About 9,200 years ago, when the ice had retreated for several millennia from most of the northern hemisphere, a herd of woolly mammoths — no more than 10 — were isolated in the far north of Siberia. The melting of ice raised the waters and what was previously connected to the continent became an island, today called Wrangel. It was the last refuge of this imposing animal. Being so few, the laws of evolution condemned them to be wiped out. But the study of their genome shows that the group overcame the profound inbreeding, and grew bigger: in just 20 generations, there were 300 mammoths, a number that would have given them a decent shot at survival. However, just as they had mysteriously thrived for 6,000 years after disappearing from the rest of the planet, they mysteriously vanished. Now, a genetic analysis of two dozen Mammuthus primigenius has provided clues about what could have happened to them, but it does not solve the mystery.
Love Dalén, senior author of the research, who is also from the Center for Palaeogenetics, states in a press release: “We can now confidently reject the idea that the population was simply too small and that they were doomed to go extinct for genetic reasons.” In fact, he believes that “this means it was probably just some random event that killed them off, and if that random event hadn’t happened, then we would still have mammoths today.”
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