
DNA revealed the woolly mammoth's fate, and what it teaches us today - Hooke
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/dna-reveal-woolly-mammoth-fate-beth-shapiro/
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sradman
Original 2016 paper [1]. After the last glacial maximum, wooly mammoths went
extinct on mainland Asia and North America about 10 kya but mammoths survived
longer on two isolated islands.

This paper explains the extinction of the penultimate population 5.6 kya on
St. Paul Island, Alaska (once part of Beringia). The extinction was caused by
drought* conditions.

I wonder if this drought was specific to the current interglacial period or
whether it is a cyclic event that occurred in each of the recent 100-kyr
interglacials.

[1]
[https://www.pnas.org/content/113/33/9310](https://www.pnas.org/content/113/33/9310)

* Edit: corrected mispelling, thanks richrichardsson

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larschdk
kya?

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bcraven
It should technically just be "ka" which stands for kiloannum following ISO
80000-3:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year#Kiloannum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year#Kiloannum)

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rustybelt
This article addresses how the very last surviving mammoths died out due to
climate change on an isolated island in the Bering Sea. I think it's accepted
at this point that mainland mammoths were hunted to extinction by plucky and
clever bands of homo sapiens.

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sradman
> mainland mammoths were hunted to extinction

Beth Shapiro's work on the _Rise and Fall of the Beringian Steppe Bison_ [1]
supports an alternative narrative. Though I'm not sure why the last glacial
termination was worse for large steppe fauna compared to previous ones. Maybe
sapiens tipped the balance for a number of species already teetering on the
brink of extinction every 100 kyr.

[1] [https://ir.lib.sfu.ca/item/15088](https://ir.lib.sfu.ca/item/15088)

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chrisco255
The Younger Dryas saw temps swing from glacial temps to interglacial temps
back to glacial temps before going back up to present-day Holocene temps:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas)

Those kind of oscillations in climate had to be massively disruptive for all
life on earth.

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gpapilion
Not about mammoth dna, but about dna from organisms in a lake. I thought this
would focus more on genetic isolation, but it’s more about how resource
isolation can cause a extinction.

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sradman
It is not only about mammoth DNA but it was part of the mix which allowed them
to determine exactly when mammoths disappeared (other proxies correlated to
the timeline).

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ur-whale
Before you go read the article: this explains how _one_ _isolated_ group of
Mammoths became extinct.

Unless I missed something, it doesn't explain how they all disappeared.

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mattkrause
When the St. Paul mammoths died off, the population on the mainland had
already been extinct for several thousand years, so the title is true, albeit
somewhat trivially.

(There was also a contemporary population on Wrangel Island that lasted
another thousand years or so, though they were likely hunted to extinction).

