Last mammoths on Wrangel Island

Wrangel Island lies in the Arctic Ocean about 140 kilometres off the northeast coast of Siberia. Rising seas cut it off from the mainland about 10,000 years ago, stranding woolly mammoths on it. While mammoths vanished from the mainland, those on Wrangel lasted until about 4,000 years ago, when the pyramids of Egypt had already been built. The dates come from radiocarbon analysis of bones and teeth, first reported by Sergey Vartanyan and colleagues in the 1990s.¹²

The island's mammoths were somewhat smaller than the mainland animals, and their population was small, perhaps a few hundred. Genome studies show that the founders may have been as few as a handful of animals. A 2017 study suggested that inbreeding and harmful mutations built up, a genomic meltdown. A much larger 2024 study led by Love Dalen sequenced 21 genomes and found no signs of a late decline in genetic diversity, which implies that the population remained stable for 6,000 years until some sudden event ended it. What that event was, whether a disease, a severe weather event or the arrival of people, is not known.²³⁴