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Mammoth Extinction: Two Continents and Wrangel Island

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2016

Paul S. Martin  and
Anthony J. Stuart
Paul S. Martin
Affiliation:
Desert Laboratory, The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721 USA
Anthony J. Stuart
Affiliation:
Norfolk Museums, Norwich NR1 3JU England
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A harvest of 300 radiocarbon dates on extinct elephants (Proboscidea) from the northern parts of the New and Old Worlds has revealed a striking difference. While catastrophic in North America, elephant extinction was gradual in Eurasia (Stuart 1991), where straight-tusked elephants (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) vanished 50 millennia or more before woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius). The range of the woolly mammoths started shrinking before 20 ka ago (Vartanyan et al. 1995). By 12 ka bp, the beasts were very scarce or absent in western Europe. Until the dating of Wrangel Island tusks and teeth (Vartanyan, Garrutt and Sher 1993), mammoths appeared to make their last stand on the Arctic coast of Siberia ca. 10 ka bp. The Wrangel Island find of dwarf mammoths by Sergy Vartanyan, V. E. Garrut and Andrei Sher (1993) stretched the extinction chronology of mammoths another 6 ka, into the time of the pharaohs.

Type
Articles
Information
Radiocarbon , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , 1995 , pp. 7 - 10
Copyright
Copyright © The American Journal of Science 

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