Bringing Back the Dead: Mammoths and Mastodons pt. 1

8,000 years ago, people warming themselves by the fire, did one last check. Their knapped stone spearpoints were lashed solidly to their spears, but this was a last resort. The fire itself would do most of the work, and the pits they had dug nearby. In the distance, scouts were tracking the large herd of woolly pachyderms, (there were many varieties and I don’t want to settle one which one.) When one of the scouts came back with word that the herd was on the move, the hunters grabbed their torches and set out.

Twenty-four strong, most of them had done this before the elders watched and guided those newer to the hunt. They converged on the herd of hairy elephants, brandishing fire to spook an elderly cow who had been lagging behind. The hunters spread out, cutting her off from the rest of the herd, and aligning themselves to corral the frightened creature in the direction they wanted her to go. She easily outweighed the whole group, and her tusks were stronger weapons than any they carried, but the fire terrified her. She let out a frantic trumpet, and her herd turned towards her, but the hunters were prepared. Some of them had formed a defensive line, holding torches aloft to keep herd at bay.

The hunters defensive line charged, and to the herd they must have appeared like an advancing wildfire, because the lone cow’s fearful trumpets were taken up by the group, which turned and began to run, stampeding away from their isolated companion. Meanwhile, the elderly cow tried to run as well, following the path the hunters wanted her to take. She was afraid of the fire, afraid of being left behind, and in the end, the fear did not help. In panic, she did not notice the pit trap ahead of her and one more step in the wrong direction sent her careening into the ground. Her body was unable to cope with the fall, and something broke. The hunters closed in, using their spears to finish off the weakened and injured animal.

It sounds harsh, but for those hunters, the end of one life meant that theirs were prolonged. The meat would feed them all for a while. The bones would make useful tools and adornments. And her thick, woolly fur would help keep them warm in the cold. Throughout history, hunter societies have paid thanks to the animals they killed, the resource which have provided them such bounty, and this time was no different. They gave thanks for the bounty.

Throughout the world, for thousands of years, hunts like this happened. Humans were not always as lucky. Sometimes the Mammoths/Mastodons broke free and trampled people along the way. Sometimes the hunts went better for the humans, and more than one mammoth was killed leading to more resources. This wasn’t the only hunting method used. (Just the only example I looked up and am sourcing in this blog. Read more about this hunting practice: here) And there is no doubt many a man and Mammoth interaction also happened without hunting happening. But there is enough evidence to show that man hunted both Woolly Mammoth and Mastodon as far back as 15,000 years ago, (if not earlier) and they continued hunting them up and until they were gone.

Before I talk more about that, lets get a naming question down first:

Woolly Mammoths and Mastodons are different groups of animals with far too complex a classification background for me to go into, so we’ll stick with a simplified: Mammoths are the younger taxa and the more direct relatives of modern Elephants, and Mastodons are their more distant cousins. Mastodons arose as early as 30 million years ago, and mammoths split off about 700-400 thousand years ago.) The entire group of woolly elephants survived then for nearly 30 million years, only to then go extinct.

(anyway, a lot of the lazier research in this blog comes from the Wikipedia articles on Mammoths and Mastodons which I link to.)

Mammoth Cave is not notable for it’s Mammoths. (It doesn’t have any.) But here’s a bad, and tiny drawing of a mammoth in a cave.)

Now, onto the real question:

When and why?

Mammoths spread out from Africa a long, long, time ago reaching all the way across the world to South America. A lot of time passed, and the group diversified, some died out, others continued to grow and change until… the end began. The last known evidence of Columbian Mammoths (a tricky name considering they also lived in North America) comes from ~11,500 years ago. The American Mastodon seems to have died out ~10,000 years ago. At about the same time, the Siberian herds of Woolly Mammoth disappeared from the mainland of Eurasia. However, populations of mammoths on the isolated islands of Saint Paul in the Bering Strait, and Wrangle Island near Siberia persisted until ~5,600 years ago, and ~4,000 years ago respectively. This means that the last living woolly mammoths were hanging out, and dying out on an island while the Egyptians were building the pyramids.*

(This does not mean that mammoths helped build the pyramids as some ‘historical’ channels have suggested. Source: look at a globe, St. Paul Island, and Wrangle Island are nearly half a world away from Egypt. Meanwhile, there’s a pachyderm much more suited to the environment of Egypt, (which is still alive today and also much closer to Egypt. **)

**(I’m also not saying that the Egyptians used African Elephants to build the pyramids, just noting that it would have been really stupid to suggest that people crossed half the world to pick up a few hairy elephants not adapted to equatorial conditions just ship them to an environment where they would bake in the heat and die before they could get any work done, when there was a much more local group of elephants nearby who wouldn’t have died of heat exhaustion.)

Anyway. The point is that woolly elephants, of one sort or another, lasted for a long time. Before modern man all the way up into our (admittedly ancient) history. But about 4,000 years ago, the mammoths breathed their last. They are survived by Asian Elephants, and more distantly by African Elephants, and even more distantly by the Rock Hyrax (it’s also called the Rock Rabbit, but it’s not a rabbit,) and manatees. (barely) They will be missed.

Now, the question of what happened to the last populations of mammoths has a relatively obvious answer. The island populations were doomed due to a mixture of population collapse because of inbreeding, (they were stuck on islands,) and changing climate/diminishing resources. But what about the earlier, near-extinction of the Mammoths and Mastodons circa 10,000 years ago? What did in the mainland branches of woolly elephants?

There’s an ongoing debate about what caused the extinction of woolly mammoths and mastodons. As highlighted by the story above, an up-and-coming, tool-using, and fire-wielding species was spreading around the globe. These new bums were wildly unspecialized. They weren’t great at any one thing, but they had two distinct advantage over most species, a bigger brain and thumbs. These helped them make tools, communicate, and plan, which allowed them to become good at a lot of different things. This included hunting creatures way above their weight-class.

Humans hunted Mammoths and Mastodon’s. The evidence is in the bones left behind. (they also hunted other mega-fauna but this article is about the M&M’s.) Is it possible that human hunting drove all but isolated mammoth populations to extinction? Some articles seem to think so. Like this one.

However, coinciding with the spread of humans, drastic changes were happening to the environment 20-10 thousand years ago. Glaciers were melting, swamps and tundra were growing, as were massive arboreal forests. (these forests were bad for the Mammoths, who were mostly grass grazers, compared to the Mastodons who liked to eat pine trees.) Chill winds blew in around the arctic, colder even than a mammoth could tolerate. So perhaps it was climate change which froze out the mammoths and mastodons, as suggested by this article here.

Humans might have contributed to this early climate change. Or, more likely, they benefited from it. (Not so much the extra cold, but the spreading of many new environments which helped humans to spread out.) But we’ll leave that aside for now.

Did humans kill off the mammoths and mastodons, or were these creatures doomed by dramatic shifts in the climate which happened too swiftly for them to adapt?

There’s some evidence for both scenarios, and even the articles which claim to have answers to the question: “What actually killed the mammoths?” usually end up summarizing that it was a combination of both factors, with either climate change providing the fatal blow, and humans hastening the inevitable, or the reverse.

Does the answer matter for what I want to discuss? Maybe? Mostly, I just think that it’s an interesting question, and a fun angle though which to investigate the lives, and the end, of a group of animals which have captured many hearts and minds.

Because: Mammoths and Mastodons have definitely found their place in many a heart and mind. Outside of dinosaurs, they are probably the most popular extinct group of animals. (maybe megalodon beats them during shark week every year.) There are many reasons for this.

1.      Fur is cool. Stick fur on an elephant and you have a cooler elephant. Maybe it’s only because it makes them different, perhaps in an alternate universe where the woolly creatures survived and their less hairy counterparts went extinct, we’d be equally fascinated with out modern hair-challenged elephants and rhinos, as we are with woolly elephants and woolly rhinos. But at least in this universe, you put giant arctic surviving fur onto a contemporary mammal, and it’s instantly more interesting. Woolly elephants > elephants. Woolly Rhinos > Rhinos. Woolly wolves…. well, there are only really two good examples of this hairy principle, but I think they both work.

2.      They had a ‘groundswell’ of early popularity which arose alongside the dinosaurs. (this is a pun, which doesn’t even pay off in this first blog.) The race to discover and understand the remains of extinct creatures really developed throughout the 18th and 19th century, but it kicked off as early as the late 17th century when researchers began to hone in on the idea that the remains they were finding from Siberia, New York, Big Bone Lick Kentucky, (yes that is the name, and I do not apologize for being the most specific about this location when the Wikipedia article literally mentions the locations of early discoveries in this way remains recovered in: ‘New York in the Huson River Valley’, from ‘Western Siberia’ (for all the good that descriptor does, and then it specifies Big Bone Lick, by name, providing the first location I can cite specifically and send people to, learn more here.

(anyway) This early popularity came alongside a developing understanding that some organisms which had existed, might no longer exist. Thus Mammoths and Mastodons were part of the early evidence humans had to help them decipher a now obvious phenomena. Living things can go Extinct. But more importantly to a conversation about M&M’s popularity, is the fact that they were part of a growing trend of paleontological popularity and as early paleontologist began to race to collect, research and understand all manner of organism, from all eras of life The publications about mammoth fossils would have come alongside reports of dinosaurs, mososaurs, cave bears, and many more non-contemporaneous animals, and still exist in the public consciousness that way to this day.

3.      Early founder popularity. Thomas Jefferson was known to like paleontology, and he heavily supported the collection and research of fossil organisms from the US. Many public figures like him helped to push some knowledge of these ancestral creatures to the public.

4.      Mammoths and Mastodons, however fleetingly, were our contemporaries. This means 2 things. 1st. There are a lot more of their remains to go around. Unlike Dinosaurs, where At least 65 million years have passed. There have only been a few thousand-a few hundred thousand years since the mammoths roamed. Meaning a lot less time for their preserved bones to have been destroyed. There are literally entire groups of dinosaurs we will never know about simply because all of the rocks containing them were eroded away, and their bones were reduced to dust. Meanwhile, places like the Labrea Tar Pits, and Big Bone Lick still exist and preserve many fossils. As do many places in and around the arctic circle where mammoth and mastodon fossils have been discovered in permafrost, and even frozen directly in ice.  (this was a very long paragraph to say that there are a lot of mammoth fossils out there.) Here’s an interesting compendium of articles about studies of human interaction with mammoths. (I’ve only read these abstracts because I do not have free access to the articles but they are all interesting.)

2nd. Because they are contemporaries to humans, we have a more direct link to them. Petroglyphs with mammoths, mammoth tusks with engravings, and even mammoths in myth and legend including myths from indigenous peoples in Siberia who say that mammoths were the creatures who dug the earth out of the ocean. (many more of these found on Wikipedia, do your own deep dive.)

This popularity has lead to some confusion.

Mammoths and Mastodons are often grouped in with dinosaurs, mostly because they make good plastic toys to add to those little packs you can buy for a few bucks in most toy aisles. They were represented in the first Power Rangers lineup along with the sabretooth tiger, even though every other Zord was a Mesozoic animal. (pterosaurs are not dinosaurs.) And even modern natural history museums contribute to this confusion, grouping the fossils of mammalian megafauna deceptively close to their Mesozoic fossils. (but where else are you going to put your fossils?)

This can be confusing, because Mammoths and Mastodons were, at least for a while, our contemporaries, while Dinosaurs (not counting birds) never were. (at least a 30-million-year separation between the last non-avian dinosaur and the earliest hairy elephant, and 65 million years and some change since the extinction of the mammoths and dinosaurs.) but sliding past that confusion. There’s another massive distinction between Mammoths & Mastodons, and Dinosaurs.

Namely, we have well preserved remains for the former, including potential sources of DNA. Which means we have to get Jurassic Park with this next question.

We have their DNA, can we bring Mammoths and Mastodons back?

And more importantly should we?

The title of this series tells you that there’s more to come before I answer this question, and I hope you stick around for it all. Today I hope that this piece alone hasn’t lead you towards any 1 answer. This is the first in a series I plan to do about Mammoths & Mastodons. An Early Article to whet your appetite.***

Over the course of the next few articles I hope to develop a better understanding of Mammoths, Mastodons, what they mean to us, what we may or may not have done to them, and what it would mean to bring them back. Or even if and why we should or should not.

But for today, I hope simply to put two questions into your mind. What happened to these hairy pachyderms, and should we bring them back?

***A quick and fun anecdote I will get into later, (I may have mentioned before) My dad tells stories of one of his old anthropology professors, who apparently encountered a mammoth in ice during an expedition. After thawing out some of the meat, and feeding it to the dogs to make certain it didn’t make them sick, they cooked it and tried to eat it. As far as my dad’s story goes, no one with the anthropologist back then got sick, but they also said that the meat wasn’t very good. (which makes sense, imagine cooking a 8,000 year old freezer burned steak.

Mammoth Cave is notably Mammoth free. However I did write a book about the park, (and the cave.) The Specters of Mammoth Cave. You should check it out. Here I am reading it, before I write the next book in my series, to make certain things remain in cannon.