For Some Reason,

I had always thought that mammoths died out about 10,000 or so years ago,

but apparently not, image credit Thomas Quine/ Wikimedia Commons, until about 10,000 years ago, mammoths roamed mainland North America. Mammoths survived longer in the Alaskan island of Saint Paul and the Russian island of Wrangel, where teeth have been discovered dating to only around 4,000 years ago, St Paul is a volcanic island that until around 9,000 years ago was connected to the mainland by the Bering Land Bridge, which enabled animals to roam freely to and fro, but as the climate warmed and sea levels rose, it became isolated – and the mammoths were trapped, a few reports that I have read stated that it was humans that brought the great beasts to extinction, but the mammoths were the only large mammals on both island, and no predators were present in either place, and so the mammoths thrived on the little island for quite a time, until something about the freshwater lake on the island changed, Dr. Beth Shapiro, a paleo-geneticist, explains the events behind the extinction of the mammoths on the Alaskan island of St. Paul, and what we can learn from this event in prehistory, the full story of the St.Paul mammoths it is here at this page in the WEF, if only the island had have been bigger,I wonder if they would still be here today?