Why did the mammoths disappear?
2005/09/01 Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria
The latest research points to
the disappearance of elephants and mammoths in the Pleistocene by hungry hunters and not by climate change.
At that time there were at least a dozen species of elephants and mammoths on the continents of Africa, Eurasia and America. Currently there are only two elephant species, one in South Asia and one in Sub-Saharan Africa.
To explain why these species disappeared, there were two main theories. According to the first, at the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 thousand years ago, the climate changed sharply, destroying habitats and disappearing inadaptable species.
The other theories are considered guilty of the disappearance of hunters. The improvement of hunting techniques and tools made the human being able to destroy all elephants and mammoth groups.
Now, US Wyoming researchers have studied the two hypotheses and studied the date of the death of mammoths and elephants to find out the truth of both.
A total of 41 deposits from five continents have been analyzed. And they have discovered that man, migrating from Africa to other places, left on the road the imprint of elephants and mammoths dead. With the human colonization of a place, elephants and mammoths disappear from the fossil record.
The research concludes that if current elephants have been maintained to date, they have been preserved in places not occupied by man, such as tropical forests.
However, more research will be needed to find out why mammoths survived in some places despite the human presence, and why many elephants today live in places of easy acceptance, such as African savannah.
