Expansion and extinction: the Collapse of the Mammoth Steppe fauna

Summary

More and more we become aware of the impact of climate change on our natural environment. The fossil record shows how extensive that impact can be. The woolly mammoth, the emperor of the animal kingdom during the Late Pleistocene, dominated the fauna of Eurasia for thousands of years, but the territory of the species shrunk dramatically; rather recently the woolly mammoth, together with for example the woolly rhinoceros and the giant deer, became extinct. Other species flourished due to the latest changes in climate and expanded their territories to more northern latitudes of Eurasia; a dynamic, fascinating process of contraction and expansion that is driven by climate change. Humans followed their own track, expanding to the east and crossing Beringia on their way to the America’s.

Russian scientists, in close cooperation with Dutch scientists from Leiden University, studied the natural changes in the fossil record during the past 40.000 years. The results of the joint research projects illustrate the impact of changes on the environment in the past as well as in the future.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Human adaptations to environmental change during the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene - Part 2

Keywords

Spatial Coverage