Woolly mammoth demise may have been result of climate change and overhunting

April 5, 2008

New research suggests that the extinction of Woolly mammoths may have been caused by the combined effect of both climatic change and human hunting. Scientists suggest that climate change during the end of the Pleistocene caused their habitat to shrink in size and as a result caused Woolly mammoth populations to drop and then Paleolithic humans delivered the final blow to the woolly mammoths by hunting the remaining Woolly mammoths. The warming climate may have also assisted humans in over hunting the woolly mammoth, the global warming that occurred during the end of the Pleistocene and the beginning of the Holocene melted ice and allowed humans to gain accesses to more mammoth habitats than previously possible.

Scientists have reached this new conclusion by combining population and climate change modeling in their research which has never been attempted in the past. This new method may have made them able to retrieve clearer data regarding the extinction of the woolly mammoth from the geological record. Previously, the two methods were used separately, yielding less conclusive evidence of a human role in the extinction of the Woolly mammoth and other Pleistocene Megafauna. Additionally, recent years have seen an improvement in Paleoclimatic data, allowing scientists to draw a better conclusion from the existing data.