Mammoths could die due to their own weight. This version was expressed by scientists from the Scientific Center for the Study of the Arctic.
“After the Ice Age, at the turn of the Holocene and the Pleistocene, natural conditions changed dramatically,” says Natalya Fedorova, head of the archeology sector of the Scientific Center for Arctic Research. - The soil was moistened, swamps appeared. For mammoths, they could become a real death trap.
According to scientists, lighter animals - horses, bison, reindeer - were able to adapt to the changed conditions. But much heavier ones - mammoths, rhinos, cave bears - suffered a sad fate: they died.
Mammoths moved along the hard, dry tundra steppe from Taimyr to Western Siberia. Scientists managed to prove this, because the mammoth found in the north of the Gydan Peninsula had the remains of larch in the stomach, although it does not grow there. The moisture content of the soil did not allow mammoths to "graze" in these areas.
The scientists' version is confirmed by a number of facts. In particular, the fact that near Khanty-Mansiysk in the town of Lugovskoye twenty years ago a whole cemetery of 30 mammoths was found. At the same time, almost all of them drowned, with the exception of one who died as a result of an injury, apparently inflicted on him by a human hunter.
The remains of the mammoth Lyuba.
The world-famous baby mammoth Lyubu, found in the upper reaches of the Yuribey River in Yamal, suffered the same fate - she drowned and suffocated in a clay mass.
Today, there are dozens of versions of the death of mammoths, but scientists have not come to the final one. Earlier, in an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta, Pavel Kosintsev, a senior researcher at the Institute of Plant and Animal Ecology of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, expressed a version based on which mammoths could die as a result of a lack of one of the important components in food. He was not to be missed due to the changed food supply of animals.
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