Humans, climate change responsible for Woolly Mammoth's demise

by Rich Bowden - Apr 2 2008, 07:37

Debate has long raged over the exact cause of the extinction of the woolly mammoth, now Spanish researchers believe they have the answer.

A team led by David Nogues-Bravo, of the Museo Nacional Ciencias Naturales in Spain, have proposed the theory that climate change drove the creatures to the edge of extinction and humans finished them off.

Using climate models and evidence in the form of fossil remains, the researchers found the mammoths had so been decimated by warming temperatures by the time humans wandered into their territory. The hunting of the creatures by humans then served only to complete their demise.

"The collapse of the climatic niche of the mammoth caused a significant drop in their population size, making woolly mammoths more vulnerable to the increasing hunting pressure from human populations," the researchers wrote in the journal PLoS Biology.

The report showed the climate and species distribution for the following times in the species history: 126,000, 42,000, 30,000, 21,000, and 6,000 years ago and found the mammoths only had 10 percent of its habitat available at 6,000 years ago compared to 42,000 years.

The team found that humans would only have had to kill one mammoth each every three years to push the species to extinction.

"Our analyses suggest that the humans applied the coup de grace and that size of the suitable climatic area available in the mid-Holocene was too small to host populations able to withstand increased human hunting pressure," the researchers wrote.

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