Mammoths

The processes leading up to species extinctions are typically characterized by prolonged declines in population size and geographic distribution, followed by a phase in which populations are very small and may be subject to intrinsic threats, including loss of genetic diversity and inbreeding [1]. However, whether such genetic factors have had an impact on species prior to their extinction is unclear [2, 3]; examining this would require a detailed reconstruction of a species' demographic history as well as changes in genome-wide diversity leading up to its extinction. Here, we present high-quality complete genome sequences from two woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius). The first mammoth was sequenced at 17.1-fold coverage and dates to ∼4,300 years before present, representing one of the last surviving individuals on Wrangel Island. The second mammoth, sequenced at 11.2-fold coverage, was obtained from an ∼44,800-year-old specimen from the Late Pleistocene population in northe...

The Gravettian site of Předmostí I in the central Moravian Plain has yielded a rich and diverse large mammal fauna dated around 25-27,000 14C years BP (ca. 29,500–31,500 cal BP). This fauna includes numerous carnivores (cave lion, wolf, brown bear, polar fox, wolverine) and herbivores (reindeer, large bovine, red deer, muskox, horse, woolly rhinoceros, woolly mammoth) whose trophic position could be reconstructed using stable isotopic tracking (δ13C, δ15N, δ34S) of bone collagen (n=63). Among large canids, two morphotypes, “Pleistocene wolves” and “Palaeolithic dogs”, were considered, and two human bones attributed to the Gravettian assemblage of Předmostí I were also sampled. The trophic system around the Gravettian settlement of Předmostí I showed the typical niche partitioning among herbivores and carnivores seen in other mammoth-steppe contexts. The contribution of the analyzed prey species to the diet of the predators, including humans, was evaluated using a Bayesian mixing model (SIAR). Lions included great amounts of reindeer/muskox and possibly bison in their diet, while Pleistocene wolves were more focused on horse and possibly mammoth. Strong reliance on mammoth meat was found for the human of the site, similarly to previously analyzed individuals from other Gravettian sites in Moravia. Interestingly, the large canids interpreted as “Palaeolithic dogs” had a high proportion of reindeer/muskox in their diet, while consumption of mammoth would be expected from the availability of this prey especially in case of close interaction with humans. The peculiar isotopic composition of the Palaeolithic dogs of Předmostí I may indicate some control of their dietary intake by Gravettian people, who could have use them more for transportation than hunting purpose.

Studies of the patterned effects of human and non-human utilization of recent elephant carcasses provide context for understanding how similar processes in the past affected mammoth bones. This information might explain similarities and differences among mammoth sites and assemblages in different times and places in prehistory, such as the Pavlovian phase of early Gravettian in central Europe and the Clovis era in North America.  Both Pavlovian and Clovis people often left behind sites dominated by proboscidean bones, but appear to have made very different uses of mammoth carcasses.

Large mammalian terrestrial herbivores, such as elephants, have dramatic effects on the ecosystems they inhabit and at high population densities their environmental impacts can be devastating. Pleistocene terrestrial ecosystems included a much greater diversity of megaherbivores (e.g., mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths) and thus a greater potential for widespread habitat degradation if population sizes were not limited. Nevertheless, based on modern observations, it is generally believed that populations of megaherbivores (>800 kg) are largely immune to the effects of predation and this perception has been extended into the Pleistocene. However, as shown here, the species richness of big carnivores was greater in the Pleistocene and many of them were significantly larger than their modern counterparts. Fossil evidence suggests that interspecific competition among carnivores was relatively intense and reveals that some individuals specialized in consuming megaherbivores. To...

The only certain evidence for prehistoric human hunting of horse and camel in North America occurs at the Wally's Beach site, Canada. Here, the butchered remains of seven horses and one camel are associated with 29 nondiagnostic lithic artifacts. Twenty-seven new radiocarbon ages on the bones of these animals revise the age of these kill and butchering localities to 13,300 calibrated y B.P. The tight chronological clustering of the eight kill localities at Wally's Beach indicates these animals were killed over a short period. Human hunting of horse and camel in Canada, coupled with mammoth, mastodon, sloth, and gomphothere hunting documented at other sites from 14,800-12,700 calibrated y B.P., show that 6 of the 36 genera of megafauna that went extinct by approximately 12,700 calibrated y B.P. were hunted by humans. This study shows the importance of accurate geochronology, without which significant discoveries will go unrecognized and the empirical data used to build models...

The causes of megafaunal extinctions in North America have been widely debated but remain poorly understood. Mammoths (Mammuthus spp.) in the American Southwest were hunted by Clovis people during a period of rapid climate change, just before the regional onset of Younger Dryas cooling and mammoth extirpation. Thus, these mammoths may provide key insights into late Pleistocene extinction processes. Here we reconstruct the seasonal diet and climatic conditions experienced by mammoths in the San Pedro Valley of Arizona, using the carbon (13C/12C) and oxygen (18O/16O) isotope compositions of tooth enamel. These records suggest that Clovis mammoths experienced a warm, dry climate with sufficient summer rainfall to support seasonal C4 plant growth. Monsoon intensity may have been reduced relative to the preceding time period, but there is no isotopic evidence for severe drought. However, it is possible that the “Clovis drought”, inferred from stratigraphic evidence, occurred suddenly at the end of the animals’ lives and thus was not recorded in the enamel isotopic compositions. Unlike mammoths that lived before the Last Glacial Maximum, Clovis mammoths regularly increased C4 grass consumption during summer, probably seeking seasonally green grasslands farther from the river valley. This predictable seasonal behavior may have made mammoths easier to locate by Clovis hunters. Furthermore, Clovis mammoths probably had no previous experience of such sudden climatic change as is believed to have occurred at the time of their extinction.

Pathological change on mammoth bones is a difficult and scarcely explored subject. Among the most characteristic pathologies of mammoths are the holes and hollows in the spinous processes of vertebrae. Although they are rarely mentioned in the literature, they appear often in bone materials. Possible causes for these changes previously proposed by other authors include: genetic trait, abnormal ossification, and Kashin-Beck disease. None of these propositions have been explored or explained more widely. The present study was conducted on mammoth bones from some of the biggest mammoth bone assemblages in Central Europe: Krak ow Spadzista, Milovice I, and P redmostí. They are located close to archaeological sites related to Gravettian culture. This vast amount of material enabled us to track the way this kind of mammoth bone pathology not only developed but also healed. For the first time, the changes in the spinous processes of mammoth vertebrae have been divided into classes indicating the stages of their development. The plausible etiology of the holes and hollows as well as other minor changes (before now not even mentioned in the literature) in mammoth vertebrae spinous processes is explained. The main cause seems to be the disorder of calcium and phosphate metabolism. It is suggested that the short-term climate changes had a significant impact on mammoth condition and on this kind of bone changes. The bone changes connected with metabolism disorder point to the decreased physical condition of the animals. Therefore another important question arises e how did the Gravettian hunters pick their prey? Did they choose sick individuals?

Recently there has been growing interest in applying the most advanced embryological tools, particularly cloning, to bring extinct species back to life, with a particular focus on the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius). Mammoth's bodies found in the permafrost are relatively well preserved, with identifiable nuclei in their tissues. The purpose of this chapter is to review the literature published on the topic, and to present the strategies potentially suitable for a mammoth cloning project, with a frank assessment of their feasibility and the ethical issues involved.

Tracks and trackways of a range of Pleistocene megafauna can be found in White Sands National Monument, New Mexico, U.S.A. These tracks occur is several forms, not all of which are visible and some of which are only intermittently visible depending on lighting and moisture conditions. Here we present the result of a successful test of cesium vapor magnetometry to detect a known Columbian mammoth trackway. This initial test found that not only the known mammoth tracks were easily detected by the method, but that the tracks of additional species, though not visible to the eye, were detected in the vicinity of the mammoth tracks, including likely giant sloth tracks. Our initial results indicate that resolution may be suitable to distinguish between the tracks of various species, including possibly humans which are known archaeologically to have overlapped temporally with these species in the southwestern U.S. This preliminary result has immediate implications for the detection and documentation of Pleistocene track sites, and further refinement of the procedure is planned in the coming months.

This article unveils imagery that seems intended to be recognized in phases from such sites as Font-de-Gaume, Laugerie-Basse, Isturitz, Saint-Cirq-du-Bugue, and Guy-Martin, after describing the first Paleolithic sculpture of an animal reported in the Ile-de-France. These include:
1) The extended panel of Ségognole 3. The grotto is known for a vulva between 2 faint horses, but its largest graphic element is a groove that has been explained away as a “border”. The groove is actually the caudal line of a 1.9 meter-long bas-relief of a bison that has been overlooked because of the failure to apply the same conventions of the vulva – figurative realism, monumentality, and the use of natural forms – to the engraved line, although it is identical in manufacture. The wisent composed by natural relief accentuated by incising, flaking, and polishing confirms that the ensemble is Paleolithic.
2) A survey of Paleolithic parietal images whose contours are defined like the Ségognole bison by natural relief uncovered over 120 examples. This revealed that mammoths and bison were illustrated far more commonly this way than other species. Such statistical analyses of how imagery relates to rock morphology provides a new way of grouping Paleolithic art and opens another window into makers’ intentions.  It also raises the related phenomenon of imagery that played upon similarities between the contours of bison and mammoths.
3) The “mammoth” on the Grotte de Canecaude spear-thrower, which has one eye above a crescent that makes it read as a tusk and another eye below the same crescent that makes it read as a bison’s horn. The sculpture is one of several images that combine mammoths and bison in some of the oldest known figure-ground illusions.
4) The art of Font-de-Gaume. Numerous paintings blend aspects of mammoths and bison, extending the theme of Paleolithic figure-ground illusions and making the relationship between the "armor-headed" herbivores one of the cave’s leitmotifs.
5) The Roc-aux-Sorciers. The juxtaposition of the generative portion of a woman’s body with one of the two herbivores identified as having some equivalency in Magdalenian art turns out to be a re-current theme in northern France, where it is also seen at Guy-Martin and Ségognole 3. Links are established between these northern friezes and the Grotte des Fieux, Grotte du Sorcier, and Abri Reverdit.
6) Guy-Martin’s “obstetric” frieze. The panel uses a compositional technique similar to Cubism – building a “de-composed” horse, for example, out of figurative, natural and schematic elements. Another example of the panel’s “interactive” technique involves a single crescent that is positioned to be read 4 ways: as one horse’s tail, another horse’s mane, an ibex’s backward horn, and an auroch’s forward horn. 
7) The “Femme au Renne”. Several Magdalenian engravings of “women” are re-examined in light of such findings of polysemic density, leading to the discovery of more secondary imagery. This re-examination shows that “la femme au renne” contains at least 4 degrees of engraving, ranging from the pregnant female under the herbivore to such lightly incised details as hocks that transform the figure into a therianthropomorph, 2 outer “pregnancies”, an umbilical snake within the over-arching external pregnancies, and even a “spectral” baby whose head is formed by a circle of light crosses.
8) Similarly, the “women” and bison on a wand from Isturitz share such traits as hooves and hackles.
9) The Grotte du Sorcier “anthropomorph”. The “sorcerer” turns out to have both short hoofed and longer human legs and rounded buttocks enclosed within a herbivore’s rectilinear rump. The figure can also be read as being juvenile or female, rather than just as an ithyphallic male.
These analyses coalesce into a new interpretation of the relationship between some Paleolithic feminine imagery and symbolically important prey species: a “prey-mother” hypothesis. Although the theory is based on internal evidence that “women” were repeatedly associated with herbivores through shared traits and connections, it is also in keeping with female roles in glacial subsistence systems where there is little for women to gather for much of the year and fitted clothing is essential.
Frequently, one female role in such “hunter-sewer” economies is to increase the chance of a hunter’s success by providing him with animal qualities. Several polar cultures believe women do this while sewing clothing and camouflage by synthesizing the powers of the species whose hides compose the garments, thereby imbuing hunters with qualities needed for success. Another common role is for wives to enter trances in which they “become” prey and lull it into coming within range. A third is to reconcile hunters with animals they have killed by “feeding” dead animals like guests and inviting them upon their “departure” to return home as living creatures. “Whale-wife-mothers” among the Koryaks and Nootka, for example, do this by initiating the regeneration of whales. All three roles involve beliefs in a woman’s maternal capacity not only to give birth to humans but also to morph into, control and generate socially important prey.
At the heart of the polysemic Paleolithic imagery examined here there probably lay equally layered beliefs concerning the relationship between women and animals. The repeated association of the generative portion of women’s bodies with large herbivores suggests that some Paleolithic societies believed that women had the capacity to generate and intercede among humans and their prey - making them the sex that spiritually controlled the food supply.

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Until recently, the general view of archaeologists was that southern Scandinavia was uninhabited during the last ice age, the Weichselian glaciation. It was thought that humans arriving from south would have met a wall of ice if they tried to penetrate into the area. Recent climate reconstructions and glaciological data, combined with recent faunal finds from the adjacent North Sea sector, promote the idea of a much more moderate and prosperous landscape with large, now submerged, plains accessible. Then this paper argues that large parts of the South Scandinavian North Sea sector were actually inhabitable during most of this glacial period, with extensive ice-free coastal zones even during the Last Glacial Maximum. It is difficult to believe that humans, already well-documented in the adjacent land areas, should not have known to inhabit and exploit such a rich resource zone. In addition to the paleoenvironmental data, ethnoarchaeological evidence is used to document that it was no problem for humans to kill large animals such as mammoths as some researchers have maintained. Furthermore, findings from excavations of mammoth-hunter sites, are used to argue that the large quantities of megafaunal remains fished up from the North Sea in recent years should be seriously considered as representing settlement material associated with mammoth-hunter camps dating from the second half of the Weichsel Glacial Stage. The central question is whether these North Sea faunal remains represent sites similar to the mammoth-hunter camps known from other parts of Europe and from Siberia? If that is the case, the Cultural Heritage management is confronted with a hitherto unrecognised problem.

This is an updated list of >170 late Quaternary proboscidean sites with probable/possible evidence for human involvement. The sites were compiled from refereed and unrefereed publications and communications from colleagues. It is a work in progress and not claimed to be exhaustive. Also presented are summaries of important sites and discussions of patterns in contexts, inventories, dating, and other variables. Additions and corrections are invited. It consists of 41 text pages, three tables, 14 numbered figures and three unnumbered illustrations, and 519 references.

This Table lists ~150 late Quaternary proboscidean sites that have certain or possible traces of hominin utilization, specifically evidence for killing, scavenging, and butchering, along with a sample of references. The sites are arranged by world landmasses. This list is far from complete. I welcome suggested additions and corrections.

This article is an unique, previously undocumented history of the construction of  the Alligator-Pungo Canal, a little known segment of  the inland waterway canal, between the Albemarle Sound (Alligator River) and the Pamlico Sounds in tidewater eastern North Carolina. The inland waterway system started as a war defensive canal first proposed when the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers  presented plans to the U. S. Congress for an inland waterway from Norfolk, Virginia, through the Dismal Swamp,and thence south. Such canal building did not start until after the Great War. Construction of the Alligator-Pungo canal commenced in late 1922, and continued until 1935.

This is part 2 of a technical report providing more information about a 24,000 year old mammoth site in Maryland, USA, and challenging a recent re-interpretation of bone fragmentation at the site (Karr 2015, in the journal Quaternary International vol. 361). The re-interpretation contends that the mammoth bones had been defleshed, disarticulated, broken, and dispersed by carnivores and other taphonomic processes over a considerable period of time before burial. Some assertions advanced to support this claim are inappropriate, such as a reference to results of experiments on cattle bones placed in water, or they are faulty, such as reliance on an early sketch of few bones. Still other assertions are based on inadequate evidence, specifically a single hole in a bone (mis)identified as a carnivore tooth puncture. No supportable evidence exists that carnivores affected the bones. Also, no valid evidence exists for any other inferred taphonomic disturbances before burial, such as animal trampling or subaerial weathering, which would be discernible if there had been lengthy bone exposure before burial. The sediment enclosing the bones was anaerobic until digging began on a drainage channel in sediments over the bonebed, after which oxidation and mineral reactions in the no longer anoxic sediments caused patchy staining and crust formation on bone surfaces. Both before and during this subsurface process, some bones were probably deformed or crushed by heavy equipment. Impact marks and scratches on surfaces of some spirally fractured bones can be seen to penetrate through stain patches or expose unstained cortical tissue, or the marks partly removed stained surface layers, indicating they are post-burial. Curvilinear fracture fronts on some specimens are contiguous with more linear or irregular fracture fronts, suggesting that ancient bones which are not fresh can still spirally fracture in some cases. The cause of the animal’s death is unknown. One rib has a midshaft swelling that may be a healed fracture; there are no clear signs of acute or chronic disease. The animal may have died after being stuck in the dense Cretaceous sediment, or its carcass may have been deposited and buried during a flood event.

This revised version of the original paper is a first description of excavations and a brief presentation of early analytical results from a mammoth bone site that was salvaged by staff and volunteers from the Smithsonian Institution in 1982. The partial skeleton of an LGM Mammuthus columbi was recovered from alluvial sediments over a Cretaceous deposit exposed within a drainage ditch near the Capital Beltway in Maryland. Direct radiometric dating of bone and ivory place the age (calibrated) at about 24 k yrs BP. The mandibular dentition indicates the mammoth was in Laws AEY age group XI/XIa (~12-15 years old) at death. The bones are well preserved; partly semi-articulated, unweathered, and unaffected by carnivores, although some elements had been fragmented under the weight of heavy construction equipment while still in the anaerobic sedimentary matrix, as evidenced by stratigraphic deformation. Recently it has been claimed that bone fragmentation was done by humans in antiquity, but there is no solid evidence for that possibility. It has also been claimed that carnivores affected the bones, but the evidence for that is likewise very weak. This first report of the site provides basic information, a bone map, stratigraphic profiles, and photographs of the salvage activity at the site and some recovered materials. The site will be discussed by G. Haynes at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, in April. The publication of further details and analysis is planned.