The answer to the question of why the mammoths became extinct was again left unanswered, despite a large-scale study with the participation of Russian scientists. Other animals, such as the hairy rhinoceros, were more fortunate: the researchers determined their fate
The debate about why almost all large animals became extinct in the last ice age lasts for decades, but so far they have not led to anything.
Some researchers insist that a large fauna was destroyed by the climate, others argue that the climate has nothing to do with it and that the animals were simply killed by people. On the one hand, most of all large animals died out where climate changes were more serious. On the other hand, the megafauna of North America and Australia began to die out exactly when people appeared there, and this also leads to suspicion.
Anyway, since the ice age began 50 thousand years ago, Eurasia has lost 36% of megafauna, and North America 72%.
And this circumstance needs to find a clear explanation.
An international team of researchers that tackled this issue published the results of their work on this subject in the latest issue of the journal Nature. The team was headed by Eske Villerslev from the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), Russian scientists from five organizations also worked on the article: the Institute of Geology of Diamond and Precious Metals (Yakutsk), the Northeast Scientific Station (Chersky village, Yakutia), the Institute of Plant and Animal Ecology (Yekaterinburg)), The Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (St. Petersburg) and the Geological Faculty of Moscow State University.
Scientists worked in many directions at once. Focusing on six species of herbivores - the hairy rhinoceros, woolly mammoth, North American wild horse, reindeer, bison and musk ox - they studied thousands of their ancient DNAs available, and mapped their prevalence across continents at different times. correlated all these data with climatic changes in their areas and with the appearance of people there, based on excavation data.
Despite the large amount of work done, the researchers did not come to any specific conclusion.
True, they found that each species (and even each population of these species) had its own destiny. So, ancient bison (they should not be confused with their surviving American relatives: those people were exterminated much later) and wild horses died out, most likely from a combination of human and climatic factors.
These factors did not affect the reindeer in any way, the Eurasian musk ox and hairy rhinoceros simply could not bear the cold weather. As for the mammoths, scientists have not been able to solve anything - the reason why they disappeared from the face of the Earth remains a mystery.
Promotional video:
Fragmentation of populations sometimes played an important role: when spreading over a large territory, species from a connected community turn into a set of small groups separated by large distances, and this, as a rule, precedes extinction. So, it was fragmentation that preceded the extinction of the musk ox in Eurasia. However, if the steppe bison became extinct precisely after fragmentation, some of them still did not die out, evolved and did not survive to this day for only a couple of centuries.
The lack of fragmentation also does not always help: genetic studies of the remains of wild horses and North American reindeer show that they practically did not separate into groups, lived together, but, as they say, they still died on the same day.
The study also calls into question the theory of the human "blitzkrieg", according to which the intersection of the habitats of a person and a large animal immediately leads to a merciless hunt for the latter and to its rapid and complete destruction. Thus, during the “good” times of the Ice Age, which occurred between 34 and 19 thousand years ago, when the cold began to recede, the Eurasian populations of hairy rhinoceroses and woolly mammoths increased quantitatively by 5-10 times. This happened at least 10 thousand years after they became acquainted with the delights of the human presence.