, isolating them from their mainland counterparts. As the world’s climate continued to warm and habitats changed, Wrangel Island became one of the last viable environments where these mammoths could survive, setting the stage for their final chapter.A prevailing theory for the extinction of isolated populations like the woolly mammoths on Wrangel Island often points to inbreeding.
Fed’s ‘Critical’ Warning Sparks Serious $50,000 Bitcoin Price Crash Alert As $200 Billion Is Wiped From Ethereum, XRP, Solana And CryptoThis drastic reduction in population size limited their genetic diversity and could have made them more susceptible to environmental stresses and changes. This suggests that, contrary to expectations, inbreeding did not lead to the accumulation of harmful mutations that could have caused their extinction. Instead, the isolated mammoth population was able to purge these detrimental mutations over generations, challenging the traditional view that genetic degradation was the key factor in their demise.The new genetic data for woolly mammoths suggests that inbreeding was only one small part of a larger storm that was brewing.
This period marked significant changes in human hunting practices and land use, which could have impacted local ecosystems in profound ways. Although direct evidence of humans hunting the last mammoths on Wrangel Island is still elusive, the coinciding timelines suggest that human activity could have played a role in stressing mammoth populations, either through direct hunting or by altering their habitats.