Mammoth Time Line
The history of mammoths begins in the distant past, but we are still learning new things about them to this day. Key moments in the development and discovery of these fascinating creatures:
55 million years ago: A group of mammals emerges in Africa and begins to develop trunks and tusks.
6 million B.C.: Mammoths and modern-day elephants diverge.
3 – 3.5 million B.C.: The first non-African species of mammoth, the southern mammoth, migrates into Europe.
1.8 million B.C.: The ancestral mammoth, M. meridionalis, crosses the Bering Strait from Asia and arrives in North America.
500,000 – 250,000 B.C.: The woolly mammoth crosses the Bering Strait from Asia into North America.
40,000 B.C.: The climate in Eurasia and North America becomes wetter and warmer. Forests expand to the north and compete with the low shrubs and grasses of the Pleistocene tundra, cutting mammoth habitats by almost 90 percent. Humans migrate into core mammoth habitats.
40,000 B.C.: A 1-month-old baby mammoth, later to be rediscovered and named “Lyuba,” dies somewhere on the Yamal Peninsula in Russia.
10,000 B.C.: Larger mammoth species begin to decline.
4,000 – 1,700 B.C.: The last mammoths die.
A.D. 1799: The first largely intact frozen mammoth carcass is unearthed in Siberia.
May, A.D. 2007: Yuri Khudi discovers the preserved remains of a baby mammoth, “Lyuba,” on the banks of the Yuribei River on the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia, Russia.
November, A.D. 2008: Scientists sequence the woolly mammoth’s nuclear genome using a technique that could reveal the genomes of Neanderthals and early humans. This groundbreaking work may even help save some of today’s critically endangered species. While some scientists believe that sequencing the woolly mammoth genome may make resurrecting these ice age animals a possibility, others argue that there are far too many obstacles for this to be achieved.
^M
