According to a study by a professor at the University of Ottawa, some people may have first settled in what is now Alaska nearly 14,000 years ago by following the tracks of mammoths.
For four years, Clément Bataille, an associate professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Ottawa, and several other researchers have been trying to learn more about the mammoths that lived several thousand years ago in Alaska.
“They’re still fascinating and majestic species, so it’s fascinating to study them,” Mr. Bataille admits in an interview with The Canadian Press.
After delving into the life of a male specimen, “Kika,” who lived 17,000 years ago, researchers turned to “Elma,” a female whose life dates back approximately 14,000 years.
What caught scientists’ attention this time was that the Elma fossil was found in the same place where humans would have set up camp around the same time, raising the hypothesis that these humans were lured to North America by the tracks of mammoths.
“We know that humans arrived in Alaska about 13,500 years ago. The first place where there is absolutely conclusive evidence of human presence is Swan Point, and that is where we find this tusk of this female Elma,” Mr. Bataille mentions.
“What’s quite interesting about how people got to Alaska at this time is that all their villages and settlements are in places where there are a lot of mammoths,” he continues.
“These are areas with a high number of mammoths. And so our hypothesis is, potentially, that humans would have been attracted to whatever large numbers of mammoths were present in North America as they passed from Asia to North America via the Bering Land Bridge – which emerged at that time. and especially in this region, where there were more of them than elsewhere. »
We know that humans hunted mammoths because they already did in Europe and Eurasia. Without being able to confirm this, scientists have also hypothesized that Elma was killed by hunter-gatherers.
First, his fossil was found where the camp was also. She was then in good health when she died aged 20 – “which is still very young for a mammoth,” Mr Bataille clarifies. It was then found near the fossils of two other young mammoths, including a cub, that were part of the same herd.
“So that still creates three coincidences that are quite strong and that tell us that very potentially this female and these two young mammoths were caught and brought back to the camp,” Mr Bataille points out.
Impact of climate change
The scientists also analyzed the impact that climate change had on mammoths, which became extinct in the Americas between 11,000 and 12,000 years ago.
Even when comparing the lives of Kiko and Elma, they noticed several differences.
“We saw that this male mammoth moved enormously over distances much, much, much greater than this female, sometimes with movements of 300 or 400 kilometers,” says Clément Bataille.
Kiko’s life 17,000 years ago took place before the ice melted. This means that Beringia, which separated Russia and Alaska, was, according to the researcher, “a great tundra plain”, “really an ideal environment for mammoths”.
But Elma, who lived 14,000 years ago, didn’t have it so easy, because her life took place during a time of deglaciation, during which the valleys turned into wetlands.
“Our hypothesis would be that it was still quite limited by climate. They are animals that have been highly adapted to these open tundra environments. When the tundra disappears or fragments, it becomes much more difficult for them to move through the area and potentially more vulnerable to hunting, and more vulnerable to extinction as well,” Mr. Bataille points out.
Mr. Bataille and his colleagues are continuing their work to better understand what happened at the end of the last ice age, when several species, including mammoths, became extinct.
Their research on Elma was published in the journal Scientific advances.