Date: 19/01/21
GWPF & Scientific American
Scientists have discovered the DNA of some 2,100 kinds of plants and 180 animals — including American horses and woolly mammoths – dating to thousands of years after their supposed extinction.
One of the most popular theories for the extinction of the wholly mammoth and other so-called ‘megafauna’ that roamed the wilderness during the Pleistocene is the claim that rapid global warming at the end of the last Ice Age killed off these species.
The idea that global warming rather ‘overkill’ by human hunters was chiefly responsible for the disappearance of the mammoth has gained in popularity in conjunction with claims that humans today are facing the same fate due to the same alleged catastrophe.
Paleontologists have been arguing for decades what may have caused these species to vanish. For much of the second half of the 20th century the ‘overkill hypothesis’ dominated the scientific debate, claiming that the post-glacial expansion of human populations into their habitats led to the overhunting and gradual destruction of these species.
With the rise of climate catastrophism, a growing number of studies attempted to show that global warming rather than humans were primarily responsible for the disappearance of these Pleistocene species.
Now, a team of paleogeneticists have discovered DNA of “about 2,100 kinds of plants and 180 animals—including American horses and woolly mammoths, in samples from soil dated to thousands of years after their supposed extinction.”
Once this new discovery can be confirmed, the whole idea of an abrupt climate catastrophe wiping out the wholly mammoth and other Pleistocene species in one fell swoop is likely to go the way of the Dodo.
Ancient DNA preserved in soil may rewrite what we thought about the Ice Age
Based on bone and tooth records, the Yukon’s last mammoths were thought to have gone extinct about 12,000 years ago. But a new genetic sampling technique suggests the great beasts may have stuck around a lot longer, plodding through the Arctic tundra with bison and elk for thousands of years more. The story is in the soil.
Bones are rich sources of prehistoric genetic information, but not the only ones; items ranging from shed Ice Age skin cells to pine needles can contribute to the genetic record stored in dirt. Paleogeneticists have been extracting and analyzing “environmental DNA” from soil for a long time, but getting rid of non-DNA material without destroying these fragile clues is daunting.
“Environmental samples contain a huge range of other chemical substances that are challenging to separate from the DNA we’re interested in,” says McMaster University geneticist Tyler Murchie. “We can’t afford to lose whatever we can get.” In Quaternary Reports, Murchie and his colleagues describe gentler techniques that recover up to 59 times as much genetic material as other methods.
In the new approach, soil samples are extracted with a sterilized chisel and then broken into smaller portions, stirred and run through a “cold spin method” to separate as much DNA as possible. The DNA is then compared against an existing genetic library to detect species matches.
“Not only do these techniques get more DNA, but they get more diverse DNA,” says East Tennessee State University paleontologist Chris Widga, who was not involved in the new study. “It’s becoming more nuanced, and it looks like there is actually the potential to document larger slices of the ecosystem.”
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“Not only do these techniques get more DNA, but they get more diverse DNA,”
I question whether what they are getting is DNA at all.
I thought that for DNA to survive for thousands of years, it has to be protected from the environment, such as inside teeth or bones.
It lasts longer when frozen.
How did it get into the soil, if the soil was frozen?
Shed skin and hair in summer thawed boggy soil, covered with layers of dust, then frozen. Similar to how whole mammoth carcasses got frozen into the tundra permafrost. Sometimes they died in water, but they also shed into rivers and lakes.
Can we say “false positives” like for a misleading covid test? I would like to see at least a fragment or two of the original animal — even just a footprint or a coprolite would do.
Take some soil from so long ago we know there’s no mammoth DNA in it — say from the age of Dinosaurs — and see how many times the tests indicate — falsely — that the DNA is present.
Graph: Temperature curve last fifteen thousand years. NB Green line.
We came out of the last ice age staring about 13,000 BC
At 12,000 BC we crashed back into it.
It bounced back And force and pulled out about 10,000 years BC.
The mammoths were found with buttercups in their mouths.
Conclusion: They were standing in a meadow when it snowed. They were totally engulfed and died. Their may have been a few survivors though not enough to keep the species going.
Village in southwest Jordan (stone houses, still standing, recently discovered) was built around 18,000 years ago
Stone towers in Syria were constructed roughly 15,000 years ago
The Younger Dryas began around 12,500 years ago and that is a cold period.
The snows of Kilimanjaro piled up starting around about 10,000 years ago. (Still there, if you want to visit) But was that snow just bad weather, or a hint of something else?
And then we started building more villages and then the Industrial Revolution (OK, OK< I”m compressing things here!) and lots of carbon-based fuel in the form of coal, which can be turned into coking coal to make better steel.
It may just be that the only reason we’re in a reasonably warm period is that we produce just enough CO2 to trap a little heat and keep us from freezing to death. Take that away and we might just return to a Very Cold Period with short growing seasons, loss of water resources (locked up in ice formations), loss of food crops to iceburgers – stuff like that.
If that comes off as simplified, it is. The Waalian Warm Period (70,000 years long) preceded the Nebraska Warm Period (140,000 years long) (on this continent; don’t have anything for South America, sorry) and all those megafauna critters in North America managed to survive. Ditto critters like wolf cubs and mammoths over in Siberia: something flash froze them, no idea what but could have been anything.
So, if the big 4-leggers like mammoths were running out of grazing foods, it’s entirely possible that (aside from being chased by hunters) they were going hungry and consuming anything, including trees.
A mastodon skeleton was found in someone’s back yard near me about two years ago, not a youngster, either. What else is lying under tons of dirt around here?
I would not take this warm period for granted, that’s all.
A pet peeve of mine is when people call generic Mammoths “Woolly Mammoths”. Sure the Mammoths in the Yukon were likely Woolly but Mammoths that lived in Texas were not Wooly.
The recovered DNA was of woollies. Arctic conditions preserve DNA better.
It is absurd to think that this interglacial’s arrival was any different than the other twenty or so in the past three million years or that woolly mammoths and the other recently extinct large manuals all evolved just during the last glacial stage.
I thought that mammoths had survived till only 5000 years ago on Novaya Zemlya, Russia.
About 4 Ka on Wrangel Island.
This is old news. It was discovered years ago that mammoths on Wrangel Island, in the Russian arctic, survived until just 4,000 years ago.
I watched a show recently that the domestication of wolves into domestic dogs may have impacted the megafauna. The migrated humans from Asia brought the dogs with them. The dogs carried fleas, etc. that could have spread new diseases to the Megafauna. The resulting loss of the game, warming environment and maybe disease from the dogs also resulted in the extinction of the Sabre-toothed tiger. Look what fleas and the Plague did to Midevil Europe.
Why would anyone think that the woolly mammoth went extinct due to a warming climate?
If woolly mammoths had an appetite similar to that of modern elephants (which only live in tropical climates in the wild), they would need to live near forests to have a sufficient food supply. There may have been forests in Siberia prior to the first ice age, but even without glaciation, the current climate of Siberia cannot support forests, or supply enough food for an elephant-sized herbivore.
It was likely a sudden cooling of the climate, at the start of the first ice age, that caused massive deaths by starvation of mammoths in Siberia. While some of them may have migrated south to escape the ice, it is not clear whether the climate at the southern edge of the glaciers could have supported the forests the mammoths would need to survive.
In todays’ climate, there is high rainfall and snowfall during summer and early autumn (when the Arctic shores are ice-free), but the climate becomes very dry in late autumn, winter, and early spring when sea ice reaches the shore, reducing the possibility for evaporation.
Prior to the first ice age, if the climate was warm enough so that the Arctic shores remained ice-free year-round, northern Siberia would have had a wetter climate than now, due to increased evaporation from open water, which could have supported growth of forests.