The woolly mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius, is an extinct herbivore related to elephants who trudged across the steppe-tundras of Eurasia and North America from around 300,000 years ago until their numbers seriously dropped from around 11,000 years ago. A few last stragglers survived into the Holocene on island refuges off the coast of Siberia and Alaska. One of these - Wrangel Island - harboured the last known group of mammoths until around 3,700 years ago.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original definition at https://www.worldhistory.org/Woolly_Mammoth/.
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- Do you think climate change or human hunting mattered more in mammoth extinction?
- Should scientists try to bring woolly mammoths back to life?
- What do mammoth bones and ivory tell us about how people lived long ago?
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