DNA revealed the woolly mammoth's fate, and what it teaches us today | Hacker News Reader

DNA revealed the woolly mammoth's fate, and what it teaches us today

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43 pointsHooke14 comments

Original 2016 paper [1]. After the last glacial maximum, wooly mammoths went extinct on mainland Asia and North America about 10 kya but mammoths survived longer on two isolated islands.

This paper explains the extinction of the penultimate population 5.6 kya on St. Paul Island, Alaska (once part of Beringia). The extinction was caused by drought* conditions.

I wonder if this drought was specific to the current interglacial period or whether it is a cyclic event that occurred in each of the recent 100-kyr interglacials.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/113/33/9310

* Edit: corrected mispelling, thanks richrichardsson

kya?

kilo years ago

It should technically just be "ka" which stands for kiloannum following ISO 80000-3:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year#Kiloannum

Unless I'm mistaken, drought has the same spelling worldwide. Draught has a few meanings, but I wasn't aware that there was any difference between British and US English regarding drought.

This article addresses how the very last surviving mammoths died out due to climate change on an isolated island in the Bering Sea. I think it's accepted at this point that mainland mammoths were hunted to extinction by plucky and clever bands of homo sapiens.

> mainland mammoths were hunted to extinction

Beth Shapiro's work on the Rise and Fall of the Beringian Steppe Bison [1] supports an alternative narrative. Though I'm not sure why the last glacial termination was worse for large steppe fauna compared to previous ones. Maybe sapiens tipped the balance for a number of species already teetering on the brink of extinction every 100 kyr.

[1] https://ir.lib.sfu.ca/item/15088

The Younger Dryas saw temps swing from glacial temps to interglacial temps back to glacial temps before going back up to present-day Holocene temps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas

Those kind of oscillations in climate had to be massively disruptive for all life on earth.

Not about mammoth dna, but about dna from organisms in a lake. I thought this would focus more on genetic isolation, but it’s more about how resource isolation can cause a extinction.

I think it’s fascinating that rather than disease or inbreeding felling them, they died of thirst due to a prolonged drought that made the only water source salty over time and by then there was no land bridge escape route.

It is not only about mammoth DNA but it was part of the mix which allowed them to determine exactly when mammoths disappeared (other proxies correlated to the timeline).

Before you go read the article: this explains how one isolated group of Mammoths became extinct.

Unless I missed something, it doesn't explain how they all disappeared.

When the St. Paul mammoths died off, the population on the mainland had already been extinct for several thousand years, so the title is true, albeit somewhat trivially.

(There was also a contemporary population on Wrangel Island that lasted another thousand years or so, though they were likely hunted to extinction).

Most likely cause was they were probably delicious.

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