Climate events let ice age mammoths go far below 40°N

Dick Mol (Netherlands) and Ralf-Dietrich Kahlke (Germany)

The remains of four mammoth bulls have been discovered in southern Spain. They lived about 30 to 40 thousand years ago near Padul, a small city in today’s Granada. These are Europe’s most southerly skeletal remains of Mammuthus primigenius (Fig. 1) and were unearthed in a moor on the 37°N latitude. This is considerably further south of the inhospitable habitat that one usually imagines for mammoths and for the characteristically dry and cold climate that prevailed during the ice ages in northern Eurasia.

“These woolly mammoth finds do not belong to stray animals that only chanced to head south, but belonged to Granada’s permanent inhabitants at this time”, says Diego Álvarez-Lao, from the University of Oviedo. Dick Mol, ice age expert at the Natural History Museum of Rotterdam and frequent contributor to this magazine, adds: “Nevertheless, the Spanish mammoths have not differed anatomically from their congeners in more northern regions”.

Climate and environmental data show that it was not the longing for summer temperatures or the chirp of crickets that lured the ice age giants to the south, but a diet of grass, various herbs and shrubs. The expansion of the mammoth steppe with its typical vegetation allowed the wandering of the giants and other ice age animals below the 40^°N latitude and far to the south. Nuria García, from the University Complutense de Madrid explains, “Fossil plants, which have been found in drill cores from scientific drilling in Spain and the nearby Mediterranean Sea, as well as our investigations of the Padul sediments, indicate that the animals lived on the plants of the mammoth steppe.” 

One of the discoverers of these remains is Senckenberg scientist, Ralf-Dietrich Kahlke, who focused on the reasons that Mammuthus primigenius passed below 40°N. As he says, “A comparison with other sites between the 38°N and 36°N latitude shows that the animals pushed south, 30 to 40 thousand years ago also in areas outside of Europe”. Therefore, the southern-most sites of the ice age giants lie on a belt, which stretches from Western Europe via Georgia, the Siberian Baikal region to eastern China, and from Korea to the Midwest of America. 

Nevertheless, the dispersal of the giants was occasionally blocked. The impressively high Sierra Nevada at Padul (Fig. 4) formed a natural barrier, likewise, the Rocky Mountains in North America. Other obstacles were areas that did not offer suitable food, such as desert-like regions or the Great Plains of North America, which expanded because of a vegetation change.

The southerly push of Mammuthus primigenius in Europe and their migration to southern Spain and Italy happened at the same time as similar advances into eastern China, to the north of Japan and to Kamchatka. This phenomenon may be related to coupled climate events in the north-east Atlantic and the north-west Pacific. Dr. Kahlke concludes, “This is proof that global mechanisms, which regulated climate already during the ice age, also influenced vegetation and, with it, also animal migration”.

References

Álvarez-Lao, D., Kahlke, R.D., García, N.  & Mol, D., 2009: “The Padul mammoth finds – On the southernmost record of Mammuthus primigenius in Europe and its southern spread during the Late Pleistocene” is published in: Journal: Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology. – Reference: PALAEO5005 PII: S0031-0182(09)00169-2.