Mammoths lived in interior and Arctic Alaska up until about 13,000 years ago. By analyzing the tusk of a mammoth, we can learn about where it lived throughout different times of its life.
Art by Mauricio Anton
Readers may remember a blog post from last November which described how scientists had tracked the lifetime movements of a male Alaskan mammoth that lived 17,100 years ago, by analysing the isotope record in its tusks.
This is possible because mammoth tusks, like those of elephants, grow continually throughout their lifetime and contain a record of the stable isotopes of strontium (87Sr and 86Sr) in their food, deposited in annual growth rings similar to those of trees, which is dependent on the ratios of those isotopes in the soil the plants grew in. By comparing the record in their tusks with known isotope maps, their movement can be mapped.
Creationists should note that these are naturally-occurring, stable, i.e., not radioactive, isotopes of strontium, so they do not decay to other elements over time, nor do the ratios change significantly over time, so modern maps of these isotope ratios in the soil are valid for tens of thousands of years ago.
Now the same team who used this technique to work out the travels of a male Alaskan mammoth, 17,100 years ago, have repeated used it to map the travels of a female which lived 3,000 years late, and have shown that humans had established encampments close to the routes these mammoths used. The mammoth tusk used was excavated from the Swan Point archaeological site along with the remains of two juvenile mammoths and signs of a campfire, stone tools and the butchered remains of other animals.
The account of the discovery is published, open access in Science Advances and is explained in a news release from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks:
Researchers have linked the travels of a 14,000-year-old woolly mammoth with the oldest known human settlements in Alaska, providing clues about the relationship between the iconic species and some of the earliest people to travel across the Bering Land Bridge.From the team's open access paper in Science Advances:
Scientists made those connections by using isotope analysis to study the life of a female mammoth, named Élmayųujey'eh by the Healy Lake Village Council. A tusk from Elma was discovered at the Swan Point archaeological site in Interior Alaska. Samples from the tusk revealed details about Elma and the roughly 1,000-kilometer journey she took through Alaska and northwestern Canada during her lifetime.
Isotopic data, along with DNA from other mammoths at the site and archaeological evidence, indicates that early Alaskans likely structured their settlements to overlap with areas where mammoths congregated. Those findings, highlighted in the new issue of the journal Science Advances, provide evidence that mammoths and early hunter-gatherers shared habitat in the region. The long-term predictable presence of woolly mammoths would have attracted humans to the area.
The mammoth tusk was excavated and identified in 2009 by Charles Holmes, affiliate research professor of anthropology at UAF, and François Lanoë, research associate in archaeology at the University of Alaska Museum of the North. They found Elma’s tusk and the remains of two related juvenile mammoths, along with evidence of campfires, the use of stone tools and butchered remains of other game. All of this “indicates a pattern consistent with human hunting of mammoths,” said Ben Potter, an archaeologist and professor of anthropology at UAF.She wandered around the densest region of archaeological sites in Alaska. It looks like these early people were establishing hunting camps in areas that were frequented by mammoths.
Audrey Rowe, lead author
Ph.D. student
University of Alaska, Fairbanks, AK, USA.
Researchers at UAF’s Alaska Stable Isotope Facility then analyzed thousands of samples from Elma’s tusk to recreate her life and travels. Isotopes provide chemical markers of an animal’s diet and location. The markers are then recorded in the bones and tissues of animals and remain even after they die.
Mammoth tusks are well-suited to isotopic study because they grew throughout the ancient animals’ lives, with clearly visible layers appearing when split lengthwise. Those growth bands give researchers a way to collect a chronological record of a mammoth’s life by studying isotopes in samples along the tusk.
Using that isotopic data, researchers determined Elma was a healthy 20-year-old female. Much of her journey overlapped with that of a previously studied male mammoth who lived 3,000 years earlier, demonstrating long-term movement patterns by mammoths over several millennia.
The era in which Elma lived may have compounded the challenges posed by the relatively recent appearance of humans. The grass- and shrub-dominated steppe landscape that had been common in Interior Alaska was beginning to shift toward more forested terrain.She was a young adult in the prime of life. Her isotopes showed she was not malnourished and that she died in the same season as the seasonal hunting camp at Swan Point where her tusk was found.
Professor Matthew Wooller, senior author
Director of the Alaska Stable Isotope Facility
College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, AK, USA.
“Climate change at the end of the ice age fragmented mammoths’ preferred open habitat, potentially decreasing movement and making them more vulnerable to human predation,” Potter said.
Other contributors to the study included the University of Alaska Anchorage, University of Ottawa, McMaster University, University of Alaska Museum of the North, University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology, Adelphi University, University of Arizona, Hakai Institute and the Healy Lake Village Council.
AbstractNone of this information about people hunting mammoths in Alaska or woolly mammoths crossing from Siberia into what is now North America could have appeared in the Bible because the authors of it were completely ignorant of mammoths (and their relatives, elephants, which don't get a mention in the Bible), Siberia, Alaska or even people living in those places.
Woolly mammoths in mainland Alaska overlapped with the region’s first people for at least a millennium. However, it is unclear how mammoths used the space shared with people. Here, we use detailed isotopic analyses of a female mammoth tusk found in a 14,000-year-old archaeological site to show that she moved ~1000 kilometers from northwestern Canada to inhabit an area with the highest density of early archaeological sites in interior Alaska until her death. DNA from the tusk and other local contemporaneous archaeological mammoth remains revealed that multiple mammoth herds congregated in this region. Early Alaskans seem to have structured their settlements partly based on mammoth prevalence and made use of mammoths for raw materials and likely food.
INTRODUCTION
Woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius), an iconic ice age species, are undergoing a cultural, scientific, and perhaps even literal renaissance stemming from new evidence of late-surviving populations (1–5), ongoing debate about the causes of their extinction (6–9), and well-publicized efforts to “de-extinct” them (10, 11). However, their behavior remains largely enigmatic, despite its importance to our growing interest in how mammoths survived, why they became extinct, and what they might need to live in our modern world if rewilded.
Woolly mammoth populations in mainland Alaska peaked shortly after the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), ~20 thousand calibrated years before present (ka), before the spread of shrub tundra, peatlands, and eventually the boreal forest (12–16). This late glacial period (20 to 12 ka) coincides with the earliest archaeological evidence for the spread of people from Eurasia through Beringia (17–20). Woolly mammoths and people coexisted on a regional scale at the close of the last ice age in Alaska for at least a millennium, demonstrated by the overlap in the earliest dated archaeological sites and the latest mammoth specimens in both archaeological and paleontological contexts. However, the precise nature of their interactions is unresolved.
The ~1000-year period of overlap between people and mammoths in Alaska highlights the potential for interaction, including hunting, which would have affected the dynamics of mammoth extinction, a key aspect of the broader debate on the causes of megafaunal extinctions in the Americas (21, 22). Evidence indicates that human roles in other megafaunal extinctions in the Americas may have been substantial (23). However, there has been limited direct evidence of mammoth predation in Beringia, contrary to a blitzkrieg overkill scenario that implicates people as the central cause for mammoth extirpation (22, 24). Contemporaneous mammoth remains are clearly present at some of the earliest archaeological sites in Alaska (25, 26) before a sharp population decline in mammoths after ~13 ka (12). However, human use of mammoth ivory and bones seen in these archaeological contexts could have derived from scavenging of either recently deceased or long-dead animals, and people may have thus played a less direct role in conjunction with climate and vegetation change (6). The post-LGM warmer and wetter conditions coincided with (and perhaps facilitated) human settlement of Alaska but, at the same time, activated changes in vegetation that would have been inhospitable to large grazers such as mammoths, confounding our ability to understand the role of people in the extinction process (6, 9, 12, 27). Mammoth population decline, whether the initial impetus was human or climate driven, may also have diminished their prominent role as ecosystem engineers (28, 29), possibly contributing to boreal forest expansion and peat formation in the former mammoth steppe (7).
Underlying these controversies are issues regarding mammoth ecology and behavior and, in particular, the question of how mammoths moved across the landscape in ways that influenced their susceptibility to human interaction. If mammoths made regular and predictable movements across a landscape also occupied by people, then it could have made them an attractive resource (30), in much the same way as caribou in Alaska (31, 32). Alternatively, erratic and widespread movements might have made mammoths less predictable for people. The expansion of shrub tundra in Alaska after the LGM, regardless of whether it can be attributed solely to climate change or exacerbated by megafaunal hunting, may have fragmented mammoths’ preferred open habitat, potentially decreasing movement and making them more vulnerable to human predation (6).
We conducted isotopic and genetic analyses of a complete woolly mammoth tusk (UA2009-177-21444, named Élmayųujey’eh by the Healy Lake Village Council, Supplementary Text) from the Swan Point archaeological site located in the Shaw Creek basin of the Tanana River valley in interior Alaska. This tusk is one of only two largely complete adult tusks from archaeological contexts in Alaska (table S1). The tusk was found in and dated to the same time as the initial human appearance in Swan Point’s Cultural Zone 4b (CZ4b) [14,177 to 13,900 calibrated years before present (ya)], the oldest known archaeological component in Alaska (33). CZ4b also contained a suite of other mammoth remains, some clearly from contemporaneous individuals, including a juvenile and neonate (Supplementary Text). Additional mammoth remains have also been found in a cluster of three other early archaeological sites (the Broken Mammoth, Holzman, and Mead sites) within ~10 km of the Swan Point site in the Shaw Creek basin (fig. S1 and Supplementary Text). The Swan Point adult mammoth tusk was previously interpreted as having been scavenged in a subfossilized state based on its slightly older age relative to other dated samples from the cultural occupation (25). However, a new radiocarbon date for this tusk produced a younger calibrated date between 13,810 and 14,068 ya (33), which overlaps with multiple hearth features, artifacts, and other mammoth remains in the same cultural zone (CZ4b) and indicates they were contemporaneous.
The Swan Point CZ4b component is interpreted as a seasonal workshop and hunting camp containing numerous organic and stone tools, including the tusk analyzed in this study (25). The tusk likely served multiple functions, both as an anvil and as a source of ivory fragments for later modification. The occupation of CZ4b coincides with the beginning of a rapid regional transition from herb- to shrub-dominated tundra (34). Graminoids and forbs, the preferred forage for mammoths, were still an important component of the local vegetation, but they were increasingly supplanted by birch and willow shrubs during this interval (34). Growing season temperatures were relatively stable at this time (35), suggesting a general increase in moisture as the main cause for this vegetation change. We studied the strontium (87Sr/86Sr), oxygen (δ18O), and sulfur (δ34S) isotope ratios of the complete adult tusk from Swan Point CZ4b to model the lifetime movement of the mammoth. To determine the sex and relatedness of the mammoths from Swan Point and other local archaeological sites, we extracted and analyzed ancient DNA (aDNA).
Fig. 3. Summary life history of this study’s woolly mammoth within the geographic, climatic, altitude, and early archaeology in Alaska.
The core movement areas correspond to those visited most frequently (purple polygons) (Supplementary Text). The black dashed lines between the most frequently used areas represent the route produced by the spatial modeling (representing the mean of the top 10 walks; Supplementary Text). The light gray polygon represents 1 SD around the mean of the top 10 walks. The orange polygons represent two frequently used areas of a male woolly mammoth from ~17 ka (30) that overlap with the mammoth in this study. The white mammoth symbol indicates the area where the female specimen was found (i.e., death location). Also shown are the locations of early archaeological sites in Alaska and Yukon, including Swan Point, Holzman, Mead, Broken Mammoth, Little John, and Britannia Creek (see also Supplementary Text). The small inset map of Beringia shows the study region (redrawn from US National Park Service map).
Audrey G. Rowe et al.
A female woolly mammoth’s lifetime movements end in an ancient Alaskan hunter-gatherer camp.
Sci. Adv. 10, eadk0818 (2024). DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adk0818
Copyright: © 2024 The authors.
Published by American Association for the Advancement of Science. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
It was written by people whose knowledge was limited to the small part of the Middle East that they thought was the whole (flat) world, and who knew so little of the fauna of the real world or their biology that they believe two of each could be sealed up in a wooden box with 8 humans for a year and they could all emerge alive from it.
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