Scientists Reveal Woolly Mammoth's 600-Mile Journey Across North America

A woolly mammoth's 600-mile journey across North America has been documented by scientists, and it appears the species lived in much closer proximity to humans than previously thought.

In new research published in the journal Science Advances, scientists discovered that the travels of one woolly mammoth, known as Elma, were linked to the oldest human settlements in Alaska.

A part of Elma's tusk, which was discovered at the Swan Point archaeological site in Alaska, underwent isotope analysis that revealed she traveled 600 miles through Alaska and northwestern Canada during her lifetime. It also seems that she shared her habitat with ice age hunter gatherers. The Swan Point site was a hunting camp occupied around 14,000 years ago.

Woolly mammoths thrived for about half a million years during the ice age but went extinct around 4,000 years ago after a drastic change in the climate.

Audrey Rowe, a University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) Ph.D. student and lead author of the paper said in a summary that it looked like people were establishing hunting camps in areas that were frequented by mammoths.

"I think we were all astonished to see how tightly the mammoth's preferred area of use in the years before her death overlapped with the densest area of Pleistocene (ice age) archaeological sites in Alaska," Rowe told Newsweek.

"This is where the power of peer review comes into play," she said. "One of our anonymous reviewers asked us whether we saw a similar story on the Canadian end, in the mammoth's preferred area during the beginning of her life. We hadn't thought to check that, but the reviewer's hunch was right! Sure enough, the mammoth spent the first half of her life right around the two firmly established archaeological sites near the end of the ice age in Yukon."

When Elma's tusk was first excavated in 2009, archaeologists also found the remains of two juvenile mammoths who were related to her. Additionally they discovered campfires, the remains of tools, and butchered animal remains, the study reported. All of this points to the fact that humans hunted mammoths, a possible explanation for them sharing habitat with the species.

"We think the body of evidence of this paper establishes means and motive for people hunting mammoths at Swan Point," Rowe said. "More broadly, we think there's a strong implication that people would have been choosing where to settle and establish their hunting camps based on predictable use of this land by protein-rich and fat-rich resources like mammoths."

Mammoth tusks are invaluable for studying how these animals lived because they grew throughout their lifetimes and can hold clues into the chronological events of their lives.

"She was a young adult in the prime of life. Her isotopes showed she was not malnourished and that she died in the same season as the seasonal hunting camp at Swan Point where her tusk was found," senior author Matthew Wooller, who is director of the Alaska Stable Isotope Facility and a professor at UAF's College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, said in a summary of the findings.

Another notable finding was that Elma's life coincided with the travels of a male mammoth who lived 3,000 earlier than her. This suggests that mammoths repeated these journeys throughout their time on Earth.

This research could open the door for more studies into how ice age humans coexisted with these ancient animals. Elma's life also helps researchers understand how the species coped towards the end of the ice age, as she would have lived at a time when the landscape was becoming more green and leafy.

"This was a very multidisciplinary team with different areas of interest and expertise," Rowe said. "The ecologists (like me) are excited to repeat these types of analyses on more tusks to deepen our knowledge of mammoth ecology in a variety of locations and time periods."

"This knowledge might even end up being practically useful if the famous push for mammoth de-extinction succeeds," she said. "I think a more subtle implication from this study that might excite the archaeologists more is that the mammoth's preferred area in western Yukon might be archaeologically under-studied, and could be a starting point for searching for more sites of human occupation near the end of the ice age there. "

Do you have a tip on a science story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about mammoths? Let us know via science@newsweek.com.