Mammoth are extinct– but they might be back soon

I ARGUED with my brotherin-law that woolly mammoths died out with the dinosaurs. He says they survived until fairly recently. Who is right? – F.

Well it’s not you. Almost all dinosaurs died out 66 million years ago. Mammoths, as a distinct species, were identified about five million years ago and they avoided extinction long enough to be hunted by Stone Age man.

Woolly mammoths (there were several species of mammoth) are believed to have lived as recently as 1650 BC, 1000 years after the great pyramids of Egypt were erected.

The last colony of mammoth are thought to have lived on Wrangel Island, a mountainous, icy outpost in the Arctic Ocean, off the northern coast of Siberia.

Mammoths once roamed all over Asia and Europe and appear in several surviving cave paintings. It is probable that man’s ever-improving hunting methods played a part, but climate change around the last ice age would also have been a factor.

Mammoth aren’t directly the ancestors of, but share a common ancestor with, modern-day elephants so there are DNA similarities.

At least three separate ongoing projects in Japan and South Korea are attempting “de-extinction” by mixing mammoth DNA with modern elephant DNA and implanting the hybrid into a zoo elephant.

There are estimated to be around 150 million mammoth carcasses buried in the Siberian tundra, yielding a supply of DNA material.