Chapter 2 - 2

02 Paleontology

Now listen to a lecture related to the topic in step 1. Fill in the blanks of the note diagram below with keywords or key phrases used in the lecture.

W: Then there’s the woolly mammoth, a prehistoric elephant-like animal that’s now extinct.

Mammoths create many difficulties for paleontologists because, well… it’s hard to really explain how the woolly mammoth became extinct.

One of the most accepted theories today is that mammoths went extinct because of the combination of climate change and overhunting.

I mean, it is true that we’ve seen this happen with a lot of other animal extinctions. However, after taking all of the facts into account, the explanation that mammoths went extinct from just these factors isn’t very logical.

First off, there’s no evidence which even suggests that the changing climate negatively affected mammoths.

Don’t get me wrong, mammoths clearly weren’t suited for life on the equator in extremely warm environments, but who’s to say they didn’t just move up north to Arctic regions.

That’s where we find a lot of their skeletons closer to the polls, of course. It’s just not clear that the environmental change would have affected them enough to push them into extinction.

As far as predators are concerned… other than human tribes, woolly mammoths really didn’t have any natural predators.

Woolly mammoths were the size of elephants, so most predators weren’t large enough to hunt them.

It’s highly improbable that even the great saber-toothed tigers would have been able to take down a mammoth.

I mean, saber-toothed tigers were the size of modern-day lines, and it’s not too common that you hear about lions giving full-grown, healthy elephants, correct?

However, more importantly, recent evidence has revealed that the bite of saber-toothed tigers was fairly weak.

The saber-toothed tiger is estimated to be about one-third the strength of a lion’s.

So there’s no simple way that the saber-toothed tiger’s large teeth could have pierced a mammoth’s thick skin.

The suggests that the saber-toothed tigers did not frequently hunt woolly mammoths, and therefore they weren’t a significant factor behind the woolly mammoth’s extinction.

Additionally, there is no rational reason why human tribes when needed to hunt mammoths extensively.

It’s probably correct that humans could’ve used mammoths to create many different objects.

Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean that they were overhunted to extinction simply because they were good to hunt.

There were many other animals that could have been hunted to create the same type of objects − animals like buffalo, giant sloths, or bears, for example.

These creatures also would have been a lot easier to hunt than an enormous mammoth.

So, the whole theory that mammoths went extinct simply from climate change and overhunting has a lot of problems.

I’m not certain why mammoths became extinct, but this particular argument is hard to believe, when you look at the bigger picture.