What is not to love about a wooly mammoth? They are woolly. And mammoth.
They used to roam this Earth, once upon a time. Woolly mammoths may seem like prehistoric creatures that died out long, long ago. But. The massive mammals actually lived much more recently than many people think.
I’ve seen the movie Ice Age. I know these things.
Anyway, for the most part, woolly mammoths vanished around 10,000 years ago. But here is the thing. Small herds survived in isolated areas around the globe. One of those places was Wrangel Island off the coast of Siberia. And on that island, they thrived until around 1650 B.C.E.
So what does that mean to us humans? Well, to put that into perspective, ancient people began constructing Stonehenge in 2500 B.C.E. And. That great big Great Pyramid of Giza was built around 2575 B.C.E. So. Humans were around.
As you can see. We knew wooly mammoths. Our human ancestors have been around since about 297,975 BCE, give or take a few thousand years.
Woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) first appeared on Earth around 300,000 years ago, too.
They originated in eastern Siberia. And then, eventually, they spread west into northern Europe and the British Isles and east across the Bering land bridge into North America.
We love them because they are closely related to modern Asian elephants. They were roughly 10 to 12 feet tall and weighed up to eight tons. Their amazing tusks could reach lengths of 15 feet.
But once again, we had something to do with the failings of this planet. Humans contributed to the downfall of the mammoths beginning around 15,000 years ago.
We overhunted them. We sought out those mammoths for both their meat and their tusks and bones. However, hunting wasn’t the only reason why woolly mammoths went extinct.
It seems the warming climate at the end of the last Ice Age was likely the main cause of the creatures’ extinction. As the environment heated up, the vegetation of the world changed rapidly. Woolly mammoths ate up to 400 pounds of vegetation a day, mainly grasses, shrubs, and sedges. So, because of this, our big woolly friends couldn’t adapt quickly enough to survive.
Are we paying for our sins? It appears that scientists are trying to bring them back. They are using preserved DNA. They are doing the old “de-extinction” effort in an attempt to create mammoth-elephant hybrids. They want to reintroduce traits of the woolly mammoth into modern elephants.
Not only have I seen Ice Age, but I’ve also seen Jurassic Park. Trust me. This can’t turn out well. I think it would fail in massive proportions.
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“The Earth is not a gift from our parents, it is a loan from our children.”
—Native American proverb
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“Nature never hurries, yet everything is accomplished.”
—Lao Tzu
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“Life finds a way.”
—Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park)
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