The last mammoths
Mainland populations vanish, and a remnant survives on an Arctic island for another five thousand years.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 5.3 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 300 years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
Woolly mammoths disappear from the mainland at the end of the Pleistocene, but small populations persist on St Paul Island until around 3600 BCE and on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean until about 1650 BCE — by which time the pyramids at Giza were already ancient. Genomes from the Wrangel population show accumulating harmful mutations from long inbreeding, a phenomenon sometimes called genomic meltdown.