How ancient people hunted mammoths. What we know about mammoths: the approximate height of mammoths. Mammoths are ancient prehistoric animals

The mammoth is an unusual mammal that has been the subject of research for a long time. For primitive man they were a source of food, houses were built from animal bones, the skin served as the basis for clothing, tools, household items, and jewelry were made from tusks and bones. In appearance, they were similar to modern elephants; in contrast, mammoths lived mainly in the northern regions of the Earth. Another mystery is the reason for the extinction of mammoths. Some scientists blame the reduction in natural diet, hunting ancient man, glaciation or warming. The fossilized skeletons of these majestic giants and even whole specimens that are found in permafrost have been perfectly preserved to this day.

The mammoth is an extinct representative of the elephant family, weighing up to one ton and growing up to two meters. Some species reached a weight of up to 13 tons and a height of up to 6 meters. Unlike modern elephants, the mammoth's body was covered with thick and long hair. The ears and tail were pressed tightly to the body and were relatively small in size. The huge body stood firmly on the ground thanks to four powerful legs. The base of the foot had a diameter of up to 50 centimeters and was covered with a horn-like sole.

The origin of the word mammoth is associated with the name of the animal in the Khanty-Mansi language, translated as “earth horn”. According to other sources, the name is close to the name of the Russian saint Mamant. From the Russian language the name migrated to other languages, for example, to English.

Habitat

Mammoths are herbivores; adult males and females consumed about 250 kilograms of plant food per day, which forced the animals to spend 18 hours a day searching for and consuming food. For this reason, herds of mammoths moved long distances, changing pastures. Animals were distributed on many continents: North America, Asia, Africa, Europe. A lot of fossil remains of mammoths are found in Russia: in Novosibirsk, Khanty-Mansiysk, throughout Siberia.

Mammoth bones were found by residents of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. Out of ignorance, they passed off the remains of giants as the remains of ancient giants, saints, mythical creatures. Only after finding perfectly preserved animal carcasses in the permafrost zone, it became clear who the huge bones actually belonged to. In Siberia, after a flood, perfectly preserved mammoth carcasses with entrails, hair, and muscles were found at the mouth of the Lena River.

Truly unique specimens have been preserved, which the permafrost carefully preserved for many years. A mummified six-month-old mammoth calf, affectionately named Dima, was found near Magadan. The baby fell through the ice, which caused his death. He was found by workers while carrying out construction work. Another famous fossil is the Adams mammoth. Thanks to him, scientists for the first time received a full-fledged mammoth skeleton. The find was discovered by Osip Shumakhov, who was collecting mammoth bones. The event dates back to 1808; the skeleton of the animal was transferred to the Museum of Academic Sciences. Another female mammoth was discovered by schoolchildren in Siberia; she was named Matilda. The last known mammoth is valuable because its remains preserved liquid blood. Until now, many scientists are making attempts to clone a mammoth, but high-quality genetic material is very difficult to find.

Mammoth extinction

There are various theories regarding the issue of the disappearance of mammoths, but scientists have not come to a single conclusion. Most versions involve change natural conditions. As a result of sudden climate changes, natural disasters, floods, and changes in their usual habitat occurred, to which animals did not have time to adapt and died. The extinction of mammoths occurred approximately 10 thousand years ago, at which time there was a sharp warming of the climate, the transformation of the forest-tundra into forests and swamps.

Many scientists believe that mammoths became extinct due to the hunting of ancient hunters. At the sites of our ancestors, mammoth bones, tusks and products made from them were found. However, there are arguments to refute this theory that the weapons of ancient people were not capable of piercing the thick skin of a mammoth, and besides, mammoth meat was very tough, practically unsuitable for food. People could only kill old and sick animals, whose bones they used in their everyday life.

Another unusual version is that mammoths did not die out at all, but simply turned into another species, for example, modern Indian elephants, which still live. Geneticists compared the DNA of modern elephants and extinct mammoths. As a result, it became known that mammoths and elephants descended from one common ancestor who lived about 7 million years ago; they are different branches of the same family tree. It’s just that modern relatives of mammoths are luckier; they still live on the globe. It became possible to isolate genetic material from animal bones thanks to the permafrost in which they were located for many years.

Mammoth bone

Ancient mammal's bones are stronger than bones modern ancestors, the color range of bone remains is varied. Over hundreds of years of underground mineralization, the bones have acquired various shades from snow-white, pink to deep purple and blue. Bones that have natural darkening are in particular demand among artisans; many people want to buy such specimens and sell mammoth ivory.

Tusk

To obtain food from under the snow rubble, the mammoth had large curved tusks. They were very massive, weighing up to 100 kilograms, length – up to 4 meters. Tusk fabric is very durable, but can be processed. Fossil tusks, after mineralization, acquire various shades from boiling white to purple. Even with the help of modern technology, it is very difficult to achieve unique shades of tusk, so the value of the material is rapidly growing. Mammoth ivory is a valuable craft material; it was used to produce boxes, chess, weapons, medallions, and figurines.

All new discoveries of fossil mammoths do not allow discussions about the fate of these ancient mammals to cool down. Scientists are getting closer to answering the question: why did the mammoth fauna disappear?

11 species of mammoths have been described, but when talking about these animals, they usually mean the woolly or tundra mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius. It had the largest range, its remains were found more often than others, and it was the first to be described. It is believed that the environment in which woolly mammoths lived was the tundra-steppe - a relatively dry area, overgrown mainly with grasses.

It appeared near glaciers, which, having trapped huge masses of water, dried up the surrounding lands. As evidenced by paleontological finds, in terms of the abundance of different animals, this region was not inferior to the African savannas.

In addition to mammoths, rhinoceroses, bulls, bison, saigas, bears, lions, hyenas, and horses lived in the tundra-steppe. This complex of species is called the periglacial, or mammoth, fauna. But now these places are extremely poor in large animals. Most of them died out.

In the early 1990s, Russian researchers made a sensational discovery. Radiocarbon dating of the teeth of woolly mammoths found on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean showed that ancient elephants existed on this island only 3,700 years ago.

The last mammoths were dwarfs, one and a half times smaller than their continental predecessors. But 12,000 years ago, when Wrangel Island was connected to the mainland, large mammoths lived there.

LOST IN SIBERIA

Discussions about the extinction of mammoths have been going on for at least 200 years. Jean Baptiste Lamarck also wrote on this topic. He believed that biological species do not die out, and if animals of the past are different from those living today, then they did not become extinct, but turned into others. True, now there are no animals that could be considered descendants of mammoths. But Lamarck found an explanation for this fact: the mammoths were exterminated by humans, or they did not become extinct, but were hiding somewhere in Siberia.

For their time, both explanations were quite acceptable. On the one hand, the destructive effect of man on nature was obvious even then. Lamarck was one of the first to thoroughly analyze this process. On the other hand, in Europe, ideas about Siberia were very vague. And it was during the time of Lamarck that data began to arrive about the finds of mammoth corpses, well preserved in permafrost, as if they had died not so long ago.

Lamarck's antagonist Georges Cuvier interpreted the same information differently: since the corpses were well preserved, they were not victims of predators, but died for other reasons, perhaps due to flooding. The essence of his theory boiled down to the following: in the history of the Earth there were fleeting cataclysms that could lead to changes in the fauna in a certain area.

Around the same time, the Italian paleontologist Giovanni Battista Brocchi expressed another idea: every species on Earth has its own time. Species and groups of species become extinct just as organisms die of old age.

All of the above points of view have supporters and opponents. At the beginning of the 20th century, one of Lamarck’s followers, the German paleontologist Gustav Steinmann, tried to prove that only the largest mammals, those that were hunted especially intensively, became completely extinct. The remaining animals known from fossil remains did not become extinct, but turned into others.

Such ideas have not found wide acceptance. Cuvier’s theory of “catastrophism” turned out to be more in demand, especially since it was supported by new data on the transformations that the Earth’s surface underwent throughout its long history.

Some researchers developed ideas about disharmony, “excessive evolution” or “inadaptability” of extinct creatures. The absurdity of individual animals was so exaggerated that the question arose: how could they even exist? Mammoths have been used as one example of such disharmony.

As if the huge tusks of these proboscideans, having developed excessively, led them to an evolutionary dead end. But the authors of such works ignored one important point: the “absurd” animals flourished for millions of years before disappearing.

And yet their reasoning was based on real fact: in the evolution of some groups of organisms, directions are found that lead to the maximum possible degree of development of a trait. For example, the size of the body, horns, tusks, teeth, and shells may increase over time. In this case, the reverse process does not occur, and when further increase becomes impossible for physical reasons, the group dies out. Austrian paleontologist Othenio Abel called this the law of inertia.

ON THE SPRUCE DIET

One of the most popular hypotheses explaining the extinction of the mammoth fauna is climatic. At the end of the last ice age, approximately 15,000-10,000 years ago, when the glacier melted, northern part The tundra-steppe turned into a swamp, and forests, mostly coniferous, grew in the south. Instead of grasses, spruce branches, mosses and lichens became food for animals, which allegedly killed mammoths and other representatives of the mammoth fauna.

Meanwhile, the climate had changed several times before, glaciers advanced and retreated, but mammoths and mammoth fauna survived and flourished. Let's say that the tundra and taiga are really not best place for large herbivores (however, reindeer, moose, and Canadian wood bison still live there).

But the theory of evolution teaches that when the climate changes, living things must adapt to it or move to it. The territory at the disposal of mammoths was huge, almost half of Eurasia and most of the north-west of North America (in which, in addition to the woolly mammoth, the Columbian mammoth, Mammuthus columbi, lived at the same time).

If the climate changed, the number of animals could decrease, but they are unlikely to disappear completely. Most of the territory where mammoths lived is now occupied by coniferous forests and swamps, but there are other biotopes on it - meadows, floodplains, large areas of mixed forest, forestless foothills.

Surely among these spaces there would be a place for mammoths somewhere. This species was very plastic and 70,000-50,000 years ago lived in forest-steppe and forest-tundra, in swampy or, conversely, dry woodlands, in taiga, mixed forests and tundra. Depending on the latitude, the climate in these territories varied from mild to severe.

Columbian mammoth

But the main argument against the climate hypothesis is that the extinction of the mammoth fauna in many places occurred when significant climatic and landscape changes did not occur there. If so, then the expansion of the taiga flora could not be the cause, but a consequence of the extinction of animals.

If there are a lot of herbivores, then they eat not only grass, which can grow quickly, but also the sprouts of trees and shrubs. As a result, trees renew poorly and are reduced in number. In addition, proboscideans can fell large trees. In African reserves, rangers are forced to regulate the number of elephant herds, otherwise they simply eat up the savannah. Therefore, it could have happened that when mammoths became extinct and other herbivores became much smaller, a forest grew in place of the tundra-steppe.

Meanwhile, it is obvious that the extinction of mammoths and other large mammals coincides with the beginning of man’s attack on nature. Already tens of thousands of years ago, people had weapons with which they could destroy their neighbors on the planet. The ability to make flint spearheads, mastery of fire, the ability to hunt together and other qualities made ancient people competitors of predators.

DANGEROUS NEIGHBORS

Ancient people hunted mammoths especially often. Entire settlements were built from their skulls and skins. Maybe they killed everyone in the end? This explanation is offered by some modern researchers (although, as we said, this hypothesis is already 200 years old). Other scholars believe that "a handful of savages with sticks" were unable to exterminate whole view large animals.

It is not known exactly how many people were on Earth at that time, but thousands of primitive sites have already been found in sediments 12,000 years old. Perhaps in the time of mammoths there were enough “savages” to cause serious damage to nature. In the 19th century, for example, European travelers described the barbaric driven hunts of Indians, Eskimos and African tribes, which exterminated huge numbers of animals.

Moreover, the natives did not care that most of them would not be used. Huge accumulations of herbivore bones in different parts lights indicate that ancient people were no different from their descendants in this regard. As the fauna became scarcer, the tribes migrated in search of places rich in game.

However, sometimes modern researchers paint a more complex picture of extermination. Man allegedly “shaken the ecological pyramids,” that is, somehow disrupted the existing ecological order. Ancient hunters, together with predatory animals, allegedly first destroyed large herbivores, and then the predators themselves died out from malnutrition.

By the way, on Wrangel Island, archaeologists discovered traces of a Paleo-Eskimo settlement, but they were mainly engaged in marine fishing. There were no remains of mammoth bones at this site. Only the bone of a woolly rhinoceros (extinct much earlier) was found, which was probably something like a children's toy. The discovered site is 3,200 years old, and the finds of the last mammoths date back to an earlier period - 3,700 years ago.

That is, no one bothered the last mammoths on the island; they died out on their own. The dwarf size of the mammoths from Wrangel Island, as well as the imprint of diseases on their remains, indicate that these animals suffered from a lack of food and inbreeding. And this small population of dwarfs gradually died out. Perhaps it was isolation that allowed her to outlive the rest of her relatives by several thousand years.

So, statements that climate or man were main reason the disappearance of mammoths is far from certain. When there are discrepancies in hypotheses, scientists often offer compromise solutions. There has already been a “traditional” conclusion to the work on the extinction of animals: supposedly in this process various unfavorable influences overlapped each other.

In our case, the mammoths were damaged by the climate, and people persecuted them, and with the reduction in numbers, genetics also failed: inbreeding began, which led to degeneration. Okay, let's say mammoths were unlucky, but it is unclear why other non-extinct ones were lucky. Bison, musk oxen, reindeer...

VARIATIONS ON A THEME BY HAYDN

One consideration in modern science is not discussed at all, namely that mammoths became extinct “from old age.” Such interpretations of evolution are now considered heresy. However, this explanation seems to put everything in its place: during their evolutionary “youth,” mammoths did not care about the climate, and they were not afraid of primitive hunters. And then, when “youth” passed, their numbers began to steadily decline. Eventually, the last long-lived populations, like the one that lived on Wrangel Island, also died out.

There is plenty of evidence of such phylogenetic aging, and its number is increasing. Recently, American researchers have traced the extinctions of some mammals using spore-pollen analysis and many other modern methods. They came to the conclusion that on the North American continent the disappearance of large herbivores began even before people arrived there and occurred gradually.

The extinction of mammoths and other mammals follows a typical picture that paleontologists describe for more ancient groups of animals, for example, dinosaurs or marine ammonite cephalopods. One of the researchers wittily compared it to Haydn's 45th Symphony, in which the musicians take turns leaving the orchestra before the end of the work.

The mentioned American researchers consider climate to be the cause of extinction. However, the facts pointed out by the founders of paleontology remain facts. For some reason, the evolution of groups of organisms goes in a certain direction, just as the individual development of an individual occurs unidirectionally - from youth to old age. The characteristics of the mechanism of “phylogenetic aging” proposed by the classics of paleontology are rather vague.

Here we can clarify something if we turn to modern gerontology - the science of aging of organisms. There are several dozen hypotheses proposed to explain the mechanism of aging of an individual. They often note that some cells cannot reproduce exact copies of themselves indefinitely. With each division, either DNA breaks occur in them, or the length of certain sections of chromosomes shortens, or something else that eventually leads to the impossibility of further divisions.

It is possible that because of this, rejuvenation of “worn out” cells, and therefore tissues and organs, becomes impossible. The result is old age and natural death. Perhaps something in the entire genome is shortened with each copying, and this eventually leads to the impossibility of its reproduction, and therefore to the extinction of the species. And although today the question of the causes of extinction remains open, this last hypothesis deserves attention.

If this assumption is true, then attempts to “revive” mammoths are doomed to failure, but some scientists continue the experiments. There were reports in the media that the mammoth was about to be cloned. Japanese scientists managed to clone mouse cells that had been in the freezer for several years, and now they seem to be ready to move on to larger-scale projects.

However, this raises the eternal question of biology: to what extent can the results of laboratory experiments on a model object be extrapolated to what happens in nature? Several years in the freezer are not thousands of years in the tundra, where the remains could have thawed and frozen again many times. During prolonged stay in permafrost, cells cannot remain intact. Only fragments of molecules remain from them, so they cannot be cloned.

Basically, damage occurs due to the fact that the water contained in the cells crystallizes and ruptures the cellular structures. All mammoth corpses discovered so far are severely damaged when compared to a mouse from a freezer. Therefore, scientists are pinning their hopes on frozen mammoth sperm. They contain very little water and can withstand freezing better than regular cells. But the likelihood of such a discovery is negligible. So for now, cloning a mammoth looks like a lost cause.