Mammoths Weren't Killed Off By Man

I don't have a lot of time for blogging today. I have to leave work early so I can see my Film-Studies-major son's movie premiere this afternoon. And I already spent part of my workday typing up a diatribe of a comment over at Hedgehog Blog (who I normally like) about his recent immigration posts.

So today it's wooly mammoths.

DigitalJournal published an article May 11, 2006, about new beliefs in the science world on what killed off the mammoth.

For as long as science has studied woolly mammoths, it was believed humansf led the furry giants to extinction. However, new evidence found in the Yukon suggests that is not the case.

In fact, it looks as though moose and weather were to blame. Dale Guthrie, a researcher at the University of Alaska, says he found evidence that the climate in the area was warming up, and grasslands were evolving into forests and tundra.

I hate to be dense, but how does a climate that's warming up change the vegetation from grassland to tundra? Here's how dictionary.com defines tundra (emphasis added):

tun·dra ( P ) Pronunciation Key (tndr)n.
A treeless area between the icecap and the tree line of Arctic regions, having a permanently frozen subsoil and supporting low-growing vegetation such as lichens, mosses, and stunted shrubs.

Are these real scientists?

Guthrie, reporting findings in the journal Nature, says mammoths and even American horses were not able to find adequate food in the forest, driving both species to extinction. Today’s domestic and wild horses are offspring of animals brought over by Europeans in the 16th century.

In addition to mammoths and horses, scientists believe weather changes and new animals also led to the extinctions of sabre-toothed cats, mastodons, giant sloths and a list of other animals.

Apparently, some scientists aren't convinced by Guthrie's findings, and they persist in believing either that mankind was responsible for the extinction of mammoths or that there was a combination of factors which included climate change and mankind's overkilling of animals.

Guthrie’s studies indicate horses died first (about 12,500 years ago) and mammoths remained in North America for another thousand years. Moose, a bark-eating animal, appeared unaffected by climate change, while elk and bison dwindled dramatically, barely surviving.

I'm not familiar with bark-eating moose. All the moose I've seen have been in wet grassland (in Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks). But maybe the grassland is where the moose hang out for tourist photo ops, and they do their real eating in the woods after dark.

All I know is that it's good to see that some scientists are losing their knee-jerk "it's mankind's (or America's) fault that animals are dead" response to natural history.