Woolly Mammoth: The Ice Age Giant, Its Fossils and Its Extinction

The woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) was a cold-adapted member of the elephant family that lived across northern Europe, Asia and North America from roughly 400,000 years ago. Covered in thick fur and armed with long curved tusks, it shared the Ice Age landscape with early modern humans and Neanderthals, who hunted it, used its bones and painted it on cave walls. Its frozen carcasses, cave art depictions and late survival on a remote Arctic island make it the best-known symbol of the Ice Age.

Origins

Mammoths evolved in Africa about 5 million years ago and later spread into Eurasia. The woolly mammoth descended from the steppe mammoth (Mammuthus trogontherii), a larger species that lived in the colder parts of Eurasia. Fossil and genetic evidence suggests that the woolly mammoth emerged in north-east Siberia, probably around 400,000 years ago, and later spread west into Europe.

Woolly mammoths crossed into North America by way of the Bering Land Bridge roughly 100,000 years ago, at a time of low sea level. There they lived alongside the larger Columbian mammoth, which occupied more southern regions.

In 2021 scientists reported DNA recovered from mammoth teeth found in Siberian permafrost that were more than a million years old, the oldest DNA ever sequenced at the time. The results shed new light on how mammoth lineages split and mixed before the woolly mammoth appeared.

Built for the cold

Woolly mammoths were about the size of modern African elephants. Adult males stood roughly 2.7 to 3.4 metres at the shoulder and weighed up to about 6 tonnes. Their tusks could exceed 4 metres in length in large males, curving outwards and then inwards.

Their bodies were adapted to the cold in many ways:

• a coat of long outer guard hairs over a dense, woolly underfur;
• small ears and a short tail, reducing heat loss;
• a thick layer of fat beneath the skin;
• a flap of skin covering the anus, protecting against the cold;
• a high, domed head and a sloping back with a fatty hump at the shoulders.

Their teeth were large, ridged grinding plates suited to tough grasses and sedges. Like elephants, mammoths had six sets of molars that came into use one after another during life, so worn teeth help scientists estimate an animal’s age at death.

The mammoth steppe

The woolly mammoth’s home was the “mammoth steppe”, a vast, cold and dry grassland that stretched during glacial periods from Spain across Europe and Asia to Canada. It supported large herds of grazing animals, including woolly rhinoceroses, horses, bison, reindeer and saiga antelope, as well as predators such as cave lions and wolves.

Unlike today’s tundra, this landscape was rich in grasses and herbs. Plant remains found in mammoth stomachs and in permafrost sediments show that the animals ate grasses, sedges, flowering herbs and some shrubs.

Frozen carcasses

Mammoth bones and tusks have been found across the northern hemisphere for centuries. What makes the species unique is the number of carcasses preserved in the permafrost of Siberia and Alaska, sometimes with skin, hair and soft tissue intact.

• The Adams mammoth, discovered in 1799 in the Lena delta of Siberia, was recovered by the botanist Mikhail Adams in 1806. Its skeleton, displayed in St Petersburg, was among the first mammoth skeletons mounted for public view.
• The Berezovka mammoth was excavated in north-east Siberia in 1901 by an expedition from the Russian Academy of Sciences. It was found partly in a sitting position and still had food in its mouth and stomach.
• Dima, a young calf found near Magadan in 1977, drew international attention to frozen mammoths.
• Lyuba, a calf about one month old, was found on the Yamal Peninsula in 2007. Dated to about 42,000 years ago, she is one of the most complete mammoths ever discovered.

These finds allow scientists to study hair colour, fat stores, diet and disease, and they have provided the DNA used to sequence complete mammoth genomes.

Mammoths and humans

Ice Age hunters and artists

Neanderthals and modern humans lived alongside woolly mammoths for tens of thousands of years. Mammoth bones, tusks and teeth were used for tools, fuel, carvings and shelters. At sites such as Mezhyrich in Ukraine, people built huts from hundreds of mammoth bones around 15,000 years ago.

Mammoths appear frequently in Ice Age art. The cave of Rouffignac in France is known as the “Cave of the Hundred Mammoths”, and mammoths are also depicted at Chauvet, Font-de-Gaume and other painted caves. Ivory figurines from Germany’s Swabian Jura, more than 35,000 years old, include small carved mammoths.

In 1864 the French prehistorian Édouard Lartet and his colleagues found a piece of mammoth ivory at La Madeleine in the Dordogne engraved with the image of a mammoth. It was powerful evidence that humans had lived at the same time as extinct Ice Age animals, an idea that was still controversial in the nineteenth century.

How science discovered extinction

The woolly mammoth played a key role in establishing that species can become extinct. In 1796 the French naturalist Georges Cuvier compared mammoth bones with those of living Indian and African elephants and showed that the mammoth was a separate species no longer alive anywhere on Earth. In 1799 the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach gave it a scientific name, Elephas primigenius, later moved to the genus Mammuthus.

The English word “mammoth” comes from Russian mamont, which was probably borrowed from a language of Siberia. By the early nineteenth century it had also become an everyday word meaning “huge”.

Extinction: climate or humans?

Woolly mammoth numbers rose and fell with the climate during the Ice Age. After the Last Glacial Maximum, roughly 26,000 to 19,000 years ago, rapid warming turned much of the mammoth steppe into wet tundra, forest and bog. The animals’ range shrank to the far north of Siberia and Alaska, and most mainland populations disappeared between about 15,000 and 10,000 years ago.

Small populations survived on islands cut off by rising seas. On St Paul Island in the Bering Sea, mammoths lived until about 5,600 years ago; research suggests that shrinking freshwater supplies played a major part in their end. On Wrangel Island, off north-east Siberia, mammoths survived until roughly 4,000 years ago. Their genomes show low genetic diversity and an accumulation of harmful mutations, though the final cause of their disappearance is unclear.

Scientists continue to debate the main drivers of the mainland extinction:

• Climate change reduced and broke up the grasslands mammoths needed.
• Human hunting increased as human populations grew and spread, and even modest hunting could have tipped small, slow-breeding populations into decline.

Most researchers now argue that both mattered, with climate shrinking the habitat and human pressure removing the last refuges. The woolly mammoth’s extinction is one part of the wider Quaternary megafauna extinction.

Legacy

The woolly mammoth is one of the most recognisable prehistoric animals in popular culture, from museum halls to children’s books and animated films. Its image as a shaggy giant of the snows owes much to the frozen carcasses of Siberia, which showed its fur and soft anatomy in a way that bones alone could not. Natural history museums in St Petersburg, London, Paris and elsewhere built their Ice Age displays around mammoth skeletons, and the animal remains a favourite way of introducing the idea of extinction to the public.

Research on mammoths also continues to advance science more broadly. The first complete mammoth genomes, published in 2015, became test cases for methods of studying ancient DNA, population size and inbreeding in extinct species.

Mammoth ivory from thawing permafrost is still collected in Siberia and sold legally in many countries, a trade that raises concerns about its use to disguise illegal elephant ivory. The species also features in debates about “de-extinction”: in 2021 a United States company announced a project to create cold-adapted elephants with mammoth-like traits using gene editing. Many scientists question whether this is feasible or desirable.

By the numbers

Timeline

• c. 400,000 years ago: The woolly mammoth emerges in north-east Siberia.
• c. 100,000 years ago: Woolly mammoths reach North America via Beringia.
• c. 26,000 to 19,000 years ago: Last Glacial Maximum; the mammoth steppe is at its widest.
• c. 15,000 to 10,000 years ago: Most mainland populations die out.
• c. 5,600 years ago: The St Paul Island population disappears.
• c. 4,000 years ago: The last known mammoths, on Wrangel Island, die out.
• 1796: Georges Cuvier shows that mammoths are an extinct species.
• 1799: The Adams mammoth is found in Siberia; Blumenbach names the species.
• 1864: An engraved mammoth on mammoth ivory is found at La Madeleine, France.
• 2007: The frozen calf Lyuba is discovered on the Yamal Peninsula.

Why it matters

The woolly mammoth was central to the discovery that species can disappear forever. Its frozen remains offer an unmatched window into Ice Age life, and its long coexistence with humans, recorded in art and bone dwellings, links our own history directly to the vanished world of the Ice Age.