the environment as the ice age comes to an end so it's not entirely clear which way are the causal arrows pointing are they pointing at humans being responsible for all of these changes or. In my view more likely are we looking at climatic and environmental change playing a role. climatic and environmental change playing a role. Do we have the surviving evidence which shows that there was regular active hunting of these mammoths and what types of hunting these humans were doing to try and down what was, as you say,

the aircraft carrier of ice age animals? Going after an aircraft carrier with a stick with a sharp rock. Let's just make it even more frightening than it might have been. Well, look, the evidence that we have in terms of these sort of activities that might have taken place, one of the things that's kind of striking is that a lot of these sites,

again, there's not that many of them, a dozen or so, maybe 16, that's the actual number that we're comfortable with, are sometimes found near water. So one of the things that happens with large mammals like this, these have water-cooled engines. When body temperature goes up, when they're ill, when they're dying, head to a pond, head to a lake.

That makes them vulnerable. So it may well be that human hunting was sort of along the lines of ambush hunting. The problem is, is you don't wanna take down an elephant when it's in the water, because if it sinks into the water, what are the odds of getting a waterlogged mammoth weighing six tons, now probably 10 tons, I'm exaggerating to make a point,

out of that muck and the mud of the pond? So, you know, one senses and suspects that if in fact these animals were near death or dying, that it would have been easier just to wait, let them die, and then just scavenge. Cut off a couple of mammoth steaks, put them on the barbecue, there you're done. Low risk hunting, by the way. You the sites while these these so named kill sites these mammoth kill sites that you have in the archaeological record. Yeah i mean some of them may just be scavenging we know that hunter gathers you know there's two things they like to do in terms of reducing risk one is reducing the risk of coming home

empty handed and the other is reducing the risk of coming home dead and so having an elephant die for you, very convenient. And do we know much else about those sites? You've got those kill sites there where it seems that, well, maybe not. If they're just scavenging on a dead mammoth, maybe humans weren't directly involved in killing that mammoth. Are there other clear sites? And I've got one, I think in my notes, it's from South Dakota, where it's almost like these mammoth have suffered from a natural disaster. They've fallen into something and not died from the human attack. Well, exactly right. That site that you mentioned is called Mammoth Hot Springs and it's basically

a sinkhole. It goes back, I think the current estimates of its age are around 65,000, which puts it pre-humans in the Americas. Natural death assemblages, you know, animals had to die, and they had to die even before humans showed up. We do have these localities where there are, in some cases, natural disasters from the point of view of a mammoth, and we have an accumulation of skeletons in one spot and and it's really striking when you go to that site, it's actually a really cool site to visit, is they have a museum that they built over this big pit and you can actually see where a mom mammoth, a mammoth mom, was trying to push its calf out of the hole. It's a wonderful and tragic moment in mammoth history where this

poor, presumably nursing, mammoth mother was trying to save her baby. It didn't work. And do we therefore also know quite a lot about young, juvenile baby mammoths from the surviving archaeological record alongside the fully grown adults, the bulls, the males, and the females that we usually think of when someone says mammoth? Well, the males, and the females that we usually think of when someone says mammoth. Well, in fact, some of those freeze dried mammoths are babies. And there's one that came out of Siberia dates to, I think around 38, 40,000 years ago, don't quote me on it.

And it had clearly not been weaned and it didn't know how to feed itself. And so when they opened up its stomach contents, the poor thing had been grabbing rocks and twigs in an effort to feed itself, not knowing what was food. So yeah, this poor thing was just incapable of caring for itself and died because of it. ACAS powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. On October 3rd, 1980, a bomb was detonated outside a synagogue on Copernic Street in Paris.

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Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com. So we have humans and woolly mammoths coexisting during this later period of the Ice Age, David. And during that time, humans would have known wo mammoths, as you say, scavenging these carcasses, maybe actively hunting some of them as well with these techniques, trying to take down the aircraft carriers of the Ice Age. Would they not just be getting the meat off the mammoth? Would they be using almost every part of this giant that is fallen? Well, six tons of meat, that's an awful lot to eat.

You remind me of a famous quote about the meat packing plants in Chicago at the turn of the century where they used everything from the the squeal to the tail on an animal. Look, there's only so much that pedestrian hunter gatherers can carry. And so my suspicion is, well, let me use a bison kill as an example and a potential analog. is, well, let me use a bison kill as an example and a potential analog. Bison are huge at the end of the ice age. 3,000, 4,000 pounds, not a problem. And what we see in bison kills is that humans would butcher the animals and they take all the high utility bones. And by that, I mean the bones that had good meat on them. They would dry the meat, they'd get it ready for transport, and then they the meat, they'd get it ready for

transport, and then they'd go and they'd probably end up leaving behind a lot of the carcass. You're not going to haul around a skull with you. These are highly mobile people, right? And so as highly mobile people and as highly mobile people without wheeled vehicles or, you know, you have dogs, they can help you drag stuff. But if you kill a six ton animal, you'll get what you need, you'll dry the meat, you'll take as much as you can carry, and you'll move on. And so we suspect that you could cash it. And let me explain that.

There's a site in Wyoming called the Colby site. And it looks for all the world as though a number of immature animals were dispatched by human hunters. Again, low risk, right? Go after a baby mammoth that's wandered away from the herd. Yeah. A lot less scary. And there was stacking of the bones when the site was found. And it looks as though in Wyoming, and this is an interpretation by the eminent archaeologist George Frizen, wonderful fellow, recently passed away. And George interpreted this site as winter's coming, it's Wyoming, it's really cold, you

kill a couple of or more immature mammoths and then you sort of stack up the meat over the course of the winter. It's going to freeze, It'll stay just fine. That's your Pleistocene refrigerator. And over the course of the winter and into the spring, as it warms up, you've got a ready source of meat for a long time. So one killer, as you say, you could come back to it at a later date. It's if the group that you're with go back to that place regularly or once or

twice a year, they could remember where it is. Oh, absolutely. In fact, there's two caches at Colby and one of them appears to have been reopened. So the other one was just, okay, fine, we got all we need. And then of course, over the next summer, it's probably going to spoil and you're not going to come back to it again. But that was certainly a handy way to exploit and take advantage of all the meat such a kill would provide. And so if we go to the end of the Ice Age, David, the big question is, what happens to the woolly mammoth?

And what are the theories as to why this great beast, this behemoth of the Ice Age, does go extinct? Primarily, let's focus first of all on the mainland continents, on let's say America, but also in Asia. Yeah. So getting back to the issue of the Pleistocene is coming to an end, environments are changing, they're changing dramatically. And one of the things that's important to stress is that the changes are not sort of uniform across time and space. Second, each species is responding individually to those changes. So it's not a sort of one size fits all. Climate change is therefore everybody goes extinct. Thirdly, extinctions is not synchronous across all these taxa. So some animals are disappearing

earlier, some are disappearing later. It all depends on their individual ecological tolerances, the thresholds that they can handle of climate change and ecological change. And so as a consequence, mammoth will survive really late, perhaps as late as maybe 4,000 years ago. That's really quite astonishing. In certain areas, areas that for all intents and purposes, the Pleistocene hasn't come to an end in terms of the environment. So for example, far northern Siberia on the Timur Peninsula, we have a record, and this

is work that was led by my colleague Eski Willerslev at the Center for Geogenetics in Copenhagen, which showed that the vegetation in this far northern portion of Siberia essentially retained that mammoth step look up until around 4,000 years ago. Not surprisingly, mammoths hung on up until 4,000 years ago. In North America, south of the ice sheets, they're gone by 10,000. So they're disappearing a lot earlier, but also in sync with significant changes in the environment and the climate of North America, which of course are not carrying over that nice Pleistocene setting that they loved so much. Is this a pattern that see? So the fauna is changing, the climate is going up and the woolly mammoths, are they almost like the biggest casualty of it amongst a

whole range of other animals that are caught up in this, in that area, let's say of America, south of the Ischides? Well, they're the heaviest that disappears, but no, they're just one of 38 different genera that will disappear. And those general range from these six, seven, eight ton animals down to a bunny, the astolian rabbit disappears at the same time. And presumably there's a tree that goes extinct, there's a bunch of birds that go extinct, some reptiles, some tortoises.

Extinctions, and this is one of the important things to stress, people always think about the end of the Pleistocene and all these big animals disappearing, and that's true. But that's only one end of a continuum of changes, of a continuum, a spectrum of extinctions that are taking place in all these different animals. some are surviving but are undergoing intense selective pressure. Okay, so they're not going extinct but they're getting hammered in other ways. So bison, giant bison of the Pleistocene within a few thousand years are basically shrinking, right, because the environment is changing, they're having to adjust, they're having to respond, and it's causing significant evolutionary change within the species. So there's a whole

lot of things that are happening that, to be honest, we don't fully understand and we cannot fully link cause to effect. We know extinctions are occurring, we know they're occurring across a wide range of animals. We know they're a part of a spectrum of changes that are taking place in the environment, but getting all of that disentangled and figuring out cause is challenging. And it's been challenging in part because for so many years, we didn't have the tools.

All we had was the fossil record. We got some bones here, we got some bones here. We have some proxies that tell us something about the climate. But with ancient DNA, which I know we've talked about before, it's so very important because with ancient DNA, we can actually see species start to decline in number. We can see their genetic diversity being reduced over time. We can see changes in their diet, changes in their ability to cope with their environment. So literally now, and for just really the last 10 years or so,

we're finally in a position to get past the impasse that has prevented us from really getting a good handle on the why question and linking cause and effect. And this is something we've definitely chatted about in both of our last two chats. This idea, as you say, it's too simple an answer to then see humans are also living here. It looks like they're eating mammoth or at least times they must therefore have a big

responsibility in the extinction of the mammoth. Yeah. So, extinctions is a global phenomenon. You see it in Australia, but much earlier. You see it in New Zealand, but much later. Not all of these cases are alike. In fact, none of these cases are alike. You've got different sets of animals, you've got different sets of environmental, ecological, and climatic contexts. And yeah, people've got different sets of environmental, ecological and climatic contexts. And yeah, people are around for all of those things, but so is climate. And so it's really important to take each of these cases individually and try and understand

what's going on and why. But also this extraordinary enclave, right? Seems that mammoths last a bit longer. I'd like you to talk a bit more about this because it is extraordinary. The story of these mammoths in the Arctic, but particularly on the islands as well as this particular peninsula you've already highlighted. Can you explain to us a bit more about the work up there, David, and how it's revealed what was happening with mammoths there and why they last longer? Yeah. So this is something that could only be done with ancient DNA because with ancient

environmental DNA, I should clarify, because we have a record, not just of mammoth DNA, but we have a detailed record of the vegetation. When you take a sample of environmental DNA from a core that you drive into the ground, you're getting not just the DNA fragments of the mammoth, but you're getting all of the DNA from all of the plants that were growing in that environment. So we've got a nice direct relationship between plant and animal. And what we see is that prior to the last glacial maximum, that is to say the depths of the most recent episode of glaciation, 25, 20,000 years ago, we've got mammoth all

around the sort of high Arctic. So if you're looking from straight down on the North Pole, you would see a circle of mammoths. Getting into the LGM, the last glacial maximum, they're still all around, but as the climate is warming and as environments are changing, mammoths are starting to disappear. And the reason they're disappearing, and we see this in the vegetation record, is that the vegetation itself, that wonderful complex of that mammoth step that they loved so much is becoming fragmented. It's disappearing. And so what's happening is that we know that there were actually multiple lineages, multiple

genetic lineages of mammoths that were scattered from far Western Europe all the way around to far Northeast Asia into the Americas. those different and widely scattered lineages of mammoth are just disappearing one by one as the environment is changing. And the last mammoth's standing are the ones who are in that far northern enclave where the vegetation is hanging on. And what makes this remarkable is that we've known for a number of years that mammoth actually survived on offshore islands in the Siberian and Beringian seas, and ultimately would go extinct later there.

And the argument there was, well, they're on these small islands, they run out of food, they run out of good water, of course they're gonna these small islands, they run out of food, they run out of good water. Of course, they're going to go extinct without humans. But on the northern Timor peninsula, they're going extinct and humans clearly could have walked out there and seen them. But they're still there and they hang on until 4,000 years ago, which of course is well after humans have reached into this portion of northern Siberia. So we have evidence of humans on that landscape

at a time when, well, the pyramids are being built. I mean, it just kind of blows your mind to think about this. There was a terrible, terrible movie about Mammoths building the pyramids that came out some years ago, 10,000 BC or something like that. In every terrible movie, maybe there's just a little grain, a little nugget of truth that mammoths were around at the time the pyramids were being built.

Very enough. Actually, I must admit, before we did this recording, one of my colleagues did mention 10,000 BC and mammoths building the pyramids. I'm glad that you mentioned it there. Very quickly, David, do we think that they die out just because of vegetation of change in that regard? That's it. That's it. There's absolutely no evidence of humans hunting these animals. They died of their own free will, as it were. Well, David, this has been great. I've only got one more question to ask you, which of course is something that you see on the news time and time again with regards to woolly mammoth DNA

and elephants today. Is it possible? Do you think that the woolly mammoth might come back? No, what you'll get is an Asian elephant with a bit of hair. No, I mean, we don't have living cells. We can't clone them. You can insert some mammoth DNA into a modern day elephant, but that's about all you're going to do. Sorry to disappoint your listeners, but they're not coming back. They're gone and they ain't coming back. Well, David, on that note, I think we'll wrap up today's episode. This has been wonderful.

As always, you've written several books, but talk to us about the book where you focus in on among many things, Ice Age America, shall we say, the humans in Ice Age America, but of course the body mammoths play a big part in that whole environment. Yeah, thanks. The book is First Peoples in a New World, Populating Ice Age America, and it takes the reader through the whole peopling process, what the environment was like, who the people were when they showed up, what they encountered, how they dealt with it and the role, if any, of large mammals like mammoth in their subsistence strategies as they dispersed out across the continent.

Brilliant. Well, David, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast today. It's my pleasure, Tristan, as always. Well, there you go. There was Professors David Meltzer and Adrian Lister talking all the things the wooly mammoth. I hope you enjoyed the episode.

This is the first in our brand new Ice Age series this February. The next episode will be released next Sunday. And we're heading down under to explore the awesome story of Ice Age Australia. Yes, that's right, in the next episode we're going to be exploring the stories of these amazing and unique Ice Age giants or megafauna that roamed Australia tens of thousands of years ago including killer wombats and massive kangaroos. You don't want to miss that one.

Thank you for listening to this episode of the ancients. Please follow this show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts at free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com slash subscribe. ACAS powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. On October 3rd, 1980, a bomb was detonated outside a synagogue on Copernic Street in Paris. Three decades later, French investigators

finally identified a suspect in the case, a Lebanese-Canadian sociology professor living a quiet life on the outskirts of Ottawa, Canada. Is Hassan Diab guilty? Can you introduce yourself? Or is he of Ottawa, Canada. Is Hassan Diab guilty? Can you introduce yourself? Or is he a scapegoat? Hassan Diab. From Canada land, this is the Kopernik Affair.

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