Mammoths Wiped Out by Prehistoric 'Perfect Storm'?

Dec. 31, 2008 -- Mammoths were a hearty group of giants that went extinct not because of climate change or overhunting by early humans, but a "perfect storm" of conditions, according to new research.

At the height of their numbers, the elephant-like beasts roamed the northern hemisphere from France to Canada, north above the Arctic circle and south into China.

But after thriving for millions of years, they suddenly disappeared around 12,000 years ago. Scientists have argued that climate change, an asteroid impact, or even the rise of a new predator -- humans, armed with spears -- did them in.

Sergey Zimov of the Russian Academy of Science and a team of researchers believe the animals were far tougher than we give them credit for. In a presentation at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union this month, they proposed that mammoths lived in an ecosystem as rich in life as today's African savannah, and that all three extinction factors must've converged to deliver the mortal blow.

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Around 12,900 years ago, temperatures in the northern hemisphere plunged abruptly, beginning 1,000 years of bitter cold known as the Younger Dryas cooling event. The shift in climate is thought to have destroyed the mammoths' ecosystem and, the theory goes, starved the giants as tundra mosses and woody scrub carpeted the frosty Earth.

"Climate change alone is not enough to kill them off," said Nikita Zimov, Sergey's son, also of the Russian Academy of Sciences. "They lived...in many different temperatures and levels of precipitation."