Thinking about a mammoth makes you think about a long stretch of time in Earth`s history. From about 5 million years to approximately 4,000 years before present.
After appearing in Africa, different species evolved and moved to Asia, Europe, and North America. The Siegsdorf mammoth, a woolly mammoth species, has been dated to a time about 45,000 years ago.
Woolly mammoths were covered in a thick coat of hair, keeping them warm in frigid areas. They had large, curved tusks that might have served for digging for food under the snow. They were around 13 feet (4 meters) tall and their weight reached up to 6 tons. Most of them went extinct about 11,000 years ago, probably due to a combination of climate change and hunting by early humans. Small populations persisted on islands off the coast of Siberia and Alaska that had become isolated by the rising sea level. The last known population inhabited Wrangel Island until 4,000 years ago. Woolly mammoths are considered to have been one of the most abundant megafaunal species during the middle to late Pleistocene. Many woolly mammoth bodies were preserved almost intact by permafrost of the Arctic and can be studied.
Mammoths and Science
In 2008, Miller and colleagues published a major part of the nuclear genome of woolly mammoths (Miller et al., 2008, Nature, 456:387-390). Permafrost is an ideal setting for preserving DNA in hair, which is an ideal source for sequencing. Based on the sequencing, the estimated divergence rate between mammoth and African elephant is half of that between human and chimpanzee. In 2015, the genome sequence was completed (Palkopoulou et al., 2015, Current Biology 25: 1395-1400), showing that sequencing can be very helpful to understand biology and evolution of extinct species.
Here, famous geneticists at Harvard University and MIT George Church comes in. In one of his projects, he works on the addition of genetic traits of the woolly mammoth such as long hair, thick layers of fat and cold-adapted blood to the genome of the asian elephant, who is the closest living relative of the woolly mammoth. This type of research is called science of de-extinction. Its current state of technology is covered in a book by Beth Alison Shapiro, an American evolutionary molecular biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz: How to Clone a Mammoth: The science of de-extinction, published on April 6, 2015.
Mammoths and Art
Wooly mammoths were one of the most popular subjects of neolithic artists. Their images were painted on the walls of western European caves. Take a look at the Rouffignac Cave in France. More than 220 animal representations have been registered, 70% of them being mammoths. No wonder the cave is also called Cave of the hundred mammoths. The paintings are dated to around 13,000 years ago, a time when the Siegsdorf mammoth was long dead. The cave was classified world heritage site in 1979 by UNESCO and can be visited.