‘Mammoths killed by climate’

Prehistoric elephants were pushed to extinction by extreme global environmental change rather than being overhunted by early humans, according to a study.

The research indicates that the extinction of the last mammoths and mastodonts at the end of the last Ice Age was the final part of progressive climate-driven decline among elephants over millions of years.

Previously, it had been claimed that early human hunters slaughtered prehistoric elephants, mammoths and mastodonts over millennia.

Elephants were once a diverse and widespread group of giant herbivores, known as the proboscideans, which included the now extinct mastodonts, stegodonts and deinotheres.

England was home to three types of elephants: two giant species of mammoths and the straight-tusked elephant, just 700,000 years ago.

Now, elephants are restricted to three endangered species in the African and Asian tropics.

The latest research was carried out by group of palaeontologists from the universities of Alcala, Bristol, and Helsinki.

They examined how 185 different species of elephants and their predecessors adapted over 60 million years of evolution that began in North Africa.

Museum fossil collections from across the world, including London’s Natural History Museum were used during their studies.

The researchers found that the changing global climate reduced the once greatly diverse and widespread mastodonts to less than a handful of species in the Americas.

By three million years ago, the elephants and stegodonts of Africa and eastern Asia seemed to be surviving.

However, environmental disruption connected to the Ice Ages left the species forced to adapt to new, more austere habitats.

The study showed the final extinction peaks for proboscideans started about 2.4m years ago for Africa, 160,000 years ago for Eurasia and 75,000 years ago for the Americas.

Researchers say those ages point to the time where proboscideans were subject to higher risk.

The study, The rise and fall of proboscidean ecological diversity, is published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

DOOMED: The extinction of the last mammoths was climate-related, says a new study.