The planet's last surviving mammoth population was killed by a random and sudden mystery event, a new study has revealed.
"We can now confidently reject the idea that the population was simply too small and that they were doomed to go extinct for genetic reasons," study senior author Love Dalén, an evolutionary geneticist at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm, said in a statement."This means it was probably just some random event that killed them off, and if that random event hadn't happened, then we would still have mammoths today.
Related: 'Archaeological sensation': Winemaker discovers hundreds of mammoth bones while renovating his cellar To look into the consequences of the Wrangel Island bottleneck, the researchers in the new study used DNA extracted from bones and tusks to analyze the genomes of 21 mammoths — 14 from the island and seven from the mainland population before the bottleneck occurred.