Hey everyone, we have an exciting announcement! Just in time for the holidays, you can now
get your own cozy, Eons socks! Now you can stay warm while showcasing the
layers of rock and fossils that help reveal the history of life on Earth. Get yours at DFTBA.com!! About 140,000 years ago in what’s now South
Dakota, a mammoth approached a sinkhole filled with steaming water. Lured by vegetation, the mammoth ventured
into the water. But with its flat, heavy feet, it had little
hope of scaling the steep, muddy sides of the pond to climb out. With no hope of escape, it either starved or drowned,
eventually being covered by silt and preserved. And it wasn’t the only one. To date, the remains of 61 mammoths have been
excavated from the Mammoth Site of Hot Springs, South Dakota, all victims of an ancient sinkhole. And one of the most intriguing things about
these dead mammoths is that the vast majority of them are male. Woolly mammoths roamed Eurasia and North America
for millions of years. They foraged mainly on grasses, along with
some shrubs, mosses, and herbs. They fended off wolves, cave hyenas, and big
cats with their large bodies, huge, curved tusks and powerful trunks. The life of a mammoth was probably a lot like
the life of their distant cousins, the elephants. But what caused the extinction of the mammoths
is still a matter of debate. They disappeared from Europe and North America
at the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago, though some small groups hung on
for much longer by hiding out in remote areas. The very last mammoths died out on a small
island in the Arctic Ocean about 4000 years ago – around the same time that the ancient
Egyptians were constructing the Great Pyramid of Giza. Experts blame the mammoths’ extinction mostly
on a rapidly changing climate, with maybe a little hunting by, well, us. And today, we’ve teamed up with TierZoo
to solve one of the mysteries about these charismatic megafauna, gamer-style. As TierZoo put it, the mammoth’s
top tier gear and high HP dominated the Pleistocene meta. But climate change doesn’t explain the nagging
mystery about our favorite ice age proboscidean: Why do most remains of mammoths found in the
fossil record turn out to be male? Even without humans hunting them or the ice
sheets melting, mammoth life was dangerous. The Ice Age tundra could be an unforgiving
place to live. Dry, dusty winds. Bitter cold. Frozen earth. Not swampy, like our modern tundra, but still
no picnic. And even if the cold or wind didn’t get
you, the tundra was full of deadly traps that sent unsuspecting inhabitants to an early
grave. In 1901, a group of scientists from St. Petersburg
ventured into the Siberian tundra. After several months of chasing tips from
locals, they saw, or rather smelled, something extraordinary. It was a woolly mammoth, embedded in the frozen
banks of the Berezovka River. Its head and neck had thawed enough to rot,
attracting scavengers. These scanvengers were eating meat that was thousands of years old! I just want to emphasize that. After they slowly dug the carcass out from
the bank, the team’s paleontologist examined it closely. Its leg bones and pelvis were broken. Its blood vessels had torn open, causing blood
to pool around its muscles. He said this creature fell from a cliff
along the river, and was smothered by the ensuing landslide of half-frozen mud. Game over. The Berezovka mammoth would turn out to be
a famous, early example of this kind of accidental preservation. Fast-forward to 2007. A reindeer herder found another carcass along
a frozen Siberian river, this time on the Yamal Peninsula. It was a small woolly mammoth calf, only about
a month old. Fermenting bacteria had taken over the remains,
pickling the carcass and thwarting scavengers. Lyuba, as she was named, was fat and healthy
when she died. But her skull was full of nodules of iron
phosphate, a sign that a lot of blood had flowed to her brain just before she died. This was clear evidence of the mammalian diving
reflex that activates when a mammal’s face is submerged in cold water and it has to hold
its breath. She also had sediment in her trunk, trachea,
and lungs. Poor Lyuba seems to have face-planted into
some soupy mud and suffocated while trying to clear it from her trunk. Like the Berezovka mammoth and Lyuba, many
mammoths’ lives were claimed by the treacherous landscape of the tundra. But for paleontologists, dramatic deaths like
these are a goldmine. Since these specimens were buried quickly,
they were shielded from scavengers like wolves, so their bodies had a much better chance of
being preserved. And these accident victims can reveal incredible
details about how mammoths lived. The Berezovka mammoth had half-chewed leaves
and grasses between its teeth. Lyuba still had her mother’s milk in her
stomach. But a freak accident like falling into mud
and suffocating could happen to anyone, right? The fact is, even if they stayed far away
from environmental hazards, mammoth life was still not easy. In the Little Badlands of Nebraska in 1962, a couple of workers discovered a large thighbone
while surveying for a dam. Paleontologists quickly descended on the scene
and unearthed the remains of not one but two Columbian mammoths, the larger, southern cousin
of the woolly mammoth. And the tusks of the two males were locked
together in mortal combat. They each had a broken tusk, and one had run
its tusk through the eye of his opponent. Brutal! These bull mammoths, later named Benny and
George, met about 10,000 years ago and died fighting over...you guessed it…. sex. And we think is what happened, because modern
bull elephants also get into aggressive confrontations and fight each other with their tusks, often
for access to females. They go pretty wild during the breeding season
because of raging hormones during a phase called musth. Researchers were able to confirm that these
animals died during the spring — which was their mating season -- by looking at the levels
of carbon and oxygen isotopes in their tusks. They’re high in the summer and lower in
the winter, and Benny and George looked like they’d just passed the winter low point. And they also had the thin growth rings in
their tusks that were consistent with mature males when they’re in musth. During their battle, one of the two bulls
must have slipped, dragging the other to the ground. Exhausted and locked together, they starved. Their heavy bodies started to sink into the
wet, muddy earth. And then they were covered with sediment,
maybe from a flood, preserving them for thousands of years, to become one of the most unique
mammoths ever discovered. And, like Benny and George, most of the mammoths
recovered by paleontologists again are male. Even a 2017 genetic study of Siberian mammoth
bones, teeth, tusks, and hair revealed that over two-thirds of their 98 mammoth fossils
were male. So why is the mammoth fossil record so male-dominated? It may be because female mammoths knew how
to stay out of trouble a bit better. Just like modern elephants, young female mammoths
probably stayed close to their female relatives. Elephants live in matriarchal family groups,
led by wise, old females. The matriarch uses her decades of experience
to keep her younger sisters, nieces, and grandchildren fed, hydrated, and safe. Mammoths likely had a similar family structure,
and we can infer this from their remains. When we find the bones of a single mammoth,
they’re usually from a male. And only in rare cases are huge groups of
young and female mammoths found together, having met their end in a sudden catastrophe,
like we see at Waco Mammoth National Monument in Texas. It all points to a female-centric family group. Female mammoths likely stayed close and learned
from their family members, while the males, on the other hand, went off on their own early
and unprepared. After leaving their family group and in their
quest for mates, these young male mammoths made deadly mistakes that females rarely made. But like, that’s how’d I would explain it to you. TierZoo can explain it to you another way: In order to complete the mating questline,
the male Mammoth build generally was forced to engage in much riskier gameplay and more
PvP than a female mammoth was. Just like the elephants of today’s anthropocene
meta, a successful playthrough on a male mammoth involved leaving the safety of their party
once they’d leveled up enough to reach sexual maturity. With no teammates to defend them if things
got ugly, far more low level male mammoth players died from things like environmental
hazards and ambushes than female ones did, and on top of that, the mating questline forced
them into potentially deadly duels with other bulls. Female players on the other hand would have
far more protection from ambushes, had more opportunities to learn to avoid common environmental
hazards, and never were forced to battle each other to reproduce. Thanks TierZoo! This is very cool to be doing. The natural traps of the Pleistocene were
great at preserving the remains of males who made mistakes in wonderful detail. Which means that we have better fossils from
them than we do from mammoths who lived long, boring lives. So it’s not that there were more male mammoths;
it’s that they tended more often to die in ways that would better preserve their remains. And also their mistakes for us to examine in the future And now museums around the world are stocked
with male mammoths. But what does this mean for people who study
mammoths? Isn’t it a problem that most of our information
about them comes from males? Well yes and no. With mostly male remains, we miss out on a
lot of important parts of mammoth life because we don’t have a good comparison point for
the males. Although mammoths show some sexual dimorphism
- like differences in pelvis size - we can't get a good sense of the degree of that dimorphism. Like did male mammoths have bigger feet? Did female mammoths have smaller ears on average? It’s hard to say without a good set of remains
from both sexes. But the hole in the fossil record in the first
place also tells us something, because it’s there. It tells us that male mammoth life was somehow
very different from female mammoth life, because young male mammoths were much more likely
to die in accidents. So as TierZoo might put it: For low
level male mammoth builds, not knowing about the traps in the Ice Age meta often led to
an early game over. And for human players, the lack of female
mammoth loot clued them into the mysterious early game of the most famous build of the
Quaternary Expansion. But for us here at Eons, our takeaway is:
Sometimes the information you don’t have is just as important as the information you
do have – for which is good news for anyone working with a limited fossil record. And if you haven't checked out TierZoo, Why not!? What a wonderful lens through which to view the biology of our planet Check it out at youtube.com/tierzoo. Also Thanks for watching Eons, produced by
Complexly. We produce over a dozen shows, including Ours
Poetica, which is a co-production between Complexly, The Poetry Foundation, and poet
Paige Lewis. Ours Poetica brings you a new poem three times
a week, read by poets, writers, artists, and sometimes unexpected, yet familiar, voices. Check out John Green reading Poetry by Marianne
Moore below! And a big thanks to this month’s Eontologists:
Patrick Seifert, Jake Hart, Jon Davison Ng, and Steve! Go level up and become an Eonite by supporting
us at patreon.com/eons! Thanks for joining me in the Konstantin
Haase Studio. Be sure to subscribe at youtube.com/eons for
more adventures in time.
As found on Youtube
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