Mammoths have been present in North America longer than expected

It is possible that woolly mammoths roamed the northwest of the North American continent about 5,700 years ago – thousands of years later than the latest fossil remains. Even wild horses probably lived in this area at this time. This is the result of a working group led by Tyler Murchie and Hendrik Poiner of McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, evaluating traces of DNA from permafrost soils.

what the team now does for their study In »Nature Communications« Published, it has collected drill cores in a field near the Klondike River in the Yukon Territory of Canada. From the sediments of the permafrost, the researchers filtered out DNA fragments from the period 30,000 to 4,000 years ago. Using gene snippets, they identified several animal and plant species such as mammoths, bison and wild horses, as well as some predators such as gray wolves and martens.

Megafauna populations began to decline about 20,000 years ago, and woolly mammoths in particular appear to be declining rapidly. The animal population declined during the Ice Age around 14,000 to 10,000 years ago when the climate changed. The vegetation changed significantly during this phase. Meadows gave way to bushes. However, in their samples, the research group continued to search for some genetic remains of mammoths and wild horses. The last fossils are about 5700 years old, while the youngest fossils are about 7000 years old.

“It is possible that smaller populations may have survived in distant niches, a size too small for the fossil record,” the scientists wrote in their study. The fact that the megafauna disappeared was probably due to several factors. Most researchers attribute this to climate change or the appearance of the first humans on the American continent. Isolated populations of woolly mammoths have been identified elsewhere: the mammoths lived on Russian Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean and on St. Paul’s Island in the Bering Sea between 4000 and 5500 years ago, respectively. The two places were once cut off from the mainland by rising sea water.