Last week, in Part I of this series, I told you the incredible story of the Arctic journey of the U.S.S. Jeannette in 1879. After their ship was trapped in the ice for 21 months and then sank, the crew dragged their food and supplies over a thousand miles of ice while stopping at some small islands in an effort to reach Siberia. Along the way, they found a rather unique and unusual resource which they used to build shelters and repair sledges: woolly mammoth bones. The realization that just over 100 years ago, men were using woolly mammoth bones to build things inspired me to learn a bit more about this iconic species.

On an evolutionary time-scale, woolly mammoths are not a particularly old species.  They are from the same genetic family as modern-day elephants, and their particular species developed about 6 million years ago, making them a more recent offshoot from the family tree than the elephants still living in African today, which developed about 7 million years ago. Here is an artist’s rendition of what a woolly mammoth may have looked like. woolly mammoth At the end of the last ice age, 15,000 years ago, woolly mammoths occupied an impressively large geographic range. In addition to Siberia and Alaska, cold places you might associate with woolly mammoths, these furry elephants also lived in the Great Plains of the United States as well as most of Europe.

Warming temperatures after the Ice Age caused two problems for woolly mammoths. The first was habitat loss. Warmer temperatures and longer summers converted continent-sized swaths of land from tundra filled with grasses, the primary food source for the mammoths, into the boreal forests which occupy nothern latitudes today. A forest is no place for a mammoth. The second problem, you will likely not be surprised to learn, was us. Warmer weather also brought humans into the mammoths’ domain. As humans spread over the globe, we routinely wiped out populations of larger animals which tend to reproduce slowly. Scientists often call these species megafauna. For example, our ancestors wiped out the giant sloths of South America and the dodo birds of the island of Mauritius.

Due to the abundance of cave paintings of woolly mammoths and numerous finds of reasonably well-preserved carcasses, people have known about and been interested in woolly mammoths for a long time. In fact, when President Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark to explore the American West in 1804, one of their tasks was to search for woolly mammoths. Before you allow yourself a chuckle about this, consider that President Jefferson was not too far off the mark. As I explained in Part I, on its way towards the North Pole, the Jeannette was tasked with trying to locate Wrangel Island off the north coast of Siberia. The location of Wrangel Island is shown below.

Long after the Ice Age, Wrangel Island remained cold and was relatively inaccessible to humans. Due to these factors, a population of woolly mammoths was still living there in 2000 B.C, not so long ago! (1)

Consider for a moment that at the same time woolly mammoths were frolicking on Wrangel:

  • the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt had been around for 500 years;
  • the Hittite Kingdom of Old Testament fame was consolidating and preparing to attack Babylon;
  • weavers in China were making fine silks;
  • Norwegians were skiing; and
  • people were worshiping at Stonehenge.

 

In the Arctic environment, woolly mammoth bones remained frozen and thus relatively intact for thousands of years, which made them available to the crew of the Jeannette in the late 1800s. Given the remoteness of Wrangel Island, it’s not too hard to imagine that it could have remained free of humans until modern times and maintained its woolly mammoth population. If that had happened, we could easily be watching nature specials about the woolly mammoths of Wrangel Island on TV today, much as we are fascinated by the giant tortoises of the Galapogos. There would also likely be efforts to reintroduce mammoths to Siberia and Alaska.

There has been some speculation in the media about trying to bring the species back to life by recovering DNA from the bones.  Thus far, the quality of the recovered woolly mammoth DNA has not been sufficient to allow this.  Scientists may attempt to splice pieces of woolly mammoth DNA into an Asian Elephant embryo – their DNA is a 99% match to the woolly mammoth’s – to create a new woolly mammoth-Asian Elephant hybrid. If so, I suspect President Jefferson would be pleased.

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1. When I make comments such as this, I often get asked, “How do we know that?” The dates come from radiocarbon dating. Carbon atoms in carbon dioxide in the air come in two isotopes, carbon-14 and carbon-12. Since plants absorb carbon dioxide from the air, a living plant has a predictable ratio of carbon-14 and carbon-12. Since all animals either eat plants or eat animals which eat plants, living animals also have a predicable ratio of carbon isotopes in their bodies, as long as they remain alive and continue eating. Carbon-14 is an unstable isotope – it undergoes nuclear decay just like uranium-235 – while carbon-12 is stable. After an animal dies the amount of carbon-14 begins to decline. So if you find a woolly mammoth bone and measure how much carbon-14 it has, you can easily determine when that particular animal died.