Man killed the mammoths? A new study relieves our ancestors: the warming after the ice age, the animals have ruined – they fled to an island in the Arctic.

Rising temperatures at the end of the ice ages have significantly affected the populations of the woolly mammoth wool – to the elephant ancestors finally extinct. Based on the analysis of the genome of mammoths Swedish and English researchers were able to prove now that the stock was reduced in warmer periods and aufsplittete.

This is not surprising for an animal that is well adapted to cold, said Eleftheria Palkopoulou the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm. Together with colleagues showed the researcher that the woolly mammoth population (Mammuthus primigenius) already aufteilte in a warm period about 120,000 years ago.

There is a distinct European branch was formed, which was then but displaced from the Siberian type and disappeared about 33,000 years ago, the scientists report in the journal “Proceedings of the Royal Society B”. In the second half of the last ice age not only populations are extinct – another mammoth holdings were expanded. At the end of the cold period, the number of animals but then fell dramatically.

It is obvious that with a prolonged warm period, the mammoth had become susceptible to its extinction, explained Love Dalén the Swedish Museum of Natural History. To understand why the species is completely extinct, researchers would have to look more closely at the last places where wool mammoths survived, added Ian Barnes of Royal Holloway, University of London. A retreat was until about 4000 years, the Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean.

Other scientists believe that the hunting of mammoth wool, also known as woolly mammoths, extinction of animals has caused or at least contributed to – the experts to deliver a fierce debate.

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