Study of a Woolly Mammoth Shows Where It Roamed From Birth to Death
Paleontologists have reconstructed the life history of a male mammoth who traveled across Alaska 17,000 years ago.
We might not be able to study a walking, breathing woolly mammoth in real life, but what if we could track its movements and get a sense of where it traveled, from its birth to its death? For the first time ever, scientists have done just that.
An international team of researchers published a paper this week in the journal Science that reveals the 28-year movement history of a male woolly mammoth. With exciting detail about where it roamed throughout northern Alaska, its seemingly favorite locations—as it returned time and time again—and where it eventually died, this paper offers unparalleled insight into an animal that lived approximately 17,000 years ago.
His movement, for the first two years of his life, was restricted to an area within the interior of northern Alaska. Between 2 and 16 years of age, when he was considered a juvenile, he started to move over a larger expanse of land. The authors believe this might reflect the movement of a herd, if mammoths had a similar social structure as today’s elephants. He began to travel considerable distances, however, when he matured at age 16 or so, and throughout his life, he often returned to specific areas within Alaska.
Image: JR Ancheta University of Alaska Fairbanks
With an in-depth discovery such as this, it might be tempting to think these scientists had access to a complete woolly mammoth skeleton—lots of fossil material to help them form their hypotheses. But in truth, they had mere fragments: two complete tusks, parts of its skull, and some of its jaw with intact teeth.
But those scattered parts were enough. The team used a variety of scientific analyses to shed light on the travels of this ancient beast. Ancient DNA revealed its sex and its clade, a term meaning organisms with a common ancestor. The team sliced one entire tusk down the middle to both sample and examine it. To learn more about the mammoth’s migration, they used a neat trick called isotopic analysis.
Isotopes are like chemical footprints, and they are in everything around us. Being able to read those chemical footprints in their various forms can help us understand more about diet, for example, or where an animal roamed. Some isotopes reflect the geology of specific environments; some reflect the type of precipitation and season within an environment. All of us—animals and plants—ingest them and incorporate them into our bodies.
Scientists, if they have the appropriate samples and tools, can “read” them. It’s a highly complex type of science, but one that is growing in popularity across paleontology and archaeology because it can reveal so many fascinating details.
The bulk of the work centered around one of the tusks. Proboscideans—mammoths, mastodons, elephants, and their relatives—are one of the rare types of animal uniquely suited for understanding an entire life history. Those histories are stored in their tusks, where daily growth increments, information about diet, seasons, and even pregnancy, can be read from the moment they are born to their death. It is therefore no surprise that the authors chose this as their starting point. What is surprising is how they went about doing it.
Image: JR Ancheta University of Alaska Fairbanks
Matthew Wooller, co-lead and senior author of the new paper, is a professor at the College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences and Institute of Northern Engineering at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He is also director of the Alaska Stable Isotope Facility, which has a relatively new, high-tech instrument crucial to this study (its full name: a Laser Ablation Multi-Collector Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometer).
It’s not enough to have the technology. Understanding both how to set up the equipment and then knowing how to use it will impact the results. Co-authors Johanna Irrgeher and Thomas Prohaska are experts in isotope ratio analysis, and they helped Wooller and his team in the initial set-up. Obtaining accurate isotope ratio measurements, said Irrgeher, research scientist at Montanuniversität Leoben in Austria, is “still an art.”
Irrgeher reflected on the type of research typically done with this kind of technology: the study of ear bones in fish. Consider, for a moment, an ear bone in a fish versus a woolly mammoth tusk. “We took that same high-resolution micro-technology and applied it on a macro scale,” said Wooller.
Prohaska said he believes “you need to be crazy to be a good scientist,” and he means it in the best possible way: having the courage to think differently and to try things others might not even consider possible. He described the enormous size of this mammoth’s tusk—1.7 meters—and compared it to the very tiny space within the instrument they would be using to analyze it. He remembers thinking of his Alaskan colleagues, “You want to put samples of this tusk into a laser cell of this size?? You people are really crazy!”
“Mat [Wooller] really brought this research to a very high level,” Irrgeher said.
To help them understand where the mammoth traveled, the authors turned to strontium isotope geochemistry. Strontium isotopes, said Joshua Miller, paleoecologist and assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati who was not involved in the research, are “a geographically informative chemical marker sourced from the animal’s environment and local geology, and acquired by an animal as it eats and drinks.”
In a nutshell, it’s almost like a tracking device. Strontium is in the ground; it is ingested by plants through their roots; herbivores eat the plants and therefore unknowingly ingest the strontium; the strontium is stored in the animal’s teeth (or, in this case, the tusk—which is actually a really long tooth); and then, thousands of years later, scientists can tell where the animal has been throughout its life.
Image: Pam Groves University of Alaska Fairbanks
To create the history of the mammoth’s life, they used something called isoscapes, which map the type of strontium found across a specific landscape. Two of today’s co-authors and others mapped the various kinds of strontium across Alaska by using the teeth of rodent specimens housed at the University of Alaska Museum Mammal Collection.
They began where the mammoth died, an area they suspect was close to where the fossils were found in 2010, and worked backward, tracing its route from death back to the moment of birth. They applied certain logical inferences when mapping the mammoth’s movement to the isotopic data. For example, they assumed “that this mammoth couldn’t fly,” Wooller mentioned in a video interview, smiling, and therefore couldn’t travel over impossible terrain such as cliffs or other “extreme topography.”
“This animal,” he continued, “was alive 17,000 years ago, pretty much at the height of the last Ice Age. A lot of people outside of Alaska assume that we were covered by ice during the Ice Age, but that’s not true. The majority of it was NOT covered by ice.”
“We never really knew what we were going to see as each tusk section came off the mass spectrometer,” Wooller recalled. “We were plotting it up in real time to say, ‘ah, look! It stopped for a while!’ And ‘oh, look! It’s headed up north again!’”
Remarkably, some of the mammoth’s most oft-traveled routes are used today by herds of caribou. Perhaps more interesting, some of these routes are not only close to locations where numerous other mammoth fossils have been found but to known sites of ancient humans. If all or even most mammoths in Alaska traveled as much as the one in this study, Wooller mentioned, this would have implications for potential contact with ancient humans when they later migrated to the area.
“The general areas regularly used by this mammoth are also used by the earliest Beringian hunters,” wrote co-author and archaeologist Ben Potter in an email, “focused on the Yukon river basin and northwest Alaska, with relatively few occupations in the southwest, south-central, and far eastern unglaciated regions. In other words, the habitat likely favored both species, mammoths and humans.”
But, for now, he wrote, “the exact nature of human-mammoth interactions remains tantalizingly ambiguous.”
Katy Smith, associate professor of geology and curator of paleontology at Georgia Southern University who was not involved in the study, is a tusk specialist. She wrote in an email, “I think this is an amazing level of insight—it’s certainly something I would like to know about every tusk on every proboscidean.”
Smith noted that paleontologists “can all do a lot of different things with the resources that we have,” whether that involves high-tech equipment or relying on more basic tools such as taking measurements and observing growth patterns in tusks, much like tree rings. It is, she said, “why science is a community. We all can bring our different skills and strengths to it.”
“I’m fascinated to see that mammoths act like modern caribou!” she wrote. “Seeing patterns of behavior in extinct animals repeated in extant animals really puts life back into the extinct forms. This study infers that mammoths were successful until the environment changed, something that we see time and time again for extinct—and extant—animals.”
“We often make these assumptions that these extinct animals behaved much like their living cousins do today,” Advait Jukar, Yale paleontologist who was not involved in the research, said in a video interview, “but there is no good way to test this unless we have direct evidence from the fossil record. And this [paper] is a great test of that.”
One of the more poignant aspects of the paper was the description of the mammoth’s death. According to nitrogen isotopes in the tusk, evidence suggests that he died of starvation in late winter or spring. The authors wonder whether a harsh winter, which may have frozen the snow, would have prevented access to the vegetation underneath.
“You can almost see the animal dying,” Miller expressed in a video interview. “You can really feel it. I mean, that kind of nitrogen excursion is really dramatic. To me, this suggests he may have even been suffering during the end of his life.”
Jukar, noting the relatively young age of 28 when this mammoth died, said that he would like to see more research on other mammoths to see “if there are periods in the geological past when these animals were dying younger in a particular part of Alaska, as it can add more nuance to our understanding of how the environment is affecting their population dynamics.”
“For the first time, we’ve learned something specific about the behavior of an extinct animal!” Beth Shapiro, co-author and paleogeneticist, wrote in an email. “With more data like this from other individuals, we will begin to tease out how behavioral patterns like movement changed as the environment changed and habitats shifted, or even as people became increasingly present on the landscape. These sorts of data sets bring us closer to really understanding how shifting climates and habitats impacted species and, perhaps, drove them to extinction.”
It took a multidisciplinary, international team over a year to interpret the migration of this one mammoth. One individual animal alone cannot offer insight into the eventual extinction of an entire species, but they hope this is a starting point.
See more here: gizmodo.com
Header image: James Haven
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Howdy
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This isn’t remotely my subject, but I’m trying to get my head around It.
I have questions:
“To learn more about the mammoth’s migration, they used a neat trick called isotopic analysis.”
Trick?! It’s also something of an art too?
Since they have no idea of the Mammoths footprint, weight, or anything else that I would consider an absolute requirement, how did they possibly do that? Find the missing teeth in various places in varying states of decay or something? Seems this isotopic analysis can do that. Though even that’s not enough for me.
“They began where the mammoth died, an area they suspect was close to where the fossils were found in 2010, and worked backward, tracing its route from death back to the moment of birth. They applied certain logical inferences when mapping the mammoth’s movement to the isotopic data.”
Suspect? inferences? They have DNA of this animal where the birth fluid stained the dust or something, to prove that? How could It…. I best leave It there.
If they did indeed manage this, that’s some achievement, but for me, It doesn’t compute.
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Jerry Krause
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Hi Howdy,
It just so happened that this weekend there was TV show (PBS as I remember) about Mammoths. And it featured the Mammoth site at Hot Springs, South Dakota (western SD) which is described at this link (https://www.mammothsite.org/who-we-are/). I was born and grew up in eastern SD and was teaching chemistry at a small community college in northern Minnesota. And we had traveled to the Black Hills (western SD) to ski during Christmas vacation a couple of years before 1976 when the Hot Springs Mammoth site was discovered. And until the TV programs had no knowledge of the site’s existence. I had read this article before you made your comment.
Which made a series of coincidences which I term: My God Sightings.
If you do a some Google research you will find that more than Mammoth fossils have been found near the search in western SD, eastern Wyoming, eastern Montana, and western North Dakota. Which seems interesting in that Great Basin of oil has also been found about a mile beneath the surface in western ND. But no coal or lignite in SD which is common in Wyoming, Montana, and western ND.
So, I am happy to find you are CURIOUS about CREATED NATURAL LIFE as well as the PHYSICAL ASPECTS OF NATURALLY CREATED PLANETS.
Much to discuss and ponder. Keep up the good work!!!
Have a good day, Jerry
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Andy
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I’m a fan if the British tv series Time Team, which ran for 20 years, and one of the techniques developed during that time was strontium analysis, which allowed archaeologists to determine which areas animals had lived him, by taking samples from teeth. As you rightly say, they can’t know the size or weight of the Mammoth, but they can at least tell where he lived.
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Howdy
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Hi Andy,
From birth to death though? They only have a small sample of them, and that means If they were the basis, they knew exactly where these teeth would be found. How is that possible?
It seems the tusk is the main identifier. It is a “time capsule” by all accounts.
“According to nitrogen isotopes in the tusk, evidence suggests that he died of starvation in late winter or spring.”
Nah!!
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Howdy
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My curious disposition is a need Jerry. I can’t help It.
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Jerry Krause
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Hi Howdy,
Here is some food to feed your need. It is from ‘Genius’ about Richard Feynman by James Gleick. “His community now assigned a kind of intellectual primacy to phenomena that could be observed only in the searing less-than-an-instant of a particle collision. But a part of him still preferred to give fundamental a different definition. “What we are talking about is real and at hand: Nature,” he wrote to a correspondent in India who had, he thought, spent too much time reading about esoteric phenomena.”
“Learn by trying to understand simple things in terms of other ideas–always honestly and directly. What keeps the clouds up, why can’t I see stars in the daytime, why do colors appear on oily water, what makes the lines on the surface of water being poured from a pitcher, why does a hanging lampsoing back and forth–and all the innumerable little things you see all around you. Then when you have learned what an explanation really is, you can then go to more subtle questions.” (Feynman)
Have a good day, Jerry
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Howdy
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Are you telling me I should learn to walk before I can run?
I take pleasure in simple things Jerry. The sound of trickling water. Watching water snails, newts , or culturing Daphnia. I can figure out a lot of simple things for myself, as well as difficult ones , but the answers I’m looking for are not available on the Earth.
One thing I believe is that other planets, or galaxies, are unique, and taking observations made on Earth, then applying them Universe-wide, simply doesn’t work for me. This is why I speak as I do. It Is my belief one can see what they are meant to see, and nothing more.
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Jerry Krause
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Hi Howdy,
First, I am not telling you what to do. I do endorse what Feynman advised his Indian correspondent to do.
However, you wrote: “I can figure out a lot of simple things for myself, as well as difficult ones , but the answers I’m looking for are not available on the Earth.”
Feynman gave his correspondent specific, observable, natural phenomenon to explain (honestly and directly). Are you being honest and direct when you do not give an example of a ‘simple thing’ that you have honestly and directly explained.to allow someone else to judge if you have ‘really’ explained the observed phenomenon.
John Hill in his textbook–Chemistry For Changing Times–gave the students questions to answer to test the student if he could explain it from what information Hill had given the students in the text.
One question was: How is a SCIENTIFIC LAW different from a Governmental Law given this definition and example of a Scientific Law: “Scientific laws merely summarize experimental data. For example, Lavoisier found that in each reactions he carried out, the total weight of the products was equal to the total weight of reactants. He summarized these findings as the law of conservation of mass. This law has been verified repeatedly through the years.” It took me as the instructor a couple of years to find the answer which I could honesty conclude that Hill expected in posing the question. For once one finds his expected answer, one REALLY knows, without doubt, it is the only BEST answer.
So, take a shot at answering this question for all PSI Readers to read.
And please tell me what is a question whose answer is not available on the Earth and I will take a shot at answering it to your satisfaction.
Have a good day, Jerry
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MattH
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Nullius In Verba
The Royal Society’s motto ‘Nullius in verba’ is taken to mean ‘take nobody’s word for it’. It is an expression of the determination of Fellows to withstand the domination of authority and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment.
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Howdy
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“First, I am not telling you what to do”
I didn’t think you were, I couldn’t get the gist of your comment.
“Are you being honest and direct”
I am allways honest and direct. It usually brings problems.
I’m often asked by children what does this mean, or what that does, increasingly so these days. A simple answer is rarely enough though. fx: “why do colors appear on oily water”. I would say to them, oil is made up of different things, and the colours are how we see those things when water touches them, like a rainbow makes different colours when the sun shines through raindrops as It rains. I will take the time to ensure understanding as far as is possible.
I guess that’s not simple, but It’s me.
Full answer: https://www.quora.com/When-oil-mixes-with-water-and-the-colours-appear-why-do-certain-colours-appear-in-certain-areas?
A scientific law is that which is not open to interpretation. If the procedure is followed, the answer must allways be the same. Government law is the opposite, and is based on need or want. It can be, and often is, interpreted in almost any way.
My questions can’t be answered Jerry. They concern matters beyond this life, yet connected.
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Jerry Krause
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Hi Howdy and PSI Readers,
The last shall be first. I considered your questions concerned matters beyond this PHYSICAL UNIVERSE. But, I didn’t want to assume this.
Now relative to the quora question: “When oil mixes with water and the colours appear, why do certain colours appear in certain areas?”
Quora divides the answers into two groups: The preferred answer (my definition) and Related Answers (Ouora’s definition)
What I first read the answers I missed the fact of Related Answers. But when I saw this I saw there was a Reason (my opinion) for these Related Answers. For the question began “When oil mixes with water”!!! So it seems these related answers considered the generally known (observed) fact OIL DOES NOT MIX WITH WATER. Which had to be the reason for the thin films of oil of varying thickness which Quora considered to be the PROPER FOCUS of the RELATED ANSWERS.
I ask you (Howdy): Do we not need to first address the fact that OIL DOES NOT MIX WITH WATER before we consider thin films of oil which quickly spread out on a water surface until the thicknesses of the oil layer are very, very thin. I would also fault the Related Answers for not referring to the specific WAVE LENGTHS of light which are observed to be related to specific COLORS OF LIGHT. Which can allow one to know the actual thickness of the OIL FILM when appears BLUE and that which appears Red. etc.
Having considered this I would simply explain the intensity of the color seen to be the result of two reflections (one from the surface of the film and the other from the surface of the water which are phase with each other (hence double) when seen by one’s eye. No need to refer to any interference or diffraction which is involved in manufactured ‘instruments.
If you reads Adrian Mudd’s answer, you have the answer to why so many consider that SCIENCE is complicated instead of SIMPLE as suggested by Einstein.
Now, you evaluate my comments.
Have a good day, Jerry
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Howdy
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Hi Jerry,
“beyond this PHYSICAL UNIVERSE.”
But still present.
“Do we not need to first address the fact that OIL DOES NOT MIX WITH WATER ”
Invariably that would be revealed as the description continued, like I could say: “you know why the colours are only at the top?”
I find It leads to easier understanding, possibly leading to more questions, which does actually happen. Were I writing an actual essay on It, I would be more formal.
“Having considered this…”
If you need to go into such depth, then yes. It depends on the depth of answer the questioner wants.
I rarely need to. For example, If I get a call from a relative who’s car makes a “chattering” sound, or turns slowly on the key and wouldn’t start, (and say the instrument lights go out at the same time) yet earlier that day the car was used with no apparent problems and he asks, “should I get a new battery?” I would likely state: “Need to check the alternator first, because If It’s that, you will be no further on. Your car will start for a bit, but in a short time, you will be back in stuck street and the new battery will also possibly be damaged.” Though It can go much deeper than that, this would usually be enough.
“Have you fixed It?”. “Yeah, poor connection on the battery terminal”. Simple. No need to go into the reasons for contact cleanliness, or adequate torque settings on the battery post clamp bolt.
Were I trying to educate somebody about why I chose that route of action, It would take much longer, requiring at least some description of the charging system etc. It’s not required usually, so I could just say that without the alternator keeping the battery topped up continuously, It will run down, just like a phone, or laptop etc, and you would need to keep stopping to recharge It yourself, with the inconvenience that causes.
I see I’m going on a bit.
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A Reasonable Man
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Just curious what the answer to the question is? How do they tell exactly where the animal travelled? Traces of know food sources from minerals in the tusk, or something like that. The responses where a little too philosophical for me to gleen a specific answer.
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Howdy
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Basically, they cut a tusk down the middle and checked the isotopes:
“To help them understand where the mammoth traveled, the authors turned to strontium isotope geochemistry. Strontium isotopes, said Joshua Miller, paleoecologist and assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati who was not involved in the research, are “a geographically informative chemical marker sourced from the animal’s environment and local geology, and acquired by an animal as it eats and drinks.”
In a nutshell, it’s almost like a tracking device. Strontium is in the ground; it is ingested by plants through their roots; herbivores eat the plants and therefore unknowingly ingest the strontium; the strontium is stored in the animal’s teeth (or, in this case, the tusk—which is actually a really long tooth); and then, thousands of years later, scientists can tell where the animal has been throughout its life.”
The process appears fraught with difficulty, and Is open to interpretation, and even results, depending on who’s doing the setting up, and reading the results.
“thousands of years later, scientists can tell where the animal has been throughout its life”.
Still doesn’t answer how they know where It went. How far would a Mammoth trek? All the land available to the animal would need to be scanned to find appropriate matches to be accurate, I would have thought.
I can only suspect they got matches over a period, in certain places known to have been frequented by Mammoths, and drew conclusions. The scientists are at least trying Elephants as a guide:
The authors believe this might reflect the movement of a herd, if mammoths had a similar social structure as today’s elephants.”
I feel that may not be useful based on the different climate and such.
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Howdy
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I presume convo is over then, Jerry.
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Jerry Krause
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Hi Howdy,
I did not see your comment of this morning until now. Because I am writing this comment, I consider I am proving the convo is not over. Except my Webster’s does not define convo even though the computer does not consider it to be misspelled. So you need to write what is your definition of this word.
I just lost a comment I had just concluded with a request for your age. Because as I review various of your statements it seems you could be younger than older. Wet behind the ears instead of dry behind the ears.
Have a good day, Jerry
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Howdy
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Hi Jerry,
Convo is conversation.
My last reply to you was August 17, 2021 at 7:33 pm. i was expecting a reply from you, and I have seen you around a few times commenting since then and wondered. It seemed you had left me hanging, so I thought I would ask. It would not be unusual If you did. It Is the way of things.
I don’t divulge anything about myself other than maybe, clues. I see no need. All I will say Is, I am young In mind and heart. Not so much In body. I am not wet behind the ears, nor dry.
Cryptic I know, but that Is how It has to be.
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