Information from Mammoth Site Museum
http://www.mammothsite.com

and the Swedish Museum of Natural History
http://www.nrm.se

 

 

Identified by its hairy coat and large curved tusks, the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius ) was a descendent of the steppe mammoth (Mammuthus trogontherii ). The woolly mammoth, living south of the ice sheets, ranged from northern Europe, across Siberia, and into North America. Smaller in comparison with the Columbian mammoth, the woolly stood 11 foot at the shoulder (330 cm), and weighed 6-8 tons.

Mammoths, mastodonts and elephants emerged from a group of mammals with developed trunks and tusks. This group, called proboscideans, can be traced back to 55 million years ago. Although related, mammoths, mastodonts and elephants are from different branches of this proboscidean ancestral tree. The first mammoths developed in Africa and soon ranged into Europe and Siberia. The ancestral mammoth, M. meridionalis, reached North America about 1.7 million years ago. Over thousands of years, adapting to the North American environment, the ancestral mammoth evolved to become the Columbian mammoth (the American mammoth).

The tusks of all elephant-relatives, including mammoths, are enlarged incisor teeth. They began to form at birth and continue growing throughout life. A thin layer of enamel is present initially at the tip of the tusk, but soon wears away. Most of the tusk is composed of dentin, which is deposited in layers, usually in thicknesses of 6mm or 1/4 inch a year. The annual layers of tusks are somewhat like tree rings, but the tusks outdo trees in offering the finer scale of weekly and daily records. Changes in tusk growth rate generally reflect changes in the animal's nutritional condition. Relatively thick dentin increments imply rapid growth and favorable conditions (summer months), while thinner increments imply slower growth and more stressed conditions (winter months).

The tusk in the workshop

Tusks were used for a variety of activities; such as digging up vegetation, fighting, snow plowing for food, a deterrent to predators, and a sexual attraction during mating.The flattened areas of a tusk may indicate if the mammoth was "right tusked" or "left tusked", similar to us being right or left handed! Longest tusk found at the Mammoth Site is 10 1/2 feet (315 cm) and is estimated to weigh approximately 148 lb. (66.6 kg). Longest Columbian mammoth tusk was found in Texas and is 16 feet (4.9 m) and weighs 208 lb. (93.6 kg) and is at the American Museum of Natural History.

As the climate began to warm up after 13 500 years before present, mammoths wandered northward from continental Europe indicating that they become extinct earlier in more souther regions, such as central Germany, than in norther regions, such as Fennoscandia and, particularly, Siberia. In remote areas of Siberia, the range of the mammoth was still substantial at the end of the ice age some 12000 years before present, and continued to contract in step-wise fashion after that. The last stand of the mammoth was Wrangel Island in the Arctic Sea north of Siberia, where remains of dwarfed mammoths, only some 1.8 meters high have been dated to about 4000 years before present (which is contemporaneous with the pyramids of Egypt).

The cause of the extinction of mammoths is unclear and must have been complex. Probably, their extinction was due to a combination of the crash of the mammoth steppe ecosystem at the end of the cold phase and the improved hunting techniques and increased population size of Palaeolithic man. In all likelihood, the ecosystem collapse depleted mammoth populations to the extent where it did not take particularly intense hunting pressure from man to drive them beyond the point of no return. At all event it is evident that Palaeolithic man used the products of mammoths, as building material and raw material for tools, although it is more likely that these materials were scavenged from already dead carcasses rather than taken from animals that were hunted for this purpose.

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