Towering over 11 feet tall and weighing 6 tonnes, the Woolly Mammoth ruled the Ice Age. But how did these mighty beasts thrive for over 100,000 years—and why did they disappear?In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes kicks off a brand-new Ice Age miniseries with two leading experts. Professor Adrian Lister from the Natural History Museum explores the mammoth’s origins, evolution and adaptation to the harsh Ice Age climate. Then, Professor David Meltzer reveals the story of mammoths in North America, their encounters with early humans, and the astonishing discovery that some still roamed the Arctic just 4,000 years ago.Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.The Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MKAll music courtesy of Epidemic Sound
Chapter 1: What are woolly mammoths and why are they significant?
They are an incredibly popular extinct animal that fascinates so many of us, So what do we know about these massive beasts? How often were they hunted by humans? And why eventually did they go extinct? It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. Welcome to the first episode of a brand new mini-series this February all about the Ice Age.
Every Sunday we'll be covering a story from this extraordinary epoch, from mammoths and other great megafauna that once roamed the Earth, to Neanderthals and extinctions at the end of the Ice Age. To kick off this new series, we're covering the Woolly Mammoth, this fan favourite Ice Age animal. This episode will feature not one, but two leading experts.
First, a chat with the Natural History Museum's Professor Adrian Lister, a paleobiologist and leading expert on the woolly mammoth. Adrian will explain their origins and how they were built to survive in cold conditions from tusk to tail.
Following that, we have an interview with Professor David Meltzer from Southern Methodist University, who has been on the podcast twice before to talk about Ice Age America and the first humans who settled that land during the Ice Age.
He's back on the show to explain the story of woolly mammoths in and around North America, including a fascinating study that revealed mammoths still alive 4,000 years ago in the remote Arctic of northeast Siberia. I really hope you enjoy. First up is Professor Adrian Lister. Let's get into it. Adrian, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast today. Very nice to be here.
Now, the woolly mammoths, but also, I guess, mammoths in general in prehistoric times. Surely they must be one of the most iconic prehistoric animal groups to have ever roamed this earth. The name and the word mammoth is still very popular today.
Yes, the mammoth is a kind of iconic animal of the Ice Age, definitely. You know, these animals of the Ice Age were way more recent than dinosaurs, you know, dinosaurs are the other kind of iconic prehistoric beast, but much closer to us in time and indeed coexisting with humans.
Mammoth is, you know, the best known of what was, though, a very diverse Ice Age fauna with lots of other species alongside the mammoth, like the woolly rhino and cave bears and so on.
This seems important to highlight straight away, Adrian. We're focusing in particular on the woolly mammoth today, but mammoths as a group. So is the woolly mammoth just one of many different types?
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Chapter 2: How did woolly mammoths adapt to their Ice Age environment?
And that presumably would include the woolly mammoth, was it? Was that one of the strongest, the best species?
Well, it was the one that was the best adapted to the Ice Age environments. As the Ice Age environments, which saw much of the Northern Hemisphere cold, obviously, also forests gave way to grasslands.
And so the earlier mammoth species that were adapted more to living in forests and eating that kind of vegetation got restricted in their distribution to small areas and then eventually died out, while the mammoth species you know, became, had to become adapted to this different kind of environment.
So we would tend not to say that one is like better than the other, but it, you know, it's the survivor of the fittest thing. It means it fits that environment, you know, and that's why it survived and the other species died out.
Well, Adrian, let's now talk through the bodily structure of a woolly mammoth so we can really understand how it adapted to best survive in these new ice age environments. And we can either go tusk to tail or tail to tusk, but I've got in my notes tail to tusk. So let's start at the back end. First of all, Adrian, what do we know about the back end of a woolly mammoth, about its tail?
Can we talk about that for a bit? Does that show any kind of great adaptations for that new climate?
Yeah, I think it's quite useful to compare the woolly mammoth with a living elephant because we know what an elephant looks like. We know that it's adapted to a tropical environment. And the early mammoths were adapted to that environment as well. So if we take the tail, for instance, the living elephant has a very long tail.
It comes all the way down to sort of ankle with hairs at the end, which it uses as a kind of fly swat. The woolly mammoth had a much shorter tail. And I think the reason for that is avoiding frostbite.
You've got a very sort of thin organ like that hanging loose out of the back end of your body in a very cold environment where it would have been way below freezing in the winter, you know, different from anything that a living elephant in its natural habitat would encounter. then, you know, you've got to protect it from frostbite.
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Chapter 3: What were the physical characteristics of woolly mammoths?
In a cold environment, you don't want to lose heat through them, and you don't want them to get frostbite. So that's that.
It is extraordinary that you have that much information to learn about the woolly mammoths, as you say, that rich archaeological record, which isn't just bones, but also these mammoths preserved in the permafrost. You've taken us from the tail straight away to the head and the ear. I think rather than jumping back, let's focus on the head and then we'll go down to the body.
We've talked about the ear, but the overall structure of the mammoth's head, Adrian, how was it designed?
Well, it's basically like a living elephant in that you've got two great big tusks sticking out of the front end. And the tusks are essentially modified incisor teeth. That's what elephant tusks are. That's what mammoth tusks were. They're equivalent to our side incisors. So not the center two teeth at the front, but the ones right next to them. Obviously, massively overgrown.
And they're made of solid dentine. which is they have no enamel around the outside, our teeth enamel on the outside, but the sort of more creamy colored dentine on the inside. Ivory, which is what tusks are, is solid dentine. And the mammoth tusks differed from those of living elephants in that they don't just go sort of straight forward with a gentle curve like those of living elephants.
They form a kind of spiral shape.
mammoth tusks have a kind of spiral shape and in some individuals you know with very large tusks they could even cross in the middle because they came down out of the skull round to the side and then spiral inwards and could even kind of cross in the middle which leads to interesting questions of how they were actually used i was going to say so do we know how they use these these great tusks because i don't think they'll be used for digging up roots or anything like that
Well, I mean, mainly these kinds of organs, whether it's tusks, horns, and so on, are for fighting. I mean, that is their original use. Exactly how that worked in the cases where the tusks ended up, you know, crossing over each other in the middle, because the points normally should point forward if you're going to be fighting with them. With most individuals, it was like that.
And I think that was still the main function, but also for a sort of intimidating display.
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Chapter 4: How did woolly mammoths interact with early humans?
Okay, so they're not going extinct, but they're getting hammered in other ways. So bison, giant bison of the Pleistocene within a few thousand years are basically shrinking, right? Because the environment is changing, they're having to adjust, they're having to respond, and it's causing significant evolutionary change within the species.
Chapter 5: Are humans responsible for the extinction of woolly mammoths?
Chapter 6: What is the latest research on woolly mammoth DNA?
Well, that word extinction is something we will get to, but you also mentioned words there like Beringia and Siberia. So that area of Northeast Asia and what was once that kind of land bridge area connecting North America with Northeast Asia, was that area of the world one of the richest focal points of woolly mammoths back in the Ice Age?
maybe not the richest, but certainly an area that was occupied by mammoth. You know, you have mammoth across pretty much a large chunk of North America, Eurasian real estate, and Beringia was simply one part of it.
We think of the land bridge as a sort of separate entity, but in reality, it was a continuous element of the so-called Beringian mammoth steppe, this vast grassland that stretched from essentially western Alaska to, well, basically across most of northern Eurasia. They call it the mammoth steppe, do they? Exactly right, because it was the most prominent animal in the landscape.
But it wasn't just them. Woolly rhinos, horses, giant bison were out there as well, because these are all grazers. These are all animals that, well, rhino to a lesser extent, but certainly horse, bison, and mammoth are animals that love large grasslands. And they're there in abundance, large, relatively dry underfoot grasslands.
as well. If we go to North America and we'll focus in largely on sites in North America with the woolly mammoth, because I know that's a main area of your speciality, David, do we know roughly when the woolly mammoth spread into the Americas and North America and become that dominant animal in that environment?
Mammoths have been in North America, south of the Arctic, starting around 1.35 million years ago. Oh, wow. So they've been here for a very long time. Now, what species of mammoth that was is not altogether clear because there are two species of mammoths in the Americas. It's sort of difficult.
When we go that far back, we tend to work at the genus level in the Linnaean hierarchy for those listeners who remember Linnaeus and all that other stuff that you had to memorize in eighth grade biology. What's that? Sorry, for someone who was terrible at grading biology. Oh, kingdom, phylum, order, family, class, genus, species, right?
Your scientific ID card, as it were. And so they arrive in the Americas. They're not sure which particular type of mammoth. And then I'm guessing they spread far and wide. And before the arrival of humans, are they at the top of the food chain in the Americas? And do we know from the archaeological record, do we know how far and wide they spread? Well, they were highly mobile.
We know that actually from isotopic evidence in their bones that they would graze over vast areas. They were not at the top of the food chain insofar as predators are going to be hovering above herbivores. So your carnivores are going to be up there at the top. But they were certainly the large herbivore on that landscape. That's why they had that role as a keystone species.
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