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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Writer: Hungry Humans Killed Off Mammoths

Bruce Ramsey Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“The Call of Distant Mammoths: Why the Ice Age Mammals Disappeared” By Peter Ward (Copernicus, 241 pages, $26)

When American pioneers rolled west in covered wagons, they thought they were seeing a virgin land, rich with big game.

“In reality,” writes Peter Ward, “they crossed a land decimated of game.”

The really big game, the American big game - mammoths, mastodons, Irish elk, elephant birds, giant lemurs, ground sloths, saber-toothed tigers - had vanished just 100 centuries before. These magnificent species died out in a mass extinction and were replaced by smaller, nimbler species from Asia.

Two events have been put forth to explain that: the end of the Ice Age and the arrival of human hunters.

In the 19th century, when naturalists first pieced together the story of the mammoths and mastodons, they assumed that man had killed them off. Man was remaking the world, pushing back the wild with steam engines, telegraphs and railroads.

Of course we had done it. Who else?

Then came the 20th century. Social scientists explained events in terms of impersonal social forces, of supply and demand. Psychologists studied rats, on the theory that we all were creatures of environment.

In that milieu, the fossil hunters said it was impossibly arrogant for us to think our naked ancestors, armed only with spears, had killed off two entire species of hairy elephants. No way. The climate had done it.

Well, we have a lot more evidence now, and Ward, curator of paleontology at the University of Washington, tells us that those Darwinists of 120 years ago were right. We did it.

It’s a disturbing thought. “Culturally, we look for any excuse except the one at the end of our fingers, where that spear sat,” says Ward.

Ward lays out the evidence in chilling and colorful detail in his new book, “The Call of Distant Mammoths: Why the Ice Age Mammals Disappeared.” Part of the evidence is several sites of fossil mammoth bones mixed with stone tools. Part is the examination of the treelike rings on mammoth tusks, which show they were healthy and fertile, not starving, when they died.

Part also is a comparison of the extinction of large mammals in various areas: The greatest extinctions happened in the Americas, New Zealand and Australia, where humans arrived for the first time, and the fewest in Africa, where the animals had watched their dangerous new neighbor evolve.

Could the climate have killed the great mammals? The climate wobbled about far more in the Ice Ages than it does now.

The mammoths and the rest “had developed everything in order to survive,” says Ward. Climate would have been no big deal. “The one thing they hadn’t evolved to withstand was human hunters.”

Like the dinosaurs, the great mammals were wiped out all at once. Perhaps the dinosaurs’ killer was the Chicxulub Comet. With the great mammals, the “comet” was us.

Ward asks the reader to imagine what it must have been like for the cold and bedraggled humans who pushed across the Bering land bridge 12,000 years ago, down past the walls of ice in the Canadian interior, into the fresh new continent teeming with huge and unwitting game animals.

Of course, we killed them - and probably with delight.

And to our immense profit, as well. For as long as there were hairy elephants and ground sloths to hunt - and worldwide, the hunting lasted some 90,000 years - our ancestors were content to sit by the campfire and plan their next feast. Only when the good stuff was gone, says Ward, did humankind knuckle down and invent agriculture.

We did, of course, spare the elephants (barely). They provide a crucial part of Ward’s argument.

The study of elephant tusks shows how well they ate and how often they reproduced. Applying the knowledge to mammoth tusks, researcher Dan Fisher of the University of Michigan was able to show, in Ward’s words, that “they were not dying off. They were being killed off.”

Fisher’s work, published last year, was “the smoking gun” on the mammoth question, Ward says.

Another recent piece of work has largely been ignored by the public, probably because it was done by Russians. But it is the most intriguing of all.

It turns out that last colony of mammoths held on for an extra 4,500 years on remote Wrangell Island in the Arctic Ocean. There they lived on, gradually becoming dwarfs, 6 feet high instead of their former 10.

Then, about the time the Egyptians were building their first pyramid, men walked 100 miles across the frozen ice and had one last wonderful hunt.

Ward’s study of the great mammals gives him little hope for most of today’s endangered species, at least in the wild. But Ward does not argue, as so many do, that wiping out sea lions, grizzly.

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