Mammoths and early humans
Few animals are more famous than mammoths.
“I'm not fat. It's all this hair… it makes me look fat! ”.
Manny, the Mammoth from the animated film "Ice Age", was right.
The Mammoths, which lived for millions of years, and up to 3500 years ago, had thick fur, but their average size was not much larger than that of a modern elephant, as scholars tell us. In fact, due to the constant melting of permafrost in the polar regions of northern Europe and North America, scientists now have a large number of fossil records at their disposal, which provide precise information on these creatures. Some of these findings have also brought to light whole specimens, mainly in Siberia.
An example is the Mammoth cub freed from the ice in 2005, or the female called Lyuba, found near the Yuribei River, almost completely intact, after 40,000 years!
Proboscidia below zero degrees
Most of the different Mammoth species had a maximum height of three meters and a weight that could rarely exceed five tons; only some male specimens of Mammuthus imperator could reach heights of up to five meters and a weight of around 12 tons. Present in Africa, Asia, Northern Europe and also in the arctic areas, mammoths were equipped with a series of adaptations that allowed these mammals to endure temperatures even below -50 ° C without damage. For example, compared to today's elephants, they had much smaller ears, for less heat loss; a thicker layer of fat - up to 15 cm - and, of course, the fur, which could even be more than a meter long, and which helped to protect them from the attacks of their enemies. But who were these predators?
Fangs and arrows
The long curved tusks of the mammoths were a deterrent and a useful defense weapon against those who saw only a huge steak in them. Wolves, bears and the mighty saber-toothed tigers or smilodons competed for rights over mammoth babies and perhaps also over some adult specimen not in good health or elderly. But the predator par excellence of these mastodons was man: against the group hunting strategies and the effective weapons supplied to our ancestors, there was nothing to be done for the mammoths. It is also thought that the intense hunting of mammoths by humans has played an important role in the extinction of these animals in parallel with climate change. Spears, hatchets and above all arrows with sharp points were deadly instruments of death against which running away meant only lengthening the time of defeat.
Not just giants
On the island of Santa Rosa, which is part of the Channels Island of Florida, there was a curious representative of these woolly animals: the dwarf mammoth, Mammuthus exilis. This species had been known for some time; but only in 1994 was it possible to find a skeleton of an adult male, missing only a foot, a fang and a pair of vertebrae.
Current elephants are excellent swimmers. It is reasonable to think that mammoths were too; it is thought that the ancestors of this small proboscidate swam the approximately six kilometers that separate the mainland from Santa Rosa, probably to look for new sources of food. We also have a similar example of insular dwarfism here in Italy, with the famous Sicilian Elephas falconeri, only 90 cm tall. The ancestors of the now renamed Palaeoloxodon falconeri most likely reached the islands of the Mediterranean during the ice ages, when the sea level dropped significantly.
Dozens of elephant species disappeared forever
Once upon a time, during the Oligocene, about 30 million years ago, in what is now Egypt, there was a clumsy baby elephant of just 1.80 meters called a paleomastodon. It had a short trunk, derived from prehensile lips such as tapirs now use, and four small fangs. Thus, like a fairy tale, the history of the proboscideans could begin. But this is not limited only to the branch of the mastodons, which culminated and became extinct with the American mastodon, a beast 3 meters high. Proboscidia include other kinds of progenitors: the oldest of all, merit, appeared in the Eocene. But many of these branches became extinct.
Our mammoth, the current African and Asian elephant, originated from the stegodon, which lived in Asia during the Pliocene and subsequently migrated to Africa. From Africa, in fact, they spread to all continents except Australia, up to North America. The extraordinary amoebelodon lived in Nebraska and Colorado during the Pliocene. This huge animal used the large shovel-shaped tusks of its lower jaw to dredge the bottoms of lakes and rivers; another noteworthy proboscidate is the Miocene and Pliocene dinoterio, 5 meters high. It also had two formidable downward curved fangs that originated from the jaw, with which it tore off roots, branches and bark which it ate. It became extinct in the Pleistocene.
