Amazing stuff! Very fascinating! She probably died of unnatural causes (hint: human hunters).
Why the scientists choose a very difficult name (Élmayųujey’eh) for this mammoth is strange! Was this a political correctness statement of sorts?
I will just call her Elma! 😊
I will just call her Elma! 😊
"Genetic and isotopic analyses have pieced together a remarkable narrative of a 20-year-old female woolly mammoth, detailing her health, social status and travels – even though her story is more than 14,000 years old. It offers new insight into mammoth behavior and clues as to how humans interacted with the dwindling great beasts. ..."
From the abstract:
"Woolly mammoths in mainland Alaska overlapped with the region’s first people for at least a millennium. However, it is unclear how mammoths used the space shared with people. Here, we use detailed isotopic analyses of a female mammoth tusk found in a 14,000-year-old archaeological site to show that she moved ~1000 kilometers from northwestern Canada to inhabit an area with the highest density of early archaeological sites in interior Alaska until her death. DNA from the tusk and other local contemporaneous archaeological mammoth remains revealed that multiple mammoth herds congregated in this region. Early Alaskans seem to have structured their settlements partly based on mammoth prevalence and made use of mammoths for raw materials and likely food."
A female woolly mammoth’s lifetime movements end in an ancient Alaskan hunter-gatherer camp (open access)
Fig. 1. Bayesian maximum clade credibility tree of dated Mammuthus spp. mitochondrial sequences.
Fig. 3. Summary life history of this study’s woolly mammoth within the geographic, climatic, altitude, and early archaeology in Alaska.
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