Excavation in Langmannersdorf, Austria, 2025.
Photo: Marc Händel/Austrian Academy of Sciences
A heap of ancient bones does not come with a label explaining how it was formed. When large accumulations of woolly mammoth remains are found at Upper Palaeolithic sites, archaeologists must determine whether the animals were killed by people, scavenged after natural deaths, or accumulated through entirely natural processes such as floods, landslides or animals becoming trapped in bogs.
Cut marks, deliberately broken bones and stone projectile points embedded in mammoth remains show that humans sometimes hunted and butchered these enormous animals. But such evidence is not present on every bone, leaving open the possibility that some of the great mammoth bonebeds of Eurasia resulted largely from natural mortality rather than sustained human exploitation.
Now an international team led by researchers at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm has approached the problem from an ingenious new direction: instead of asking only what happened to the bones, they used ancient DNA to determine whether the mammoths were male or female.
As described in a newly published paper in Current Biology, the researchers analysed genome data from 521 woolly mammoths, Mammuthus primigenius, recovered across Eurasia and North America. These included 448 animals sequenced for the first time, making this one of the largest palaeogenomic studies yet undertaken on an extinct species.
The contrast was striking. Among 421 mammoths recovered as dispersed remains from natural depositional settings, 66 per cent were male and only 34 per cent female. That male bias is consistent with the behaviour of modern elephants: adult males commonly leave their natal herds and live alone, making them more likely to take risks or become caught in natural traps such as bogs, sinkholes and landslides.
However, among 100 mammoths from large bone accumulations associated with Upper Palaeolithic people, the ratio was almost exactly reversed: 70 per cent were female and only 30 per cent male. As the researchers explain, this substantial difference provides population-scale evidence that human activity, rather than natural mortality alone, was the principal force creating these bone accumulations.
That does not necessarily mean that hunters deliberately selected females simply because they were smaller than adult males. If mammoths lived like modern elephants, females and their young would have travelled in matriarchal herds capable of mounting a formidable collective defence. However, such herds may also have followed more predictable routes than solitary males, making them easier for hunter-gatherers to locate repeatedly. People may have hunted them, scavenged animals that died along those routes, or—most probably—used a combination of both strategies.
Either way, the result opens a remarkable window onto human behaviour between about 30,000 and 20,000 years ago. Mammoths supplied meat and fat for food, hides for clothing and shelter, bones for construction, and ivory for tools, ornaments and works of art. By combining genetics with archaeology and knowledge of elephant social behaviour, scientists can now reconstruct something of how Upper Palaeolithic people located and exploited this critically important resource.
And all this human ingenuity, accumulated ecological knowledge and repeated interaction with mammoth herds was taking place tens of thousands of years before creationists believe their god created Earth and everything upon it. Once again, the evidence reveals not a recently created world interrupted by a global flood, but a deep and richly documented human past—one preserved not merely in tools and bones, but in fragments of ancient DNA surviving within those bones.
