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The Then & Theory team

The last mammoths

A woolly mammoth crosses the snow towards a camp of fires. The last known mammoths lived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean, cut off from Siberia as the seas rose at the end of the Ice Age. They lived there for thousands of years after mammoths vanished from the mainland, and died out around 4,000 years ago. By then the Great Pyramid of Giza had stood for several centuries. Their genomes show a small, inbred population that kept collecting mildly harmful mutations over hundreds of generations.

Note. What finally ended the Wrangel mammoths is still unknown.

Sources

1. Dehasque et al., Cell (2024), mammoth genome erosion
2. Smithsonian Magazine, “The last woolly mammoths died isolated and alone”
3. Britannica, “Pyramids of Giza”