Hunters May Have Delivered Fatal Blow to Mammoths

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 27, 2010
Filed at 5:13 a.m. EST

CHERSKY, Russia (AP) — During the last Ice Age, shaggy mammoths, woolly rhinos and bison lumbered across northern Siberia. Then, about 10,000 years ago — in the span of a geological heartbeat, or a few hundred years — the last of them disappeared.

Many scientists believe a dramatic shift in climate drove these giant grazers to extinction.

But two scientists who live year-round in the frigid Siberian plains say that man —either for food, fuel or fun — hunted the animals to extinction

Adrian Lister, of the paleontology department of London's Natural History Museum, said humans may have delivered the final blow, but rapid global warming was primarily responsible for the mammoth's extinction. It brought an abrupt change in vegetation that squeezed a dwindling number of mammoths into isolated pockets, where hunters could pick off the last herds, he said.




Hunters May Have Delivered Fatal Blow to Mammoths