LINGERING QUESTIONS

“LYUBA,” AN AMAZINGLY WELL-PRESERVED BABY WOOLY MAMMOTH (DISPLAYED AT THE ROYAL BRITISH COLUMBIA MUSEUM IN 2016). LYUBA LIVED AROUND 40,000 YEARS AGO. SHE WAS FOUND IN SIBERIA IN 2007.

We’ve come a long way since the days when mammoth fossils were mistaken for the bones of giant humans. Scientists have learned a great deal about these ice age giants, and about the ancient people who shared their prehistoric world. Amazing fossils and frozen specimens have revealed how mammoths looked, what they ate, and how they grew.

But for all that is known, many questions remain, both for scientists and the public.

Whodunit?

The biggest unsolved mammoth mystery is also one of the oldest: What caused their extinction? Smithsonian paleontologist Frederic A. Lucas tackled this question over a century ago. “As to why the mammoth became extinct, we know absolutely nothing, although various theories, some much more ingenious than plausible, have been advanced to account for their extermination,” he wrote. A hundred years later, that’s still true. Scientists have narrowed things down to some leading suspects, but the available evidence has not yet allowed them to solve this very cold case.

It’s a hard question to answer because the fate of the mammoths is just one piece of a much bigger puzzle. Mammoths weren’t the only large animals to die off near the end of the most recent ice age: many dozens of species went extinct all across the globe. Mastodons, wooly rhinos, cave bears, saber-tooth cats, ground sloths, dire wolves, and giant armored armadillos all vanished roughly 11,000 years ago, as did many others. This worldwide wave of extinction was very sudden compared to the long ages of our planet’s history. And yet, it didn’t happen all at once. Over a few thousand years, species dwindled in one place and then another, perhaps for different reasons in different places. In each part of the world, some animals survived while others went extinct. (Bison survived in North America, for example, while mastodons did not.) Some animals died out in one place yet survived in others. (Horses and camels both vanished from North America, yet lived on elsewhere.)