365NEWSX
365NEWSX
Subscribe

Welcome

Woolly mammoths' extinction blamed on climate change, not human hunting - CNET

Woolly mammoths' extinction blamed on climate change, not human hunting - CNET

Woolly mammoths' extinction blamed on climate change, not human hunting - CNET
Oct 20, 2021 1 min, 17 secs

"This is a stark lesson from history and shows how unpredictable climate change is -- once something is lost, there is no going back.".

"We have shown that climate change, specifically precipitation, directly drives the change in the vegetation -- humans had no impact on [the mammoths] at all based on our models," Yucheng Wang, a zoologist at the University of Cambridge and first author of the paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, said in a statement.

Co-author Eske Willerslev, a fellow at the University of Cambridge and director of the Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre at the University of Copenhagen, added, "This is a stark lesson from history and shows how unpredictable climate change is -- once something is lost, there is no going back." .

"Humans have been blamed because the animals had survived for millions of years without climate change killing them off before, but when they lived alongside humans they didn't last long and we were accused of hunting them to death.".

It makes sense that prehistoric people were suspected to be behind woolly mammoths' eventual demise instead of climate change.

The researchers looking into ancient mammoths discovered populations of the enormous animals -- uncovered using the sequencing method -- were depleted at a rate consistent with the quick speed of climate change at the time.

Wang also notes that prehistoric humans would've probably spent most of their time hunting animals much smaller and easier to capture than enormous woolly mammoths, suggesting their impact on the animals' extinction was arguably smaller than intuitively thought

Summarized by 365NEWSX ROBOTS

RECENT NEWS

SUBSCRIBE

Get monthly updates and free resources.

CONNECT WITH US

© Copyright 2024 365NEWSX - All RIGHTS RESERVED