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About 140,000 years ago in what’s now South Dakota, a mammoth approached a sinkhole filled
with steaming water.
Lured by vegetation, the mammoth ventured into the water.
But with its flat, heavy feet, it had little hope of scaling the steep, muddy sides of
the pond to climb out.
With no hope of escape, it either starved or drowned, eventually being covered by silt and preserved.
And it wasn’t the only one.
To date, the remains of 61 mammoths have been excavated from the Mammoth Site of Hot Springs,
South Dakota, all victims of an ancient sinkhole.
And one of the most intriguing things about these dead mammoths is that the vast majority
of them are male.
Woolly mammoths roamed Eurasia and North America for millions of years.
They foraged mainly on grasses, along with some shrubs, mosses, and herbs.
They fended off wolves, cave hyenas, and big cats with their large bodies, huge, curved
tusks and powerful trunks.
The life of a mammoth was probably a lot like the life of their distant cousins, the elephants.
But what caused the extinction of the mammoths is still a matter of debate.
They disappeared from Europe and North America at the end of the last ice age, about 10,000
years ago, though some small groups hung on for much longer by hiding out in remote areas.
The very last mammoths died out on a small island in the Arctic Ocean about 4000 years
ago – around the same time that the ancient Egyptians were constructing the Great Pyramid
of Giza.
Experts blame the mammoths’ extinction mostly on a rapidly changing climate, with maybe
a little hunting by, well, us.
And today, we’ve teamed up with TierZoo to solve one of the mysteries about these
charismatic megafauna, gamer-style.
As TierZoo put it, the mammoth’s top tier gear and high HP dominated the Pleistocene
meta.
But climate change doesn’t explain the nagging mystery about our favorite ice age proboscidean:
Why do most remains of mammoths found in the fossil record turn out to be male?
Even without humans hunting them or the ice sheets melting, mammoth life was dangerous.
The Ice Age tundra could be an unforgiving place to live.
Dry, dusty winds.
Bitter cold.
Frozen earth.
Not swampy, like our modern tundra, but still no picnic.
And even if the cold or wind didn’t get you, the tundra was full of deadly traps that
sent unsuspecting inhabitants to an early grave.
In 1901, a group of scientists from St. Petersburg ventured into the Siberian tundra.
After several months of chasing tips from locals, they saw, or rather smelled, something
extraordinary.
It was a woolly mammoth, embedded in the frozen banks of the Berezovka River.
Its head and neck had thawed enough to rot, attracting scavengers.
These scanvengers were eating meat that was thousands of years old!
I just want to emphasize that.
After they slowly dug the carcass out from the bank, the team’s paleontologist examined
it closely.
Its leg bones and pelvis were broken.
Its blood vessels had torn open, causing blood to pool around its muscles.
He said this creature fell from a cliff along the river, and was smothered by the
ensuing landslide of half-frozen mud.
Game over.
The Berezovka mammoth would turn out to be a famous, early example of this kind of accidental
preservation.
Fast-forward to 2007.
A reindeer herder found another carcass along a frozen Siberian river, this time on the
Yamal Peninsula.
It was a small woolly mammoth calf, only about a month old.
Fermenting bacteria had taken over the remains, pickling the carcass and thwarting scavengers.
Lyuba, as she was named, was fat and healthy when she died.
But her skull was full of nodules of iron phosphate, a sign that a lot of blood had
flowed to her brain just before she died.
This was clear evidence of the mammalian diving reflex that activates when a mammal’s face
is submerged in cold water and it has to hold its breath.
She also had sediment in her trunk, trachea, and lungs.
Poor Lyuba seems to have face-planted into some soupy mud and suffocated while trying
to clear it from her trunk.
Like the Berezovka mammoth and Lyuba, many mammoths’ lives were claimed by the treacherous
landscape of the tundra.
But for paleontologists, dramatic deaths like these are a goldmine.
Since these specimens were buried quickly, they were shielded from scavengers like wolves,
so their bodies had a much better chance of being preserved.
And these accident victims can reveal incredible details about how mammoths lived.
The Berezovka mammoth had half-chewed leaves and grasses between its teeth.
Lyuba still had her mother’s milk in her stomach.
But a freak accident like falling into mud and suffocating could happen to anyone, right?
The fact is, even if they stayed far away from environmental hazards, mammoth life was still
not easy.
In the Little Badlands of Nebraska in 1962,
a couple of workers discovered a large thighbone while surveying for a dam.
Paleontologists quickly descended on the scene and unearthed the remains of not one but two
Columbian mammoths, the larger, southern cousin of the woolly mammoth.
And the tusks of the two males were locked together in mortal combat.
They each had a broken tusk, and one had run its tusk through the eye of his opponent.
Brutal!
These bull mammoths, later named Benny and George, met about 10,000 years ago and died
fighting over...you guessed it….
sex.
And we think is what happened, because modern bull elephants also get into aggressive confrontations
and fight each other with their tusks, often for access to females.
They go pretty wild during the breeding season because of raging hormones during a phase
called musth.
Researchers were able to confirm that these animals died during the spring — which was
their mating season -- by looking at the levels of carbon and oxygen isotopes in their tusks.
They’re high in the summer and lower in the winter, and Benny and George looked like
they’d just passed the winter low point.
And they also had the thin growth rings in their tusks that were consistent with mature
males when they’re in musth.
During their battle, one of the two bulls must have slipped, dragging the other to the
ground.
Exhausted and locked together, they starved.
Their heavy bodies started to sink into the wet, muddy earth.
And then they were covered with sediment, maybe from a flood, preserving them for thousands
of years, to become one of the most unique mammoths ever discovered.
And, like Benny and George, most of the mammoths recovered by paleontologists again are male.
Even a 2017 genetic study of Siberian mammoth bones, teeth, tusks, and hair revealed that
over two-thirds of their 98 mammoth fossils were male.
So why is the mammoth fossil record so male-dominated?
It may be because female mammoths knew how to stay out of trouble a bit better.
Just like modern elephants, young female mammoths probably stayed close to their female relatives.
Elephants live in matriarchal family groups, led by wise, old females.
The matriarch uses her decades of experience to keep her younger sisters, nieces, and grandchildren
fed, hydrated, and safe.
Mammoths likely had a similar family structure, and we can infer this from their remains.
When we find the bones of a single mammoth, they’re usually from a male.
And only in rare cases are huge groups of young and female mammoths found together,
having met their end in a sudden catastrophe, like we see at Waco Mammoth National Monument
in Texas.
It all points to a female-centric family group.
Female mammoths likely stayed close and learned from their family members, while the males,
on the other hand, went off on their own early and unprepared.
After leaving their family group and in their quest for mates, these young male mammoths
made deadly mistakes that females rarely made.
But like, that’s how’d I would explain it to you.
TierZoo can explain it to you another way:
In order to complete the mating questline, the male Mammoth build generally was forced
to engage in much riskier gameplay and more PvP than a female mammoth was.
Just like the elephants of today’s anthropocene meta, a successful playthrough on a male mammoth
involved leaving the safety of their party once they’d leveled up enough to reach sexual
maturity.
With no teammates to defend them if things got ugly, far more low level male mammoth
players died from things like environmental hazards and ambushes than female ones did,
and on top of that, the mating questline forced them into potentially deadly duels with other
bulls.
Female players on the other hand would have far more protection from ambushes, had more
opportunities to learn to avoid common environmental hazards, and never were forced to battle each
other to reproduce.
Thanks TierZoo!
This is very cool to be doing.
The natural traps of the Pleistocene were great at preserving the remains of males who
made mistakes in wonderful detail.
Which means that we have better fossils from them than we do from mammoths who lived long,
boring lives.
So it’s not that there were more male mammoths; it’s that they tended more often to die
in ways that would better preserve their remains.
And also their mistakes for us to examine in the future
And now museums around the world are stocked with male mammoths.
But what does this mean for people who study mammoths?
Isn’t it a problem that most of our information about them comes from males?
Well yes and no.
With mostly male remains, we miss out on a lot of important parts of mammoth life because
we don’t have a good comparison point for the males.
Although mammoths show some sexual dimorphism - like differences in pelvis size - we can't
get a good sense of the degree of that dimorphism.
Like did male mammoths have bigger feet?
Did female mammoths have smaller ears on average?
It’s hard to say without a good set of remains from both sexes.
But the hole in the fossil record in the first place also tells us something, because it’s
there.
It tells us that male mammoth life was somehow very different from female mammoth life, because
young male mammoths were much more likely to die in accidents.
So as TierZoo might put it: For low level male mammoth builds, not knowing about
the traps in the Ice Age meta often led to an early game over.
And for human players, the lack of female mammoth loot clued them into the mysterious
early game of the most famous build of the Quaternary Expansion.
But for us here at Eons, our takeaway is: Sometimes the information you don’t have
is just as important as the information you do have – for which is good news for anyone
working with a limited fossil record.
And if you haven't checked out TierZoo, Why not!? What a wonderful lens through which
to view the biology of our planet
Check it out at youtube.com/tierzoo.
Also Thanks for watching Eons, produced by Complexly.
We produce over a dozen shows, including Ours Poetica, which is a co-production between
Complexly, The Poetry Foundation, and poet Paige Lewis.
Ours Poetica brings you a new poem three times a week, read by poets, writers, artists, and
sometimes unexpected, yet familiar, voices.
Check out John Green reading Poetry by Marianne Moore below!
And a big thanks to this month’s Eontologists: Patrick Seifert, Jake Hart, Jon Davison Ng,
and Steve!
Go level up and become an Eonite by supporting us at patreon.com/eons!
Thanks for joining me in the Konstantin Haase Studio.
Be sure to subscribe at youtube.com/eons for more adventures in time.