How Woolly Mammoths Worked

before you started. I want to say best of luck to mind. You means wonderful, great best friends Brandon and Laurel, who are at this moment in the delivery room blow Laurel's water broke. They're expecting their firstborn child. Wow. So by the time this releases, it will be like six years old. Yeah, pretty much, because we we have a six year Yeah, so good luck guys. It's great. Yeah. You should tell him that personally so they actually hear this.

I recorded it. That's enough. They'll give what they get and be happy with it. Yeah. You you uh excited about willy mammoths? I am you? Are you not? I think it's I think they're wonderful, wily anything plus also like a wooly mammoth. They were. They were sweet, good natured. They could take a joke at their own expense, but they weren't self deprecating. They just you know, had a good sense of humor. Yeah, anything related to an elephant, okay in my book, Yeah, I agreed. I have a

very big love for that animal. Well, it's a big animal, deserves a lot of love, and they're just wonderful in every way that they grieve over their dead. Oh God, there's this one story about Domini. I believe it's the name of the elephant that um. I think he or she was a zoo and had like a best friend, and the best friend died and this elephant could not get over it, and she died of I think the zoo keepers like, she died of a broken heart. You

can't take that she she grieved herself to death. Um. And I think the story is even more tragic than that. I'm not doing it justice, but just go go research Domini the elephant d A m A N. I You're like, whatever, it's kind of funny, right, he'll tickle your ribs. I don't know if I did it justice. Did it come across as funny stupid elephant? Well, you know what's even cuter than a wooly mammoth? Oh yeah, Well, what's cuter

than an elephant is an elephant with hair. So that's a wily mammoth, okay, or a mastodon, as we'll talk about a little bit. Those are different, totally different. Yeah, but they have hair. Not as much, yeah, but they have hair. Yeah, but you wouldn't look at it and be like, oh, that's wooly. You just be like, that's kind of hairy, yeah, stubborly. But the only thing cuter than a hairy elephant is a tiny hairry elephant. And there was a place, well there still is a place

called Wrangel Island and they don't have them anymore. But at one point, not too long ago, in the grand scheme of you know, the history of everything, right, uh, the Wrangel Island mammoths roamed the earth. And they are how tall are they? Like human height? Right at the shoulder? They were four to six ft tall. Oh man, So yeah, it's like a mini wooly mammoth, give me one. And they were directly descended from the wooly mammoths they just ended up on this island, and the island is pretty good.

Size is the size of Delaware from what I understand. But that's small enough. But that's small enough, well for an island, you know, but it's small enough that that they became dwarf. They went under that. Um what's that process called where a population lands on an island and it immediately begins to diminish in size. I don't know, I haven't heard of that island fever, something weird like that. Because they wanted to ride the roller coasters on the way,

you'd have to be bigger. Maybe they were scared of roller coasters, That's what I meant. They're like, we're getting out of here and we're gonna shrink, so we couldn't possibly go on a roller coaster. But they butchered that one. They were around for you, butcher them like a Wrangel Island wooly mammoth. So they were around, uh until about three thousand years ago, something like thirty years ago. I

think they were the last of their kind. Were on Wrangle Island in six b C. And dude, by that time, the pyramids were already a thousand years old. Like people, they shared territory with people, but most I shouldn't say most, A lot of the wooly mammoths, especially the ones that lived at the end of the Place of Steem place to scene. That's a tough one to say that scene, is it not. Yes, I think that's right, but I always want to like take continents and switch them around

and shuffle it up. Well, you're an anarchist, yeah, especially with words. Um, I even hate the word anarchists. You call it anarchist. Yeah, yeah, but uh, I mean that threw me off. Sorry, Yeah, man, what was I saying? Oh? Yeah, they did coexist with humans. Yeah, Like it's the one thing the flint Stones were right about. When you see a big willy mammoth in Fred flint Stone, that was entirely possible that the dinosaurs, the Brnos source all that

stuff just fantasy. And if that wily mammoth on the flint Stones was used to watch a car or some other household chore, completely real, right. Yeah. They were very helpful in addition to having a great sense of humor. They would help you out around the house. That was

one of my favorite parts of The flint Stones. I remember when I was a kid watching that and just being so tickled every time a bird's beak was used to play a record, and they were always just like so willingly, like just tilt me down and I'll play your record. Yeah, I love that stuff. And then every once in a a while but they would thank the animal and the animal be like oh man, most of the days.

So the Wrangel Island mammoths for around until about years ago, um, and they survived the extinction of the rest of the mammoths about four thousand years earlier. Right, Yeah, And if we're talking, like if you look at the dinosaurs, they left us sixty five million years ago, So this is

all very recent stuff. Like people hunted wooly mammoths and ate them and use their bones and tusks and wore their skin, I imagine, and uh not worshiped well we don't really know for sure, but at least revered them enough to put them in their cave art. Uh. So this is all kind of really cool stuff to me. We know a lot about them compared to a lot of other extinct species, right, but where they went remains a mystery a bit. Yeah, I mean it's definitely not definitive,

and there's a lot of theories. But there's really they melted remember that one? Yeah, what was that from? It was from one of our earlier podcasts. That was my personal theory on like where like the proto humans one or something. I don't even know they melted. Yeah, I

forgot all about that. That's an old one. And not only that, my friend, but um, we have they have like relatives, distant cousins still roaming the earth today because if you look at the African bush and the African forest elephants and the Asian elephant actually the closest, it's very close. Yeah not, I mean it's close and distant. If that makes sense, It doesn't. How do you mean? Well, I mean it's close enough to say it's the closest relative.

But they're still distant cousins. You know, they don't have the hair or the high sloping back or the curly tusk right or yeah with the finger like grippers. Yeah yeah, um, but they're still pretty close close enough that some mad scientists are like Wickham resurrect wooly Mammoth's using the Asian elephant because we have DNA right like when they found and they have found a lot of these carcasses. Some

some of them really intact. I mean enough, like there's brain and bone and blood and uh yeah, basically the whole thing. It's just the slightly mummified so there's like water loss. Other than that, it's all there. Like there's one called um man this is tough word to say, and there's another another continent Switchero. My brain wants to pull liuba it means love in Russian. Was just a little guy, yeah, the little baby. Yeah, this was not a miniature. It was actually a calf right, It was

a baby baby wooly mammoth um. I think maybe like a month old or something like that. But it was still die. Yeah. And and then in lifness would have weighed about um a hundred a hundred kilos or two pounds now a hundred pounds fifty kilos. That's missing half of its um weight and water while it was alive when you'd want to pick it up and now now you just kind of patted on the head and be like you stay over there. Yeah. When was that found?

Two thousand seven? Yeah, and um it was found perfectly preserved because apparently she had been colonized by a um uh some sort of lactic acid producing bacteria that effectively pickled her. So it preserved her, but it also made her very unappetizing scavengers too. She tasted weird, right, So, um, she's a really good example of a wooly mammoth. And I can't remember how many tens of thousands of years

old she is, but she's pretty old. So we do have this access to all these great specimens, and they've figured out that about the shelf life of viable DNA is a million years So there's plenty of wooly ammoths that who's DNA we have access to that's much younger than a million years old. And yeah, we'll talk about it. But some people are like, let's bring them back, let's de extinct them. Yeah, tricky territory. Oh yeah, but so Willie mammoth pretty cute. It's not a sabretooth tiger, right,

that's not tricky. You just don't do that. But the kind of the long and the short of all this, with the distant cousins and all of the uh preserved carcasses we found is that we have a really robust picture of how these things lived and what they were like. And um, I guess we'll take a break here and we'll get a little bit into their you know, they're nine to five. Job, we'll go back to the mammoth world.

All right. So if you picture in your mind a wooly mammoth, you might think, all right, frozen waste land. Uh and like Siberia, Right, they just eat like snow Wrong, snow cones. That's wrong. I'm sure they appreciated again, snow cone. They like Italian nights more than the snow cone. They're a little more European. But what was actually going on is they were they were trotting upon land what was called a mammoth step st e p pe mm hmm, not the step variety. Sure there's an extra p. Yeah,

like a steppy boy. It's not pronounced steppi is it? No? Okay, No, when you first encountered the word, it is uh. And this is this was basically it was sort of a unique time in the in the history of planet Earth in that it was rich. These areas were rich with stuff for them to eat, just like overloaded with vegetation. Yeah. One thing, were veggie eaters. Yeah, they were, they were um actually um grassland grazers. You can call them. So they ate long um long grasses sedges, which is like

a fake grass, but all intends of purposes. Yeah, they come upon a basil field. Man, it was all over like oh man, it's Italian night. So um, they ate grasses and they were herbivores and they ate this pretty specific diet and it certainly wasn't snow based and it was definitely cooler, which is I think another reason why people think, um they they they lived in a frozen wasteland. Well,

because they needed that coat, they did. And the reason why is because they were living in the Pleistocene, which was definitely it was a series of ice ages, right. Um, so it was colder. It's like five to ten degrease celsius colder than it is globally now. But the the whole ecosystem was just utterly different than what it is today. So like if you did manage to bring back Willy Mammoth and you put him on the Siberian step, they'd be like, well, I'm going to starve. There's nothing here

for me to eat. Things have changed. If you put them in Arizona or New Mexico or someplace where it might kind of look the same with the shrubbery and brush and grasses. Uh, they would say, no, I can't live here either, kind of die here too. It's too hot. Why did you bring me back? Really didn't think this through, that's right. But what you also had, though, is a pretty nice I mean, it was colder, but it was it was kind of nice weather for a wily mammoth.

It was the sea levels had dropped, so it exposed all this great land for them to roam, and it was very breezy and clear and kind of lovely, easy, freezy, beautiful, easy, breezy, beautiful for wooly mammoth. Yeah. Because again, well we'll talk about their coat. Actually, we can talk about it right now. So their coat was, um, are you familiar with a musk ox? Oh? Yeah, it was like that. It was like a skirt of long hair. But beneath that was

wooly undercoat that really kept them warm. Yeah, the outer coat, and we've talked about a lot of mammals, most of them have like layers of different kinds of fur. But um, the outer coat was the guard for and then under like you said, was the the wooly undercoat. And below that they had an inch of skin, very oily, and below that they had three to four inches of fat and all of this stuff made them nice and cozy and warm. But they were de delicious to eat man

oily skin inches of fat. Yeah, I'm just gonna ignore that, all right, Uh, twenty hours a day they spent eating, I guess, fattening themselves up for for me, for you. So they would just roam around and eat man and get along with each other. They were you know, I was about to say peaceful, which they kind of were unless they were infringed upon. And you don't want to mess with the willie mammoth alone, right, No, they they This article puts it that in a standing fight they

could take all commerce. They were definitely like they could defend themselves. And for the most part, apparently the major predators of the day um would not have taken a healthy adult mammothon. They would have like maybe followed a herd because the mammoth's um you were. If you saw a single mammoth, it was a male, or if you saw a herd of them, it was females and calves female calves, yeah right, or it could be male calves or nursing still before they went off on their own teenager.

They sent them off pretty young though, I think maybe starting when they were teenagers. Um. And either way, no short faced bear or sabretooth tiger is going to take on one of these guys by themselves. It would be like a calf that fell behind yeah, um, or like uh one that was sick or dying or trapped in like a tar pit. You would leap out with your clob spear, my knife and fork and have dinner my

napkin tied around my neck. Uh. And they were they did, you know, share their their area with these fearsome creatures like the sabretooth tiger. And there was actually something called a wooly rhinoceros, which is exactly what you think it is. Yeah, I'll bet you would not want to mess with that. I'd want to scratch him behind the ear. Oh, rhinocero. I are tough and mean. I know. That's the problem

with me. As I see these things, and I think, like a big tiger, I think all that guy needs is he looks like my Yeah, you know you should not go a little just to give him a good scratch behind the ear. And they're like, oh, well, I kind of like this guy, he's not up to get me. That's not what they do, I know. But that's why I don't take Safari's I'd be the dope that you

know tried to pet the cheetah. Oh my god, did you see the video of the woman who got out of her car in a tiger preserve and was like the just like a it's like a like a security camera, so it's a steady shot. And I don't know what the lady was doing out of the car. I think maybe in China, and she's just standing there one second, then all of a sudden, the tiger comes in frame

and just pulls her right out of frame. And then like her sister and husband get out of the car, and I think her sister was killed as well, and the husband like just runs back and dives into the car. But what were they doing out of the car, And like this huge tiger at least the size of the woman just comes and just grabs her. Was nuts, well, really disturbing. Yeah, I don't want to see that. Then you probably shouldn't. You'd still be like I'd still pet

that tiger. No, I wouldn't pet that tiger. You put that another one. What was the name of the grizzly Man, Timothy tread Well or Treadway. I think tread well Man. Yeah, that was a disturbing The best you should that was the best part was a terrible You should narrate everything. He should. He should do every commercial, voice over, every documentary, just you name it. He should do this podcast. They should go back and redo the voiceover the Alec Baldwin

did for the Royal. Tannon bombs Burner put a different spin on things. I think Royal was born in the avenue. Now that's a good herzog. It's not bad. All you have to do is try and do it like an evil mad german scientist or something. Colonel clink Colonel clink um, where were we? We were talking about how um they could defend themselves. You'd still want to pet him, and they'd probably be okay with you petting them. They just

accidentally trample you. Yeah, exactly. Elephant. Uh, those little calves were born in the springtime. Uh. And here's something that will come into factor later when they were wiped from the planet. They have a very long gestation period. It's twenty two months, so you know they're not pumping out these calves with great regularity. It takes a long time,

almost two years. Yeah, that's that's a while. So they would have been impregnated I guess, uh summer, late summer a year previous, and then born in the spring because they adapted to do that because there was more to eat, you know. Yeah, that makes sense. It's like, it's lovely. There's stuff blooming everywhere. Look at that basil field and so it We don't know exactly what they're society was like, but just based on modern elephants, paleontologists have surmised that

they were very social. Most likely. There's mammoth track ways that we've found fossilized footprints UM that show a number of mammoths walking side by side and amongst one another UM and they're clearly different size footprints. So there's different generations all walking together, which would indicate that they probably have similar societies to elephants. Right, the dead and stuff like that. Yeah, defend their dead, grieve over them, man,

it's really tough. UM. And that they probably came together in annual migrations, although the evidence for that is still lacking. And if they did migrate, I think I saw somewhere that they probably didn't go more than four miles. So still that's I don't go more than four dred miles when I walk. I don't either anymore, So hats off

to the manuths are walking that far. When they would go into heat the female, Like many mammals and many animals, there would be a competition of sorts among the men, uh, everywhere, from you know, puffing their chest out and flaunting to just straight up fighting with one another. I guess if times were tough, there weren't a lot of ladies around. And and that is a lot like the modern elephant as well. Uh. And and that they had what's called a must gland u s t not musk, which is

easy to say, must must. It's even when you've been drinking a lot. I don't know that's exactly what it sounds like. Or if you're Cindy Brady right, or if you're missing a tooth right, Oh yeah, you're getting psyched. I am getting psyched. And I'm also I was like, can I just get it done before this, Like I'm

going to Paris for three it's for God's sakes. And I was reading about Paris and they're like, if you don't want to stand out, you know, Americans are kind of if you want to blend in American French or preasons, kind of chic, like you know, you should you know, clean cut, and you know you shouldn't wear T shirts and shorts and tenny shoes. And it's like, man, I'm going to be the most American dude. They're you might as well just go with it, where like there's nothing

chic about me. Yeah, just walk around your me and these and an ill fitting T shirt and flip flops is like born in the USA T shirt? Yeah exactly, yeah, yeah, with an American eagle on your head. Yeah, and on the back it says have you seen my tooth? They're gonna love you. Yeah, we'll see. Well, we're also going to the land of bad dentistry? So or is that in the UK? They're gonna welcome us with me with open arms. Oh yeah, they're gonna be like he's one

of us. Is that a thing still? I thought? No, I'm sure it's gotten better, but it's still a joke that we can make. Oh god, I think so, or Mike Myers can We'll find out we have no idea, how our humor is gonna go over there probably fall flat. I we'll see um. All right, So there they have the musk gland and that secretes a fluid which um. And I think that just sort of it says here it establishes their higher they're mating hierarchy there. It's like

a pheromone gland. Yeah, so whoever has the musk not must oh desecrete musk. I'm sure you could call it that, or it secretes must Let's talk about their tusks, because here's something I didn't know. The tusks actually have evolved from their incisors. And then I mean it makes perfect sense. It's like Lisa Simpson with that um where she didn't have a dental plan, so like her tooth was gonna grow up through her. Remember that they have like a

projection or something. Yeah remember that? Uh yeah, that's exactly what it's like. Actually these outward Yeah, and they twist around. You know, if you've seen pictures of mammoths before, if not, look one up and it's not like a standard just curby elephant tusk. It's just beautiful the way it swoops around. Yeah, and I believe like they could get up to like sixteen ft long. It's enormous. That's a big tusk. Uh. And we'll talk a little more about how they were used.

But they here here to me is one of the saddest things. They go through. Well, first of all, their other teeth are foot long, their molars, which is remarkable. And they go through six sets of teeth like the modern elephant, over a sixty year lifespan. And they die after the last set of teeth is worn out. Yeah, and that's just like the saddest thing ever. They their last prune and kilo. Yeah, Like I guess they I mean to me because he human, I assume they sense

this like this, this is it? Well that and then they see me stalking on with my knife and fork and napkin because I wouldn't kill a mammoth. I just eat it after a diet of natural causes. Oh well, that's different. You just waited out until they had a loss of teeth. I'm like a jackal or a vulture. Would herb herban board taste better or worse than a

beautiful Yeah? Yeah, grass fed? All right, Uh, chuck, let's take a break and we'll come back, and we're gonna talk about where wooly mammoth's come from, came from past tense. All right, we're back. It's gonna have been a strong my friend. So, you know, wooly mammoths resemble elephants. They have a common ancestor. And what's that. There's a very primitive Elephantine animal type of animal called the probosidian. And actually if you look at the wooly mammoth, the massed

on some of those old ancient ones. Um their their order they belong to, So I think it goes species genus order, no species genus family order. Yeah, the order they belong to is um probosidia. And it's like um, like a you know, a bug has a probiscus, same thing. Uh, that's basically Greek for nose. I believe it is. So this the Greeks are just poking fun at their noses and they this uh split off from the million years ago.

It split off from the mamillion tree. It's a long time ago, right, And all this is happening in a Frica. The elephant family, the probe probos probositians, they all were found in Africa. That's where they evolved and then they eventually spread out of Africa up into the Sinai and over into Europe and then up into Asia, just like humans did. Um, and I think something like seven million years ago the first mammoths developed in Africa. No, they

weren't and we'll get to ye in a second. They were like they were mammoths, but they yeah, they weren't Willie like you said. They hung around in Africa for about four million years, about three million years ago they started to spread, and then about one point seven one point eight million years ago the Earth changed dramatically. It entered the Pleistocene. And again the palist scene was characterized

with huge dips in global temperature. It's been a hot house up to that point, and all of a sudden it's like getting cold, and there's like glacial periods and all that. And now the mammoths are starting to adapt to the cold. Now they became wooly and um kind

of differentiated from southern mammoths, uh, and became wooly mammoth's. Yeah, there was one in particular, the largest one of all, the step mammoth, and this sucker was fourteen feet and that's always at the shoulder, right, yes, And that correct, what do I don't measure from the top of the head, because you can like make yourself seem taller by lifting your head up, and they would do that when you mammoth's great sense of humor delicious really uncooperative at the doctor, right,

wanted to be taller. Uh. And this one they think originated in northeastern Eurasia, and uh was the ancestor most likely of the wooly mammoth shaggy but not wooly. No, it wasn't wooly. And the wooly mammoth actually is the smallest of them all right, So not only did they adapt to the cold with their wooly coat, right, they actually had some really interesting adaptations with their blood and um.

One of the things they figured out that it was that the willing mammoth had this pretty cool system where their arteries, which carried warm blood from the heart to the extremities, were really close to their blood vessels, which brought deoxygen aated cold blood from the extremities back to the heart. Well. The fact that the arterial blood vessels were close to the veins means that the warm blood would actually warm the blood in the veins on the way back to the heart, so that the heat never

really made it out of the core. It kept the core very warm, which is important, um. And it meant the extremities were very cold, which is much less important as long as you still have blood flow. And then they also had this hemoglobin that could so hemoglobin clumps onto oxygen and delivers it throughout the body. Right. Well, it takes a little bit of heat energy to get the hemoglobin to let go of the oxygen, but you want as much heat energy as you can possibly have

if you're wooly mammoth on the steps, right. Um. So they figured out get this by taking forty three thousand year old wooly mammoth, the na, isolating the genes that expressed hemoglobin that led to the expression of hemoglobin, and then it's inserting it into E. Coli bacteria and getting the equal light to manufacture wooly mammoth hemoglobin and then

analyzing that hemoglobin. And the researchers were saying, like, if we had a live well, if we built a time machine and went back in time forty three thousand years and took blood hemoglobin from this wooly mammoth, it would be this exact same substance we've brought back wooly mammoth hemoglobin, and from studying they found out things like it required

less heat energy to release oxygen, so thus conserving more heat. Well, and they're not the only ones either, Weren't there a lot or they speculate at least are a lot of cold adapted animals that had that same feature. Pretty cool. Um, alright, so the wool we're finally at the wooly smaller wooly mammoth, right, Yeah, they're the smallest of all the mammoth. Yeah, four hundred thousand years ago, and the first one of those was actually found in eighteen or six in Siberia from a

botanist named mackayl Adams. And um, these dudes like they were widespread. They went as far as modern day Ireland and then across the Bearing Land Bridge or sorry, the Bearing straight was the bearing Land Bridge? Ye, the st the water. Yeah, and then they roamed the east coast of the United States and up into Canada and down into Mexico. They went even yeah, they went west in

the United States and west pretty far west. Yeah, um, west, and a little bit south because at the time some of the glacial glacial is zation would come as far south as like covering Chicago entirely in a glacier. So they were a little further south. And they loved the Great Plains because the Great Plains were still the Great Plains back then. And yeah, they would eat the grasses.

But they also coexisted or shared the North American continent with another type of wooly mammoth that was indigenous to North America, the Colombian or Jefferson mammoth. Yeah, that's the one that actually spent time in Mexico and Nicaragua, I think as far south as Nicaraguay, Yeah, which is yeah, it's pretty amazing. Of course, the weather was different back then, yeah, like we said, but still, I mean they were closer

to the equator and it was definitely warmer. So they were a different species of wooly mammoth or of mammoth, but they were pretty closely related and I think they were actually um descended from the step mammoth as well. Yeah, and they were you know, they were they didn't need the weather just to be one thing. They were pretty adaptable. Um, not completely, as we'll see, because climate change probably did factor in h although not specifically because of like the temperature. Um, well,

we might as well talk a little bit about that. Huh. Are we there yet with the temperature? Well know, like maybe where they went. Oh well, it's a big mystery. Like I was saying, no one knows case close. Well, they have some ideas, uh, and one of them is climate change. But um, like I was hinting at, not necessarily like the temperature was something that affected them. It was more how the temperature affected their habitat. Shrinking their habitat is what, ultimately I think had a lot to

do with it. I think so too. There's well, there's so there are a number of theories. One was like a meteorite that never found any evidence for that. Um uh, maybe like a superbug got them doubtful. Yeah, And so it came down to humans over hunting them, which is called the overkill hypothesis, and then climate change hypothesis this and I think of those two, if I had to choose, I'm with you. I think the climate change is what got them. I think it's a little bit of both.

I think ultimately it is too. But I think humans finished off something that was a process that was already inevitable. Yeah, like here, here's what happens. Here's a bad thing. If you're a mammal or any animal. It's a bad, bad mammoth day. If you're if you're ecosystem is shrinking and your available food sources shrinking, and you continue to move where that is, you become isolated and your area is smaller and smaller, and that eventually is super bad news.

What you want if you're a wide ranging mammal like that is especially a big one that needs like four pounds of food today. Yeah, you want to be able to travel a long way to get as much food as you can because you're eating twentys a day. But if your habitat is shrinking, Uh, yeah, that's what I meant. Habitat, not ecosystem. That works. Yeah, it definitely works. Um. So the climate climate change melted those glaciers, sea levels rose, and then the land shrank, came cover with water yea,

and the wooly mamples like looking so good. Well, plus not only that, with the changing climate and the warming of the earth or the climate, I should say, um, their their food supply, not just the amount of food, but the type of food available diminished. Like I said, you couldn't take them and put them on the Siberian step Today. It's different plants that are there. They weren't

necessarily adapted to eat those things. You need certain enzymes to break down certain types of sugars and stuff like that to gain energy from it. And as their food changed, they got to be in big trouble. Um. That's the climate change hypothesis. The overkill hypothesis says that somewhere around twelve to thirteen thousand years ago, humans showed up in North America, and right about the same time, within a thousand years, there were no more wooly mammoths, and not

just wooly amos. There's something called the um North American mega fawn extinction where mammals I think ninety genera, so not even species, but genera, the next level up in classification. A lot of animals, ninety of them weighing over UM I think ninety pounds. UM just all died off around the same time we covered this. Yeah, surely or like the Clovis one, maybe UM And a lot of people say, well, clearly it was humans, and it makes a lot of sense.

It has some legs it's humans. A lot of people do think humans did show up around that time in North America. UM. The fact that it happens so quickly, and then the point that I think about the overkill hypothesis that really drives it home to me, although I'm more on the climate change fand wagon UM, is that these North America can mammoths would not have co evolved with humans like African ones did. So the African ones survived, the elephants down there, they survived because they covolved with

humans and came to understand that humans are dangerous. The ones here in North America wouldn't have been innately afraid of humans. You've seen them as dangerous, and so it could have been easy pickens for humans. The big problem is is there's not that much evidence of humans mass hunting these things, well maybe not maths hunting. They have found um. They have found like these spears and things in mammoth bones the Clovis point, which is what we

were talking about earlier. And we do know that they use their fur and they like to use their irene, they like to eat them. But the problem with that is that UM mammoth would have fed a lot of people, especially in that cold weather. You know, this natural preservation going on, so they could have lived and used that that but like a single adult or mammoth for a long time, which means they're not going to be hunting

like five of them a day. Uh. And there's also evidence that they were revered somewhat by their cave art. So there are people who think that maybe it was like the buffalo with the uh Native Americans. Maybe they respected it and they managed it. Yeah, and didn't say, hey, let's kill millions of these over a span of months. Right, this is a very euro American mentality. I mean, that's where the buffalo almost went extinct, was when euro Americans

came over and said, let's start shooting. That's that doesn't mean that that's what Native Americans did. And Plus also there were plenty of mammoths that when extinct. The mammoth species in the steps and in Europe when extinct two and there are humans over there for a long time, so it's not like the humans suddenly arrived everywhere. But yet the amoths died out at about the same time

throughout the world. Yeah. Plus, mostly people hunted smaller game, small the medium game back then like dogs maybe, but uh, you know, a mammoth like what it was probably an intimidating kill first of all. Uh, and you know what do we do with all that stuff? So I mean it's it's like we were saying, it is a mystery still exactly what happened to him. I again my bets on climate change. But obviously humans did kill or at least butcher mammoths, But I don't think they killed them

out of existence, so I agree, uh. And then that that leads us to that last point though about bringing them back. Good idea, bad idea. I mean, it's always a bad idea, isn't it. I think so. But you can also makes but do they I mean that's a pretty fatalistic view. Like you can also make the case that if you believe that humans into them to extinction, well then maybe it's our moral obligation to bring them back if we can. And that's the view I think of. Remember, um,

the ten thousand Clock, ten thousand year clock episode. We did so the Long Now Foundation, Um, they're big into that, the people who made the ten thousand year clock, they're big in the de extinction movement to bringing things back and there's two ways you can do it. You can take a you can take as much viable DNA from a wooly mammoth as you can get your hands on

and insert it into an Asian elephant DNA treatment. Yeah, and then make a hybrid, and then over time you breed out the Asian elephant stuff through a breeding program until you have a pure wooly mammoth. And then the other one is to take a the nucleus of a wooly mammoth cell and then plant it into an embryo. Sorry, yeah, you're right, and then you've just cloned to wooly mammoth. After it just states in a in a poor elephant,

it's like, what what are you guys doing? I wonder if the elephant when it was born would be like whoa right, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, this is uh, this is a wooly man with you guys realized Rosemary's baby. Yeah, so they Um. I think there's groups working on both of those. And the ethics are questionable because I mean, like, I'm sure it's gonna sound preposterous to some people, but what about that elephant mom, Like, you know, is she gonna care for this baby. How's it going to affect her?

How will it affect the baby? Um, it's just a it raises a lot of questions. And plus also everyone is pretty much in agreement that there's no way this thing could ever live in the wild, so to living captivity to charge people money to come see him. So yeah, I agree with you. No I'll eat them. But so we teased about the Mastodon earlier. Um, and you found this was a mental flass thing, right, the difference between a mammoth and the Mastodon because they coexisted here in

the US. The Mammoth is not a great metal band, first of all, like Atlanta's own Mastodon, who, by the way, our old friend Chris, bass player in my band, he was at his one of his kids, or not one of his kids. You always want a kid his kids soccer game, and the lead guy from Mastodon was right there. His kid is on the same soccer team, the one with the face and neck tattoos. Yeah, that guy, that's awesome. He was like, I know who you are. By the way,

fans like, yeah, let's talk soccer? Did they? Yeah? Nice? Anyway, They're just like normal people. Sure they have kids that play soccer, even though he's a metal god. Hm. But what does that have to do with the wooly mammoth? Not much? Uh. Their teeth is where you can all the big diff that's uh yeah, is that the only way these days? It's pretty clear that that's the only way to tell. Well, the hair was a little different and they don't have the high sloping back, and then

tusks are a little straighter. They look a lot more like elephants than a mammoth does, because a mammoth looks elephant time, but it looks like especially when you put it next to an elephant or a mastodon, it looks like a totally different animal. Agreed. But the teeth is the giveaway. The the elephant molars, I'm sorry. The mammoth has elephant like molars and they are like cheese graters

or like the sole of like a running shoe. Sure, it's used to just grind through some some leaves, grasses, lovely. The mastodon Actually the word means nipple tooth or boob tooth, which is a bit of that was a lot of fun on the playground, right. It's because they have like um conical bumps on their molars. That reminded this anatomist from the I think the early nineteenth century, George Cuvier. He said, well, these bumps look like breasts, so we're

gonna name him breast tooth. And also, I've been out alone with my journal for far too long. Help, Yeah, you got anything else? When there's something about Thomas Jefferson, he was into the mastodons. They were actually the mastodon, the people he was convinced that there was a mammoth

still alive out west. Remember Lewis and Clark episode. That was one of the reasons Lewis and Clark went out west was to look for mammothing because he was just convinced they were out there and he thought they were meat eaters. Though he did, I think he was part of that train. Ben Franklin was like, I think you could probably also eat branches and stuff, which is went

mastodons eight. But the massdon became like the earliest symbol of America, an American like, ah, let's mess stuff up, let's let's kick some butt that it came from the mastodon. And the mastodon. Also, this is like a hundred years before they were finding um mammoths um. They it proved for the first time the idea of extinction. Before that, everybody's like, you're the Earth was created six thousand years ago.

Everything was in the Garden of Eden. There was a flood, so we lost some things, but everything else is exactly the way it's supposed to be. And the masted on teeth that they were finding in Eventually the bones proved that there were things that had lived before that. We're not alive any longer, and extinction became a scientific thought. Amazing. That's a nice little cherry on top. Do we finish strong? We did, didn't we? And by we I mean you us,

Chuck us Uh. If you want to know more about mammoths, you should type that word in the search bar at how stuff works dot com. And since I said search, parts the time for listening to mail. Hey guys, this is my first time emailing because I was waiting for an opportunity 'll tell you some stuff you should know. I finally came today in the form of book talk

with Josh and Chuck. Remember that, Yeah, in the Moonwalk episode, I think so, and uh, you said that I had said previously I didn't give a book much and I was like, I don't think I said that. Turns out I did say that. I just don't remember because I'd rarely read books that I have to put down, right, I want to say. Also one other thing, I'm sorry the guy who wrote Head full of Ghosts, Paul Tremblay.

I believe um. Somebody tweeted to him and said, hey, you gotta mention in this episode, and I guess he went and listened. He was like, that was great, and no, I know how to moonwalk. And then he tweeted some time later he's like, Okay, it's been eight hours and I still have not moonwalking. Well, and I guess they're making a movie out of his his book with uh Robert Downey Jr. Oh wow, it's gonna be big. Well. I wonder if that was because of us. Probably they

were like, we're kind on the fence. And then they heard our Moonwalk episode and they green lighted it. Wow. Uh so, guys, I was excited to hear you rambling about books, something I love dearly in A nice change of base for movie talk with Josh and Chuck. Not that I don't love movie talk or booze talk with Josh and Chuck. Yeah, those are the only three things we talked about. You talked about how long each give

a book before you give up on it. Did you know there's a rule for that, Nancy Pearl's rule of fifty. Have you ever heard of this? She says, I assume Nancy as a woman. Uh, if you're younger than fifty, you should read fifty pages before deciding to give up. And for every year older than fifty that you are subtract one page, soft one, forty nine pages, and so on. At one hundred. You judge a book by its cover. Literally,

how about that? Who's this Nancy from Heart? Nancy Wilson? Nope, I'm going to see Heart soon though, Like, are they opening for somebody or that? Are the headlining? Their Cheap Trick is opening in Joan Jett? Are opening for Heart? Awesome triple bill? Yeah, that's a heck of a bill. Yeah, I can't wait. Um, So Nancy Pearl says, yeah, fifty and then subtractive page because obviously life is getting short.

You don't have enough time to waste time. So by the time you're a hundred, you just look at it and go now. And you could keel over just looking at a book. You could Also, if you haven't heard of Nancy Pearl, she's great. She's probably the most famous librarian. Okay, there you go. I love that. At least, Well, is there more than one famous librarian. There's gotta be If she's the most famous, didn't have to be other famous ones. John Dewey, inventor of the Dewey decimal system. That's right,

she says. At least she's up there, And she even has her own action figure librarian action figure. I just got my masters in library science last year or so. I'm a Nancy Pearl fan. Multiple professors of mine have had the action figure in their offices. I love this story. Chris Palette, he wanted to become a librarian. Oh yeah, he's He deserves an accent figure too. Oh I bet he's. He's probably uh, he's probably got a Nancy Pearl one, former host of tex Stuff and early host of co

host of Stuff. You should know before I snuffed him out, right, I just I didn't like kill him. I just chloroformed him and he woke up in a library. It was like, I guess I'll get a degree. Yeah, that's exactly how I want. Anyway, I hope this email wasn't too long. I thought you'd like to know about the Rule of fifty. All the best, Erica in Boston, p s ce you in Boston and October right. Thanks a lot. We're doing a show there sure are on your sober that the

Wilberth Theater. Yep, you can still get tickets at s y s K Live dot com. BAM. Thanks for the set up, Erica. If you want to set us up to plug our shows, we'd love that. You can tweet to us at s y s K Podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast to how Stuff Works dot com and has always joined us at our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com For more on this and thousands of other topics.

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