The question of what wiped out the woolly mammoth has been debated for decades, but a closer look at recent research reveals that headlines claiming climate warming drove the animals to extinction may be telling only part of the story — and in some cases, telling it backwards.
A study published in Science, titled “Abrupt Warming Events Drove Late Pleistocene Holarctic Megafaunal Turnover,” was widely reported as evidence that rising temperatures were responsible for the disappearance of mammoths and other large prehistoric animals. National Geographic, Democratic Underground and several other outlets ran headlines pointing to warming as the primary cause.
However, a striking contradiction emerges when the same source articles are read in full. One report, after spending several paragraphs attributing extinction to warming, concluded with a final sentence stating: “Scientists found that cold weather was the reason for the extinction, and advances in locating DNA from fossils and carbon dating helped them confirm this theory.” The same article, in other words, arrived at the opposite conclusion from the one its headline promoted.
When the study’s corresponding author, Dr. Cooper, was contacted directly and asked whether mammoths died out due to warming or cooling, his response indicated that the publication in question had not read the research or its accompanying press release particularly carefully. Yet even the University of Adelaide’s own press release focused on rapid warming events, despite the fact that mammoths survived well beyond the last glacial maximum — raising further questions about the timeline being proposed.
The physical evidence preserved in permafrost has led some researchers to a different conclusion entirely. Millions of mammoth remains are believed to still be frozen in Siberian permafrost, alongside the preserved bodies of reindeer, bison, horses, wolves and other animals. The condition of these remains — fresh enough, in some reported cases, for scavenging animals to feed on when they are exposed — points to sudden freezing rather than a gradual warming process as the cause of death.
The Younger Dryas period, a sudden and severe return to near-glacial conditions lasting roughly 1,500 years that ended around 11,000 years ago, is considered by some scientists to be a more credible candidate. That transition is thought to have occurred over as little as a decade, potentially trapping animal populations that had followed retreating ice sheets into new habitats and were unable to escape when conditions rapidly reversed.
The theory that early human hunters delivered the final blow to already stressed mammoth populations has also been questioned. The human populations occupying vast stretches of North America, Europe and Asia at the time were thought to number far fewer individuals than the mammoths themselves, making a hunting-driven extinction difficult to account for on the available evidence.
What the debate ultimately illustrates is that climate change is not a one-directional phenomenon, and that the story of the mammoth’s disappearance may be considerably more complex than warming-focused headlines have suggested.
