Scientists have traced the 600-mile journey of a woolly mammoth, offering new insights into their lifestyle and possible reasons for their extinction.
About 14,000 years ago, the tusk of a 20-year-old female mammoth, named Élmayuujey'eh, was found at a campsite in Swan Point, Alaska.
The isotopic analysis of her tusk revealed that she had traveled from Yukon, Canada, covering approximately 621 miles in just three years.
The mammoth's life journey is written in the chemistry of their bones. Like the rings of a tree, each layer of her tusk records another page of the mammoth's life, written in the language of charged atoms known as isotopes.
Élmayuujey'eh was related to other mammoths found at the Alaskan hunting site, including a closely related baby and a juvenile. But she was not related to some other mammoths found nearby, reinforcing the isotope evidence that she migrated, along with a family herd.
Her new home was an area in Alaska with the highest density of archaeological sites, up to 20,000 years old, belonging to the first human migrants from Eurasia, who traveled across the Beringian land bridge that existed during the glaciation period.
The co-occurrence of both human and mammoth hotspot areas on the Beringian landscape is probably not coincidental. It more likely demonstrates people's purposeful and strategic intent to map their behavior onto that of a mobile but highly visible and predictable megafaunal resource.
Debate around what caused the woolly mammoth's extinction continues. There's some indication humans hunted them out of existence as with other megafauna, but other signs point to climate change. If humans were indeed following the giant herbivores herds to hunt them, this likely contributed to the massive herbivores demise, along with the shifting climate around them.