Hunters May Have Delivered Fatal Blow to Mammoths

[Elmore Furth]

Consideriing the number of species now teetering on the brink of extinction due to humans and habitat change, this hypothesis of humans pushing a species to extinction has a ring of truth.

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 27, 2010
Filed at 5:13 a.m. EST

CHERSKY, Russia (AP) — During the last Ice Age, shaggy mammoths, woolly rhinos and bison lumbered across northern Siberia. Then, about 10,000 years ago — in the span of a geological heartbeat, or a few hundred years — the last of them disappeared.

Many scientists believe a dramatic shift in climate drove these giant grazers to extinction.

But two scientists who live year-round in the frigid Siberian plains say that man —either for food, fuel or fun — hunted the animals to extinction

Adrian Lister, of the paleontology department of London's Natural History Museum, said humans may have delivered the final blow, but rapid global warming was primarily responsible for the mammoth's extinction. It brought an abrupt change in vegetation that squeezed a dwindling number of mammoths into isolated pockets, where hunters could pick off the last herds, he said.




Hunters May Have Delivered Fatal Blow to Mammoths

[Enthusiast]

1. Okay, interesting.

But if Mammoths and Mastodons were pushed to extinction by human hunters why exactly weren't their Indian and African counterpart pachyderm cousins likewise effected? Maybe human hunters in Africa and India were just incompetent? I ain't buyin' it.

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. The last mammoths died only about 4,000 years ago, on Wrangel Island

http://www.radiocarbon.org/Journal/v37n1/vartanyan.html
which may or may not have been due to humans (there's evidence of human habitation there at the time, but not of hunting, according to the ever-reliable Wikipedia).