This could be the start of a palaeontological cold war. A paper published this week is claiming that the last woolly mammoths to roam the earth were not Russian but American.
“For more than a century, any discussion on the woolly mammoth has primarily focused on the well-studied Eurasian mammoths,” says Régis Debruyne of McMaster University in Canada (press release). “Little attention was dedicated to the North American samples, and it was generally assumed their contribution to the evolutionary history of the species was negligible. This study certainly proves otherwise.”
In Current Biology Debruyne and his colleagues report their DNA analysis of 160 mammoths from across ‘Holarctica’ (the Northern bits of Europe, Asia and North America). They say that during the end of the Pleistocene about 10,000 years ago New World mammoths replaced endemic Asian mammoths, meaning the Team USA’s tuskers were the last woolly mammoths standing.
“Migrations over Beringia [the land bridge that once spanned the Bering Strait] were rare; it served as a filter to keep eastern and western groups or populations of woollies apart,” says fellow paper author Hendrik Poinar (press release). “However, it now appears that mammoths established themselves in North America much earlier than presumed, then migrated back to Siberia, and eventually replaced all pre-existing haplotypes of mammoths.”
And as Poinar tells the NY Times: “I’m not sure the Russians would be happy that their iconic woolly mammoth has North American origins.”
Another author of the paper Ross MacPhee, of the American Museum of Natural History, told Scientific American, “That we find such complete disappearance of the early Siberian groups is pretty remarkable. It sounds like something really bad happened around 40,000 years ago that resulted in their collapse on that continent. It’s a strange and provocative finding.”
Science News says the result helps explain an earlier finding by Web Miller and colleagues at Penn State that there were two different types of mammoth roaming Siberia at the same time.
“We couldn’t explain it,” says Miller. “Poinar’s team has started to piece together at least some scenario that would explain that genetic split.”
This raises another issue. Poinar notes that we don’t know yet why the Siberian mammoths went extinct, an event that is suspiciously close to the time the American immigrants arrived…
PS: I can’t find any coverage of this in the Russian press.
Image: Hendrik Poinar.