Ancient Hunters Butchered Mostly Female Mammoths
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- David Díez del Molino's team sequenced DNA from 521 mammoths and found that roughly 70% of specimens at 11 human-associated sites dated 20,000–30,000 years ago were female, compared to 66% male at natural depositional sites.
- Researchers suggest the skew reflects deliberate targeting: females were smaller, slower when accompanied by calves, and traveled in predictable herds along seasonal migration routes — much like modern elephants.
- Hannah Moots and colleagues also identified a mammoth with XX/X0 mosaicism, the genetic basis of Turner syndrome in humans — the first sex chromosome mutation ever documented in an extinct species.
- Audrey Rowe at the University of Alaska Fairbanks called the findings "a new line of evidence that humans contributed to the extinction of mammoths," warning that hunters were "thinning their own resources over time."
- The Centre for Palaeogenetics study, published in Current Biology (DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2026.07.023), challenges prior theories that mammoth bone piles at archaeological sites were natural accumulations that humans merely exploited.
Why it matters: The 70%-female skew at kill sites versus 66%-male at natural traps provides a genetic fingerprint of deliberate hunting behavior, not opportunistic scavenging. Rowe explicitly links this to mammoth decline, adding fresh weight to the long-running debate over whether human hunting or climate change drove the species toward extinction.
