Four inches of fat and 16ft tusks

THE last Ice Age began 2million years ago and the only animals which survived in the northern hemisphere had to adapt to life in the biting cold.

Mammoths lived in a brutal landscape among woolly rhinos, sabretoothed tigers and – at least in the last few thousands of years – a few hardy modern humans.

Homo Sapiens had evolved a few clever ways to cope with the cold, making clothes from animal hides and shelters from mammoth bones. When one of the huge creatures was killed, it was stored in the permafrost like a deep freezer. Mammoths roamed a huge area of modern-day Russia, America and northern Europe, but frozen Siberia is one of the few places their remains are preserved. The local people in this wilderness area have collected mammoth bones for years – and long thought they were mole-like beasts which lived underground.

Like modern elephants, mammoths mostly ate plants, lived in herds and had tusks – but theirs were up to 16ft long. It is thought that males with the longest tusks mated with more females.

They had a four-inch layer of fat under their skin and may have shed their hair in warmer weather during the summer.

A sample of their haemoglobin was recovered a few years ago, showing they managed to release oxygen at much lower temperatures than elephants – which is how they managed to adapt from their origins in the tropics.