The mammoths’ demise

Originally published 5 May 1986

In Jean Auel’s block­buster nov­el, The Mam­moth Hunters, the beau­ti­ful Ayla mus­es on the com­ing hunt. “How could crea­tures as small and weak as humans chal­lenge the huge, shag­gy, tusked beast, and hope to suc­ceed?” she asks herself.

Her ques­tion evokes an image we have often encoun­tered: A lit­tle band of half-naked humans, shiv­er­ing with fear and ice age cold, thrust­ing piti­ful wood­en sticks at a great rag­ing wool­ly mam­moth. The odds seem so uneven, the foe so for­mi­da­ble, that our hearts and admi­ra­tion go out to Ayla and her companions.

But the odds were not so uneven, after all, as Ayla knows. She has in her favor “the intel­li­gence, expe­ri­ence, and coop­er­a­tion of the oth­er hunters.” And that includes Jon­dalar and his new spear-throw­ing device. The mam­moth herd goes down with­out a sin­gle human casu­al­ty, apart from a bad scare for Ayla.

Sci­ence knows a lot about the ice age mam­moth. Sev­er­al well pre­served mam­moths have been recov­ered by the Rus­sians from the Siber­ian per­mafrost, includ­ing a baby mam­moth named Dima. The stom­ach con­tents of the frozen mam­moths tell us about their feed­ing habits. More is prob­a­bly known about the biol­o­gy of mam­moths than of any oth­er extinct creature.

There has been much debate among pale­on­tol­o­gists about the fate of the mam­moths. The crea­tures were appar­ent­ly numer­ous through­out the last ice age, in Europe and Asia and west­ern North Amer­i­ca. Then, quite sud­den­ly, the mam­moths became extinct about 11,000 years ago, just as the ice age ended.

What wiped out animals?

The mam­moths were not the only ani­mal to van­ish at the end of the most recent ice age. A simul­ta­ne­ous wave of extinc­tions swept many large land mam­mals from the earth. The mastodon, the cave bear, the giant deer, the sabre-toothed “tiger,” the tank-like glyptodont, the North Amer­i­can camel, beavers the size of bears, and the giant ground sloth all van­ished. With their demise, the Gold­en Age of Mam­mals came to an end.

What was the cause of the extinc­tions? Some sci­en­tists lay the blame on a warm­ing cli­mate that accom­pa­nied the retreat of the great con­ti­nen­tal glac­i­ers. The larg­er land ani­mals would have been least like­ly to adapt suc­cess­ful­ly to the new cli­mat­ic conditions.

But there are prob­lems with the cli­mate the­o­ry of extinc­tion. We know, for exam­ple, that the recent ice age is only one of many that have affect­ed the earth over the past few mil­lion years. Why did the giant mam­mals sur­vive pre­vi­ous inter­glacial peri­ods only to fall vic­tim to the most recent warming?

A con­sid­er­able amount of cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence points to Ayla and her peo­ple as the agents of extinc­tion. At sev­er­al killing sites in the Amer­i­can south­west, fine­ly craft­ed flint points have been found in con­junc­tion with mam­moth bones. Phys­i­ol­o­gist Jared Dia­mond reviews some of the new­er evi­dence on mam­moth extinc­tion in a [Jan­u­ary 1986] issue of Nature. An exam­ple: radio­car­bon dat­ing has con­firmed the simul­ta­ne­ous dis­ap­pear­ance from Ari­zona of the cold-adapt­ed Har­ring­ton’s moun­tain goat and the Shas­ta ground sloth, a species derived from warm cli­mates. Cli­mat­ic change would not be expect­ed to adverse­ly affect both species. But the dis­ap­pear­ances coin­cide exact­ly with the arrival of human hunters in Arizona.

Hunters most likely skilled

Ice age hunters were pow­er­ful­ly armed with flint-tipped spears and devices that ampli­fied the force of the arm when the spear was hurled. They were not the brave naked prim­i­tives we have some­times imag­ined them to be. They were well adapt­ed to the tun­dra. They knew how to use fire as a weapon. They were skilled at set­ting traps. Says Dia­mond: “A real­is­tic paint­ing of mam­moth hunt­ing should show warm­ly clad pro­fes­sion­als calm­ly spear­ing a mam­moth already crip­pled by a trap or ambush.”

As dif­fi­cult as it may be to com­pre­hend, small bands of ice age hunters, rang­ing over three con­ti­nents, prob­a­bly pos­sessed suf­fi­cient skills to dri­ve sev­er­al races of huge beasts into extinc­tion. If this inter­pre­ta­tion of the extinc­tions is cor­rect, it was a slaugh­ter of epic pro­por­tions that brought the Gold­en Age of Mam­mals to an end.

“Hunt­ing mam­moths can be very excit­ing,” gush­es Ayla after her nar­row escape. She looks at Jon­dalar with an aroused gleam in her eye. He returns her glance. The steami­er bits of the book are about to ensue. The Gold­en Age of Humans has begun.