Who Killed the Elephants?

Hungry prehistoric hunters, not climate change, drove elephants and wooly mammoths to extinction during the Pleistocene era, new research suggests.

At least 12 kinds of elephants andperson Inflatable Tent mammoths used to roam the African, Eurasian, and American continents. Today, only two species of elephants are left in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. One theory for this dramatic demise holds that rapid climate shifts at the end of the most recent major ice age, some 10,000 years ago, altered vegetation and broke up habitats, causing the death of those unable to adapt to the new conditions. Another hypothesis blames prehistoric humans, whose improved weapons and hunting techniques allowed them to wipe out whole herds of elephants and mammoths (Science, 8 June 2001, p. 1888).

To help resolve the debate, archaeologist Todd Surovell of the University of Wyoming, Laramie, and colleagues tested two assumptions. If humans caused the elephant and mammoth extinctions, Surovell reasoned, the timing company Inflatable Archof the die-offs in specific regions should match human expansion into those regions. On the contrary, if the extinction of these mammals were due to climate change, elephants and mammoths should remain in regions already colonized by humans and would only begin to die off once climate change occurred.