As I was walking around a dark room with life-sized mammoth models and signs asking me to touch at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, I came to the impressive display of the world’s most complete one-month-old mammoth named Lyuba, discovered along the frozen banks of the Yuribei river in Siberia in 2007.
She was carefully displayed inside a glass container and was so well preserved that I was amazed to find out that the last time she roamed the earth was 42,000 years ago. I was searching to understand more about mammoths on the last day of the museum’s exhibition on ‘Mammoths: Ice Age Giants’ – which is an eye-opener on these incredible and beautiful creatures that last roamed the earth 4,000 years ago.
About six million years ago, there were three types of Elephantidae on earth, the ancestors of today’s African elephants, the ancestors of today’s Asian elephants and the earliest mammoths.
Those of us who watched Ice Age are familiar with a mammoth, those woolly giant elephant look-alikes with exaggerated curved tusks. Although not all mammoths were woolly, these seem to be the most well known and understood by scientists since they lived in cold areas where the permafrost kept their remains well preserved over time.
How exactly the mammoths got wiped out is still a bit of a mystery to scientists, although the popular reason for the demise of woolly mammoths is that as the earth’s climate changed and the ice melted, the mammoths struggled to adapt to the new conditions and their habitats.
We need to help stop elephants from following in the historic footsteps of their ancient relatives before they become today’s mammoths and cease to exist
This may have crippled numbers but did it really wipe them out completely? Scientists are increasingly beginning to argue that humans, who lived alongside mammoths for tens of thousands of years, played a significant role in their extinction and could have pushed these endangered animals off the edge, wiping them out altogether.
Although scientists do not know for sure how these giants disappeared, one thing we do know for certain is that no matter how the mammoths became extinct, they are sounding a word of warning for their relatives clinging onto life today: the Asian and African elephants.
Sadly, these animals have also become endangered and one thing we know for sure is that the primary reason for this is due to humans. In the late 1800s, an estimated five million savannah elephants roamed Africa. Today there are fewer than half a million as their habitats are lost and they are being poached for their ivory.
Asian elephants, the most similar to mammoths, are the most endangered, with only about 30,000 left in the wild. We are lucky enough to still get the opportunity to see them in real flesh, but who knows for how long?
We need to help stop elephants from following in the historic footsteps of their ancient relatives before they become today’s mammoths and cease to exist.
If you wish to make a donation to help save these beautiful giants, visit WWF-Save the Elephants.
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