The two pachyderm species, the woolly mammoth or mammuthus primigenius, and the steppe mammoth or Mammuthus trogontherii, roamed the grasslands and plains of Eurasia for several hundred millenia, slowly dwindling in numbers due to climatic change, change in prey and predator species, and from hunting by hominids and early Homo Sapiens. The traditional story is that the last mammoths died out around 6-4,000 years ago, reduced to an inbred, isolated population on frozen Wrangel Island, a small landmass lying close to the northern shore of eastern Siberia. However, new archaeological investigations are beginning to challenge this interpretation; according to roughly calibrated dates, the woolly mammoth may have survived until around 3,900 BP in the wilderness of the Taimyr peninsula in north-central Siberia - that is, approximately 1,870 BCE.
The dates were achieved in early 2021, after years of research by Yucheng Wang, Mikkel Pedersen, Jeffery Rasic and numerous other archaeologists, zoologists and geoscientists from universities across the globe, using samples of eDNA or 'environmental DNA', essentially mitochondrial DNA that is released, upon defecation or decay, into the surrounding environment - in this case tundra, frozen rivers and permafrost. Their sites were scattered across the Arctic Circle, from the north Atlantic coast of Greenland, to the Svalbard archipelago, to the coasts of eastern Siberia and western North America, as well as a handful of sites in the central Siberian forest-steppe. According to their work, a number of other interesting dates were thrown up; in northeast Siberia, the woolly rhinoceros survived until circa 7,000 BCE; in Alaska, prehistoric horses survived until at least 5,700 BCE; and mammoths in the Americas lasted until circa 6,600 BCE. Hominids and modern humans had long colonised these areas by then. The implication is, then, rather than driving the last megafauna to extinction, either deliberately or accidentally through removing habitats, mammoths and humans coexisted together for thousands, if not tens of thousands of years.
While the Taimyr peninsular is still incredibly remote today; for most of history it was inhabited half by a Finno-Ugric tribe known as the Nganasan and half by Samoyedic groups, both living a nomadic lifestyle of reindeer hunting, movable tents and shamanic ceremonies, it is worth comparing what was going on at the same time mammoths continued to eke out an existence the tundra.
The Taymyr peninsula in northern Siberia.
The Neo-Sumerian empire was on the ascendant, having inherited the political machinery of the Akkadian and old Sumerian empires. On the Eurasian steppe, the Yamnaya and succeeding kurgan cultures had spread their language, customs and DNA across the European continent, and their cousins, the Corded Ware culture, was slowly being replaced by the bronze-using Unetice Culture in central Europe. Minoan Crete was at its economic and cultural zenith, its fleets travelling the length of the eastern Mediterranean. The Indus Valley civilization was at its height, trading as far afield as central Asia and Sri Lanka. The Yangtze river valley civilization in China was beginning to form, remembered in literature as the legendary Xia Dynasty. In the Americas, the Norte Chico culture was flourishing, and many early farming communities were building in scale and ambition.
There is the remote possibility that these Bronze Age cultures might have known about and interacted with the last surviving megafauna. The Afanasievo culture of modern Mongolia, a offshoot of the Yamnaya culture of the east European steppe, were pastoralists, but are known to have mixed and traded with hunter-gatherers to their north. By the end of the 3rd millennium BCE these farmers gradually drifted south, bringing their language and customs with them, to the Tarim basin where they became the Qäwrighul culture, famous for its well-preserved cave mummies. This culture is also thought to have traded with eastern Chinese cultures, and possibly with the early towns of the Yangtze river valley. Although it would have taken many months, perhaps in one-off cases, ivory from a recently killed or deceased mammoth could have been traded down the tundra as a prestige object to adorn the fireplace of an Afanasievo chieftain, or to be buried with the mummy of a dead Qäwrighul relative.
Another option is interaction between late Corded Ware farmers or their Finnish hunter-gatherer (but still pottery-using) relatives, the Grooved Ware culture, and the game-hunters of the Siberian tundra. A northern ivory trade, from western Siberia to western Europe, is historically known from at least the 9th century CE, sourced from both walrus ivory and mammoth ivory recovered from uncovered remains during periods of melting permafrost. While this may have something to do with the Norse expansion and the medieval warm period, mammoth bone could have been transported along similar, if mostly overland, routes during prehistory. Any contact like this can hardly be traceable in the archaeological record - if it occurred at all, it must have happened once every few generations - but, given what we know about the mobility of the middle and late Bronze Ages, it is a possibility.
It is worth mentioning that eDNA is still an experimental field, and there is the likelihood of contamination, or an unreliable date based on old carbon in the surrounding context or more recent anthropogenic or natural activity, such as a wildfire. The researchers claim that they also found Arctic Camel DNA in some of the contemporaneous samples, which is unusual given the species is thought to have died out around 2.5 million years ago. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile research and, while the permafrost continues to melt at an accelerating pace, research that should be paid a great deal of attention.
References:
Wang, Y., Pedersen, M. et al (2021). Late Quaternary dynamics of Arctic biota from ancient environmental genomics. Nature, 600(7887), 86-92.
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