When did the woolly mammoth go extinct? Three dates

The short answer

The woolly mammoth has three extinction dates, one for each of the last places it lived.

Across the mainland of Eurasia and North America, woolly mammoths died out around 10,500 years ago. A population on Alaska's St Paul Island lasted until 5,600 years ago. The last population anybody has found, on Wrangel Island off the Siberian coast, held on until about 4,000 years ago.

That final date catches people out. Work on the Great Pyramid at Giza began around 2550 BC. There were mammoths alive on Wrangel Island while it was going up.

Where the animal came from

Woolly mammoths evolved in northeast Siberia somewhere between 800,000 and 600,000 years ago. From there they spread west across Eurasia and east into North America, crossing Beringia, the ground that used to join Siberia to Alaska, about 100,000 years ago.

A grown one stood roughly three to three and a half metres at the shoulder, around ten to eleven and a half feet, and weighed four to six tonnes, depending on whether it was a male or a female. Its tusks grew in a spiral, curving in two dimensions at once.

They were grazers. The Bering Land Bridge National Preserve describes them as herbivores that fed on tundra grasses, on a grassland so bound up with the animal that scientists named it the Mammoth Steppe. Not many animals get a whole ecosystem named after them.

What finished them

The Park Service stays careful about the cause. The reason "is still largely unknown, but often attributed to a combination of climate change and over-hunting by humans." Both were happening at the same time, and which one mattered more is still open.

The pattern is clearer than the cause. The mainland emptied first, and the two groups that outlasted everybody were the two that ended up surrounded by water. Water bought them thousands of years.

The island that ran out of water

St Paul Island sits in the Bering Sea. Rising seas cut its mammoths off there, and after that they had nowhere left to walk to.

An international team dated the end of them to 5,600 years ago, give or take a hundred. They used radiocarbon dates from fourteen mammoth remains, fungal spores from dung buried in lake sediment, and mammoth DNA pulled out of the sediment itself. All of it lands on the same century, which is why this counts as one of the best-dated prehistoric extinctions anywhere.

The cause was fresh water. As the island shrank between 14,700 and 6,000 years ago, the mammoths were squeezed onto less and less ground, and they stripped the plants around their lake while digging for a drink. The bare soil washed in and filled the lake, which left even less water. The researchers put it plainly: the mammoths contributed to their own demise.

It is a grim little loop. The animals were doing the ordinary thing a thirsty herd does, on an island that had stopped being big enough for it.

The last three hundred

Wrangel Island was made an island by the same rising seas. A few mammoths ended up on the wrong side of the water, and they stayed there.

A 2024 genome study from Stockholm University traced the entire population back to fewer than ten founders. From that start it grew to roughly 300 breeding adults, and it stayed at about that number for six thousand years. Six thousand years is a long run for a herd that small.

Those mammoths were inbred, as you would expect from that few founders. A herd in that state is expected to dwindle away slowly. This one held its numbers right to the end, then dropped all at once about 4,000 years ago, and nobody yet knows what did it.

So if you want one date for the species, it is about 4,000 years ago, give or take.

Field note: our mammoth

Otto has tusks and the manners of an extremely large dog.

Otto is the mammoth in the Atomic Critters cast, a dog and mammoth hybrid out of prehistoric Wyoming, brown and curly and far too big for most doorways. He walks at the back of whatever group he has taken responsibility for, watching the slow one, putting himself between everybody and whatever he has noticed first. He is also, at any given moment, standing in the only usable gap.

Three hundred animals holding out at the edge of the map for six thousand years is the sort of thing he would have taken personally.

Otto is on the Otto Frozen tee and across the rest of the Otto Mammoth Collection. If you would rather read him than wear him, the graphic novel starts here.