Scientists have dropped an extinction bomb, they say a freak event killed the last woolly mammoths

Scientists behind a new genomics study now say the last wave of woolly mammoths on Earth were wiped out by an extreme storm or plague – meaning they could still be around today if they hadn’t gone extinct.

These giant Ice Age beasts traversed the then tundras of North America, Europe and Asia as early as 300,000 years ago. They later became extinct around 4,000 years ago on an isolated island off the coast of Siberia in the Arctic Ocean.

The latest analysis shows that several hundred woolly mammoths have been trapped on tiny Wrangel Island for about 6,000 years, but scientists say they did not die out due to inbreeding, The Guardian reported.

A long-held theory was that the woolly mammoths eventually accumulated enough deleterious genetic mutations to cause a “genome crash.”

“We can now confidently reject the idea that the population was simply too small and that it was doomed to extinction for genetic reasons,” said evolutionary geneticist Love Dalén of the Center for Paleogenetics, a collaboration between Stockholm University and the Swedish Museum of Nature. History.

“That means it was probably just some random event that killed them, and if that random event hadn’t happened, we’d still have mammoths today,” he continued.

Dalén and his colleagues analyzed the genomes of 21 mammoth specimens found on Wrangel Island and the Siberian mainland, representing 50,000 years of existence.

They found that the prehistoric creatures went through a “serious bottleneck” once they were trapped on Wrangel Island due to rising sea levels as the Earth warmed.

At one point during the Holocene period (11,500 years ago to the present), the total population was eight or less.

“These findings suggest that Wrangel Island may have been founded by a single herd of woolly mammoths,” the study said.

The study authors said you would normally expect the species to undergo “accelerated genomic decline,” but that didn’t happen.

“The population recovered quickly after the bottleneck and subsequently remained stable. More specifically, we even find evidence that the recovered population was large enough, or perhaps changed its behavior, to avoid inbreeding with close relatives… during the 6,000 years of island isolation,” the study says.

So if they were able to avoid inbreeding in the end, what killed them all?

It’s not clear and will probably never be known for sure, but Dalén believes something like bird flu could have doomed the species.

“Perhaps mammoths would be vulnerable to this, given the limited diversity we identified in immune system genes.” Alternatively, something like a tundra fire, volcanic ash layer, or really bad weather could have caused a really bad year of plant growth in Wrangel.”

“Given how small the population was, it would have been prone to such random events,” Dalén said, adding: “It seems to me that maybe the mammoths were just unlucky.”

The paper’s lead author, Marianne Dehasque of Uppsala University, told the Guardian that this new story of how mammoths went extinct has lessons for today’s world, as biodiversity dwindles every year.

The World Wide Fund for Nature’s Living Planet Report 2022 found that wildlife populations have declined by an average of 69 percent over the past 50 years.

“Mammoths are an excellent system for understanding the ongoing biodiversity crisis and what happens genetically when a species passes through a population bottleneck because they mirror the fate of many current populations,” Dehasque said.