Researchers make links between woolly mammoths and colonization of the Americas
uOttawa professor and team go back 14,000 years to show links between mammoths and early hunter-gatherer communities
IMAGE:
“THE NEW TOOLS DEVELOPED IN THIS RESEARCH WILL HELP WITH EFFORTS TO CONSERVE BIODIVERSITY, PROVIDING AN ANALOGUE TO MODERN TIMES". CLÉMENT BATAILLE — ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF EARTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES, FACULTY OF SCIENCE
view moreCREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA
Imagine journeying back in time to the era of woolly mammoths, some 14,000 years ago. That’s what a team of international researchers from the University of Ottawa, the University of Alaska Fairbanks, McMaster University and Adelphi University, and Indigenous scholars, managed to do. Using novel high-resolution isotope profiling (a sort of “paleo-GPS”), they were able to connect the dots between the wanderings of a woolly mammoth and the earliest known human settlements in the remote expanses of eastern Beringia (the land and maritime area between the Lena River in Russia and Canada’s Mackenzie River).
The paper, published in Science Advances, sheds light on the relationship between mammoths and early hunter-gatherer communities in the region. Through a detailed analysis of the mammoth’s remains and genetic connections, the researchers were able to reconstruct the life history and movements of this iconic species, providing evidence of overlapping mammoth/human habitats and of the possible role mammoths played in facilitating the peopling of the Americas.
This study focuses on a female woolly mammoth, “Élmayuujey’eh” (Elma), named by the Healy Lake (Alaska) Village Council, whose remains were discovered at Swan Point, the earliest archeological site in Alaska. Alongside the mammoth, the site also contained remains of a juvenile and a baby mammoth, indicating the presence of a herd in the area. This finding intrigued researchers and prompted further investigations into the movements and interactions between mammoths and early humans.
Clément Bataille (associate professor, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Science, University of Ottawa), lead author and PhD student Audrey Rowe (University of Alaska Fairbanks) and co-author Matthew Wooller (University of Alaska Fairbanks) conducted a detailed isotopic analysis of Élmayuujey’eh’s complete tusk. This allowed them to retrace the mammoth’s movements through her lifetime.
“Elma roamed extensively within the densest region of archaeological sites in Alaska,” says Rowe. “This suggests a close association between mammoths and early human hunting camps.”
Meanwhile, Hendrik Poinar and his team at McMaster University conducted genetic analyses of the remains of eight other individual mammoths found in the region. They determined that the Swan Point area likely served as a meeting ground for at least two closely related herds. This suggests that mammoths had social structures and exhibited herd behavior.
Solving the mystery of human-mammoth coexistence
“This research gives new insights into how humans and mammoths interacted when humans first came to the Americas,” says Bataille. “It seems that mammoths, which were plentiful in eastern Beringia and an important food source, attracted humans to the area.”
It’s not the first time that this geolocation technique has been used to retrace the mobility of a mammoth. The team created it for a study of a 17,000 year old male named Kik, who lived in a colder period when humans hadn’t yet arrived, unlike Elma.
Interestingly, Kik and Elma showed very different mobility behaviours. Kik moved freely over long distances across large valleys and tundra plains using regular core areas, whereas Elma, while still using similar core areas, moved shorter distances, maintaining a high elevation. This raises questions about the role of humans and climate change in influencing the mobility of this ancient species.
This high-resolution isotope profiling technique can be applied to uncover the ecology of many other extinct species. Used with genetic analysis, it’s an innovative way to learn about how ancient species responded to climate change and human pressures, and what ultimately caused their extinction.
By shedding light on mammoth ecology and lifeways and mammoths’ long-term interactions with climate change and humans, the study can help us predict how animals will respond to climate and human pressures in the future. “The new tools developed in this research, along with the insights into the ecology of extinct species, will help with efforts to conserve biodiversity, providing an analogue to modern times, where many large mammals are in danger of going extinct with human and climate perturbations,” says Bataille.
This study was funded in part by the NSERC Discovery Grants program and was published in Science Advances on January 17.
JOURNAL
Science Advances
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Case study
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
Animals
ARTICLE TITLE
A female woolly mammoth’s lifetime movements end in an ancient Alaskan hunter-gatherer camp
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
17-Jan-2024
Researchers chronicle lifetime travels of a single woolly mammoth which wandered the north more than 14,000 years ago
IMAGE:
SINA BELEKA, A POST-DOCTORAL RESEARCHER AT THE MCMASTER ANCIENT DNA CENTRE AND CO-AUTHOR OF THE STUDY EXAMINES A SAMPLE.
view moreCREDIT: SIDNEY ROTH/MCMASTER UNIVERSITY
High resolution photos, background footage, video clips can be downloaded at this link: https://photos.app.goo.gl/Sn4unWFGHb5ULdeB9
Hamilton, ON, Jan. 17, 2024 – An international team of researchers from McMaster University, University of Alaska Fairbanks and the University of Ottawa has tracked and documented the movements and genetic connections of a female woolly mammoth that roamed the earth more than 14,000 years ago.
She travelled hundreds of kilometres through northwestern Canada and Alaska over the course of her lifetime, which ended when she encountered some of the earliest people to have traveled across the Bering Land Bridge.
The last remaining woolly mammoths lived alongside the region’s first peoples for at least 1,000 years, but little is known about how the mammoths moved across a landscape increasingly populated by people and whether those movements made them more vulnerable to hunting.
The mammoth at the centre of this study, named Élmayuujey’eh by the Healy Lake Village Council, was discovered at Swan Point, the earliest archaeological site in Alaska, which also contained remains of a juvenile and a baby mammoth. Mammoth remains have also been found at three other archaeological sites within 10 km of Swan Point.
Researchers conducted a detailed isotopic analysis of a complete tusk and genetic analyses of remains of many other individual mammoths to piece together their subject’s movements and relationships to other mammoths at the same site and in the vicinity. They determined that the Swan Point area was likely a meeting ground for at least two closely related, but distinct matriarchal herds.
The findings are published today in the journal Science Advances.
“This is a fascinating story that shows the complexity of life and behaviour of mammoths, for which we have very little insight,” says evolutionary geneticist Hendrik Poinar, director of the McMaster Ancient DNA Centre who led the team that sequenced the mitochondrial genomes of eight woolly mammoths found at Swan Point and other nearby sites to determine if and how they were related.
Researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks performed isotopic analyses of the tusk. Mammoth tusks grew like tree trunks, with thin layers marking steady growth and isotopes from different elements—oxygen and strontium, for example—provided information about the subject’s movement.
The female mammoth was approximately 20 years old when she died, having spent much of her life in a relatively small area of the Yukon. Researchers report that as she grew older, she travelled over 1000 km in just three years, settling in interior Alaska and dying near a closely related baby and juvenile, for which she may have been the matriarchal lead.
Mammoths are presumed to behave much like modern elephants, with females and juveniles living in close-knit matriarchal herds and mature males traveling alone or in looser male groups, often with larger home ranges than the females.
Researchers say using multiple forms of analysis, as in this study, allows them to make inferences about the behaviour of extinct mammoths.
The McMaster team extracted and analyzed ancient DNA from the tusk of Élmayuujey’eh, which revealed the mammoth was closely related to the other mammoths from the same site and more distantly related to others from a nearby site called Holzman.
Early human populations, with a deep understanding of mammoths and the technology to hunt them, took advantage of mammoth habitats, using scavenged and hunted remains as raw materials for tools, the researchers report.
In addition to the direct impact of hunting on mammoth populations, human activity and settlements may have also indirectly affected mammoth populations by curtailing their movements and their access to preferred grazing areas.
“For early people in Alaska, those localities were important for observation and appreciation, and also a source of potential food,” says Poinar.
The collected data suggests that people structured their seasonal hunting camps based on where mammoths gathered and may have played an indirect role in their local extinction in Alaska, which was compounded by a rapidly changing climate and changing vegetation.
Such deprivations did not appear to have affected the subject mammoth, though.
“She was a young adult in the prime of life. Her isotopes showed she was not malnourished and that she died in the same season as the seasonal hunting camp at Swan Point where her tusk was found,” said senior author Matthew Wooller, who is director of the Alaska Stable Isotope Facility and a professor at UAF’s College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences.
“This is more than looking at stone tools or remains and trying to speculate. This analysis of lifetime movements can really help with our understanding of how people and mammoths lived in these areas,” says Tyler Murchie, a recent postdoctoral researcher at McMaster who conducted the ancient DNA analysis with Sina Baleka. “We can continue to significantly expand our genetic understanding of the past, and to address more nuanced questions of how mammoths moved, how they were related to one another and how that all connects to ancient people.”
The research was funded in part by the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).
The researchers can be contacted directly at : Hendrik Poinar, poinarh@mcmaster.ca ; Matthew Wooller, mjwooler@alaska.edu
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A sample used in the study which tracked the travels of a woolly mammoth which wandered the earth 14,000 years ago.
CREDIT
Sidney Roth/McMaster University
JOURNAL
Science Advances
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
Animals
ARTICLE TITLE
A female woolly mammoth’s lifetime movements end in an ancient 2 Alaskan hunter-gatherer camp
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
17-Jan-2024
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