Love Dalén receives funding from the Swedish Research Council, the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, and the European Research Council. In scien

Did inbreeding cause the woolly mammoth’s extinction? Our research suggests it was more sudden than that

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2024-07-10 19:00:14

Love Dalén receives funding from the Swedish Research Council, the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, and the European Research Council.

In science, we usually share our successes and ignore the less glamorous mishaps. We decided to follow a different approach. This is the story of how multiple generations of scientists collaborated to decipher the genome of the mammoth formerly known as Lonely Boy, often referred to as the last mammoth on the Earth.

The woolly mammoth was one of the most charismatic species of the last Ice Age, between roughly 120,000 to 12,000 years ago. Yet, the cause of its extinction remains a mystery. Mammoths roamed large parts of the northern hemisphere during their heyday, but by the end of the Ice Age, they had disappeared from most of their former range. The last mammoth population lived on Wrangel Island, a small island off the Siberian coast, until its final demise about 4,000 years ago.

In our new study, published in Cell, we investigated whether the Wrangel Island mammoth population was genetically destined for extinction. And despite many mistakes along the way, we ultimately discovered it wasn’t.