Mammoth Extinction: Two Continents and Wrangel Island

• Published in: Radiocarbon
• Main Authors: Martin, Paul S., Stuart, Anthony J.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge University Press (CUP) 1995
• Subjects: General Earth and Planetary Sciences; Archeology; Arctic; Wrangel Island; Siberia
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0033822200014739; https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0033822200014739

A harvest of 300 radiocarbon dates on extinct elephants (Proboscidea) from the northern parts of the New and Old Worlds has revealed a striking difference. While catastrophic in North America, elephant extinction was gradual in Eurasia (Stuart 1991), where straight-tusked elephants ( Palaeoloxodon antiquus ) vanished 50 millennia or more before woolly mammoths ( Mammuthus primigenius ). The range of the woolly mammoths started shrinking before 20 ka ago (Vartanyan et al. 1995). By 12 ka bp, the beasts were very scarce or absent in western Europe. Until the dating of Wrangel Island tusks and teeth (Vartanyan, Garrutt and Sher 1993), mammoths appeared to make their last stand on the Arctic coast of Siberia ca. 10 ka bp. The Wrangel Island find of dwarf mammoths by Sergy Vartanyan, V. E. Garrut and Andrei Sher (1993) stretched the extinction chronology of mammoths another 6 ka, into the time of the pharaohs.