The extinction of mammoths took place at the border of the Upper Pleistocene and Holocene: in Europe it was about 13,000–12,000 years ago, and in northern Siberia, the final extinction of mammoths occurred much later.
Scientists believed that the first reason for the extinction of mammoths was global climatic changes, which affected the state of their food base. It has now been established that up to 12 thousand liters. ago, mammoths lived throughout the north of the Asian continent. But from about 12 thousand liters. a rapid decline in the mammoth habitat begins, possibly caused by a change in climate and vegetation under conditions of general warming, with the disappearance of landscapes suitable for mammoth habitat. Although in some areas mammoths lived at a much later time.
In addition to the warming factor, an increase in climate humidity also played a role during this period, which led to a violation of the hardness of the soil, which is necessary for the normal habitation of mammoth fauna. Thus, the extinction of mammoths occurred when the harsh climatic conditions that existed during the Late Quaternary glaciation were replaced by conditions close to modern ones.
Although climate changes occurred earlier, but mammoths could experience them in the so-called stations of experience, but during this period the influence of extermination hunts in places of local conservation of species increased to a critical level, i.e. "human factor". Therefore, one of the decisive reasons, a number of researchers call the intensification of hunting for mammoths of humans of the Late Paleolithic, whose number had significantly increased by that time. This could well lead to the death of mammoths as a species that by this time had a fairly limited range.
There is also a hypothesis of the extinction of the mammoth fauna from epizootics caused by microorganisms unknown to us. Analysis of non-frozen tissues of extinct mammoths may provide an answer to this question in the near future.
It should also be taken into account that mammoths that appeared at the end of the Eocene or the beginning of the Oligocene are one of the last branches of the order Proboscidea. The flowering of the order Proboscidae falls on the Miocene-Pliocene time, when only in the group of mastodons there were more than 300 species. Therefore, mammoths could die out as a result of a certain direction of evolution, i.e. the final stage of development of the order Proboscidea, which was replaced by representatives of the family Elephantidae, more adapted to the new environmental conditions. The development of the latter took place in the Pliocene and Pleistocene, and two modern species of elephants: African and Asian, in fact, are the last representatives of a huge group of extinct proboscis animals.
The extinction of proboscis, namely mammoths, according to the adherents of the landscape hypothesis, occurred due to the replacement of the tundra-steppes with the modern tundra, since paleontological data really indicate the absence of a continuous tundra-steppe with solid soils and steppe vegetation at the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene. Although, according to other scientists, the spread and dominance of tundra landscapes at the end of the Pleistocene was not the main reason for the extinction of the mammoth fauna.
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The sensational discovery in 1993 of the Holocene mammoths of Wrangel Island destroyed the coherent theory of their catastrophic extinction at the turn of the Pleistocene and Holocene about 10,000 years ago. Here mammoths survived 6000 years later than the fatal milestone and died out most likely as a result of inbreeding in a small population. Radiocarbon dating of the remains of Pleistocene horses, musk oxen and bison obtained in recent years convincingly proves that these species persisted in northern Siberia also 4–6 thousand years later than the Pleistocene and Holocene boundaries. The role of humans in the extinction of mammoths and other Pleistocene mammals was too overestimated, the hypothesis of the death of mammoths at the hands of humans did not stand the test of time. Despite numerous expeditions of archaeologists to the north of Siberia,no traces of numerous human tribes were found here at the beginning of the Holocene. The possibility of studying frozen organisms and tissues from the permafrost of Siberia still attracts much attention of scientists of various specialties. The implementation of such projects will make it possible to come a little closer to solving the problem of morphological and functional adaptations of large mammals to the harsh conditions of extreme cold and many months of polar night. Molecular studies of frozen mammoth muscles and skin have shown the complete futility of searching for preserved intact cells that could be used in genetic engineering. Thousands of years of tissue freezing destroys cell membranes by increasing the volume of fluid inside the cell, DNA is represented by short fragments, through which only one gene in mammoths was hardly restored.
Uncompensated extinctions at the end of the Pleistocene
Large mammals are distributed very unevenly over the surface of the continents. This is mainly due not to the current climatic and other conditions, but to the devastating extinction of large (average female weight 40 kg and more) terrestrial animals at the end of the Pleistocene-early Holocene (50-5 thousand years ago), in the smallest the least affected Africa, the greatest - America and Australia. If earlier in the Cenozoic (last 63–65 Ma) large animals usually died out with more or less equivalent ecological substitution (ie, some forms were replaced by others, ecologically similar, but more perfect), then these extinctions occurred without such a substitution; they are called uncompensated. To explain them, many global, regional and local, general (for all or many species of a particular region) and private (for certain species) models have been proposed. These models sometimes complement, sometimes exclude each other. A natural stage in the development of the problem should be the development of a synthetic concept, into which the correct thoughts of the previous models will organically fit, and their contradictions will be eliminated.
Based on the data obtained, it becomes obvious that the population of Siberian mammoths up to 12 thousand years. n. successfully survived repeated climate fluctuations and changes in vegetation zones from interglacial to glacial and vice versa. Only about 12 thousand liters. n. the irreversible reduction of the mammoth range began, which, most likely, was associated with some very specific process of disappearance of the “mammoth” landscapes. Explain the sharp reduction in the range of mammoths and their subsequent extinction in the continental part of Siberia about 9.7-9.6 thousand years. n. only general climate change towards warming fails.
To find out the most probable reasons for the extinction of mammoths in Siberia, it is necessary to reconstruct paleolandscapes for a time interval of 13–9.5 thousand years. back.