The dodo was found food for humans. The bird was fat, unable to fly and therefore easy prey. The dodos were grilled on a spit in so many numbers that the animals native to Mauritius became extinct by the end of the 17th century. In the case of the elephant bird in Madagascar, people also ate the eggs with them. And the actually shy Tasmanian tiger was considered a brutal cattle predator and was therefore hunted until it no longer existed. It is certain that the human predator exterminated these and many other animals. The suspicion was therefore obvious that Homo sapiens was also responsible for the disappearance of the mammoth about 4,000 years ago. Especially since fossil finds show that people at that time regularly ate mammoth meat, built protective shelters from the bones of the animals and made weapons from their tusks.
Apparently, in this case, the person is not to be blamed for once. Scientists working with Eske Willerslev, who conducts research at the University of Cambridge and the University of Copenhagen, have now shown this in an extensive study.
When the Ice Age ended and the climate warmed up, the animals could no longer find enough food
According to the studythat just appeared in the science journal Nature was published, it was not Homo sapiens who made the mammoth disappear forever, contrary to what had been assumed, but climate change at the end of the last ice age. “Humans have been accused because the animals have survived for millions of years without being affected by changes in the climate,” says Willerslev. Only when the human appeared did they go downhill.
The results of his study show, however, that the huge animals simply couldn’t find enough to eat. The warming of the climate meant that the vast steppe landscapes in which the mammoths had grazed disappeared. In their place, forests and wetlands were created, which the animals could not cope with – unlike before with thick layers of snow, which they simply shoveled away with their tusks in order to get to their food.
“We were able to show that the main problem was the speed of climate change,” says Willerslev. The mammoths would not have managed to adapt quickly enough when the landscape was changing rapidly and their food was becoming scarce.
The scientists found all of this with the help of a relatively new method in which not only the genetic makeup of individual species is analyzed, but that of entire communities. For this purpose, soil samples are taken that contain remains of plants and animal remains such as urine, feces or skin cells. The genetic material of long-extinct creatures, which is contained in these remains as well as in fossil bones, can be extracted from the samples and analyzed.
For their mammoth study, the scientists examined 535 samples from arctic regions in which fossils of mammoths had previously been found. They came from different layers of permafrost and from the sediments of water and, according to the researchers, cover a period of 50,000 years.
Based on the genetic material contained in it, the scientists were able to understand, among other things, how the vegetation changed over time and, at the same time, the number of mammoths continued to decrease. Until the animals disappeared completely from the surface of the earth.