June 27, 2024 10:42 PM

Genome study deepens mystery of what doomed Earth’s last mammoths

About 4,000 years ago, the last of Earth's woolly mammoths died out on a lonely Arctic Ocean island off the coast of Siberia, a melancholy end to one of the world's charismatic Ice Age animals. But what doomed this last mammoth population on Wrangel Island? A new genomic analysis deepens the mystery. The study offers the fullest account to date of the inbreeding, deleterious mutations and low genetic diversity experienced by this population during 6,000 years of isolation on the island but conc...