Gadgetory

There’s something fantastic about imagining humans living alongside and even hunting woolly mammoths. But it really happened. By examining the skeletons of woolly mammoths buried underground in places like Michigan and Siberia, scientists have been able to build a timeline of when humans and mammoths walked the Earth — together. Now, researchers think they’ve added another piece to this elephant-sized puzzle. The frozen carcass of a young male wooly mammoth discovered in 2012 in Russia shows signs that it died from an attack by human hunters, according to a study in Science. But it’s the timing of that attack that’s got the researchers excited: according to them, this woolly mammoth died from its injuries 45,000 years ago in the Arctic. That means that humans were present in the Arctic much earlier than previously thought — about 10,000 years earlier, to be precise. There’s a lot of evidence that this mammoth died from human-induced injuries. One of the mammoth’s ribs, for instance, displays butchery marks similar to ones found on other mammoth carcasses killed by humans. These marks were probably the result of a blow aimed at the mammoth’s internal organs. The researchers also found a deep lesion on its skull beneath the cheekbone’s surface, as well as marks on its right tusk and its left shoulder blade. Taken together, the mammoth’s many injuries indicate that humans used sharp weapons, made of stone or ivory, to bring the mammoth down, says Vladimir Pitulko, an archeologist at the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg and a co-author of the study. “These damages [tell] me that the mammoth was attacked by humans who used some projectiles, like spears. [Humans] probably either [threw projectiles] into the mammoth or just hit it from a short distance.” And thanks to radiocarbon dating — a technique that uses the properties of carbon to assign a date to organic materials inside bone — scientists were able to narrow down the timing of the attack. They concluded that the mammoth lived and died about 45,000 years ago. Given that the mammoth was found at a latitude of 72 degrees North, that’s big news, Pitulko says. “I wouldn’t expect to find an evidence for humans [that] far north at that time, because all sites of this age are limited [to] 55 degrees North.” There isn’t much that we can tell about how ancient humans lived in the Arctic based on these findings. But we can say that humans were capable of killing mammoths even that far back. And even though the researchers didn’t examine human bones or a settlement, the mammoth does show that people could be found in the region over 40,000 years ago. Improvements in our ability to kill mammoths may have made humanity’s expansion northward possible, Pitulko says. And now that we have evidence of human activity that far north, scientists might want to look for archeological sites dating back to that period in the Arctic. The region probably has a lot more to tell us about human history.