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New study shows humans may be cause of woolly mammoth extinction
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A study published in Science Magazine recently shows new evidence of what may have killed off the woolly mammoth and other animals now extinct that roamed the countryside after the last ice age, according to a story on NPR.
Scientist’s think the clue may lie in a fungus that grew on the animals’ feces.
North America was home to mammoths, mastodons, beavers the size of black bears, giant ground sloths, camels and horses, and the American lion, said Jacqueline Gill, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin Madison.
Wooly Mammoth
“By about 11,000 years ago, we lose about half of the animals in North America larger than the size of a German shepherd, and that’s a pretty big ecological event,” Gill said on NPR.
Since there are not enough bones left to determine the precise reason for extinction, scientists studied a certain species of fungus that ended up in lake sediments dating back 15,000 years and only grows on the animal’s dung.
Gill said she and her colleagues disproved the long-believed theory that climate shift caused a change in vegetation that no longer provided nutrition for the animals resulting in their starvation.
But Gill said the animals began to disappear more than 14,000 years ago, before evidence of widespread vegetation changes occurred.
She said human beings likely contributed largely to the decline as they began moving into the country and hunting for food.
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