Aha music video ice age
Based on previous research, scientists suspected two factors were driving extinctions: a loss of food due to a warming climate or overhunting by humans. During the Pleistocene-Holocene transition roughly 11,000 to 14,000 years ago, the climate went through rapid changes that led to the extinction of many Ice Age species like mastodons and saber-toothed cats. The research team was eager to understand how and why large North American species like mammoths and bison survived for thousands of years before they vanished. “One of my responsibilities at the ancient DNA center is freezer maintenance, so I had a good idea of what cool stuff might be in there waiting for someone to study.” “I found them in the freezers while looking for a new project during my PhD,” Murchie, lead author of the new paper, tells Gizmodo. The soil samples sat in a freezer untested for years until Tyler Murchie, an archaeologist specializing in ancient DNA at McMaster University, decided to reinvestigate them. Most DNA samples are taken from materials like bone or hair, but soils also contain also genetic residue that animals leave behind as they move through an environment, according to Gizmodo’s Isaac Schultz. A new analysis of the DNA samples reveals that woolly mammoths, wild horses and steppe bison were around as recently as 5,000 years ago-some 8,000 years later than previously thought, according to a study published this week in Nature Communications. Frozen DNA evidence trapped in soil suggests that mammoth and wild horse populations petered out slowly, instead of vanishing quickly.įrozen soil samples collected around a decade ago are rewriting our understanding of iconic Ice Age animals like the woolly mammoth. The soil samples were pulled from Canada’s permafrost in the early 2010s, but no work on them had been published until recently.