Scientists still cannot name the exact reason for the extinction of mammoths. According to one hypothesis, these giant animals that lived in North America could have been completely exterminated by representatives of one of the earliest known North American human populations
Some researchers believe that representatives of the megafauna could become extinct due to the gradual reduction in habitat after the warming of the climate caused by the alternation of the ice age and interglacial. There is also a hypothesis of a sharp extinction of all North American mammoths, which, judging by the damage to the discovered animal bones, could have been killed by fragments of a comet that exploded in the sky.
However, Jacqueline Gill of the University of Wisconsin in Madison refutes all these versions, arguing that only a combination of several unfavorable factors could destroy the giants of the Stone Age. The researcher analyzed the sediments of Lake Appleman, Indiana, which contain spores of the fungus Sporormiella. The life cycle of this fungus takes place mostly in the intestines of large herbivores, where it gets along with the vegetation they absorb. After passing through the intestines of mammoths, this fungus again appeared in the environment along with animal manure, where it multiplied with spores.
Based on this knowledge, scientists concluded that the more Sporormiella spores are contained in lake sediments dating back to a particular period, the more numerous were the populations of mammoths and other large herbivores in this region at that time.
After processing the data obtained, paleontologists came to the conclusion that the extinction of mammoths began in the period from 14.7 to 13.8 thousand years ago and was in full swing 13.5 thousand years ago. After this tragic process ended, forests replaced the herbaceous territories in which the giants lived, as evidenced by the sharply increasing amounts of soot and ash in the later bottom sediments.
Such a gradual extinction of the mammoth population suggests that they could not have been killed by an exploding comet overnight. In addition, scientists doubt the version about the reduction of the habitat, since for this, the warming of the climate should have caused a change in the types of vegetation in the habitat of animals. As it turns out now, this happened only after the complete extinction of animals, RIA Novosti notes.