Humans Didn't Kill the Woolly Mammoth

It's commonly thought that our Stone Age ancestors drove the woolly mammoth to extinction. In a way, this has always made me feel better about my own indirect connection to modern extinctions.

But while people were responsible for killing off other Ice Age megafauna -- so long, aurochs! -- it looks like we might be off the hook for woolly mammoths.

By analyzing DNA samples from fossil remains, University of London researchers a different picture of extinction:

"...not as a sudden event at the end of the last ice age, but as a piecemeal process over tens of thousands of years involving progressive loss of genetic diversity,” said Dr. Ian
Barnes, of Royal Holloway, University of London.

“For the mammoth, this seems much more likely to have been driven by environmental rather than human causes, even if humans might have been responsible for killing off the small, terminal populations that were left.”

Ancient DNA traces the woolly mammoth's disappearance [press release]