Mammoth find fuels extinction debate.

Mammoth find fuels extinction debate

Mammoth bones recovered at a gravel pit in England last year are about 12,800 years old and extend the known occurrence of the huge mammals in Britain to near the end of the last Ice Age. The new find, say paleontologists G. Russell Coope of the University of Birmingham, England, and Adrian M. Lister of the University of Cambridge, England, contradicts the widespread scientific view that mammoths disappeared from Britain during the maximum expansions of ice sheets between 18,000 and 15,000 years ago.

The discovery, consisting of an almost complete adult skeleton and partial skeletons of at least three juveniles, is unique in Europe, and the adult skeleton is the best-preserved mammoth of any age yet found in England, report the investigators in the Dec. 3 NATURE.

Tusk fragments from the adult specimen underwent independent radiocarbon dating at two university laboratories. Their age is close to that of two other recent mammoth finds in Europe dated at around 12,000 years old.

A juvenile skull and two juvenile lower jaws contained fossil remains of the blowfly and dung beetle. Since both of these species are now found only in temperate regions. Coope and Lister say the late-Ice Age climate in England may also have been relatively mild.

The age of the British mammoths is only 2,300 years older than the latest known mammoth remains in North America, writes Jeffrey J. Saunders of the Illinois State Museum in Springfield in an accompanying editorial. Additional British mammoth finds may further reduce this age difference, he says, and lend support to the notion that a global climatic change led to mammoth extinctions.

"The new discovery makes it more likely that mammoth extinctions were synchronous in Europe and North America,' Lister told SCIENCE NEWS. There may have been a return of cold temperatures around 11,000 years ago that fostered the mammoth demise in North America, he says, although no solid data suggesting such a shift have been uncovered. In Europe, however, there are signs of such a scenario: Analysis of fossil pollen indicates that at about that time, ice sheets briefly returned and reduced the landscape to a sparsely vegetated tundra.

Nevertheless, says Paul S. Martin of the University of Arizona in Tucson, there were far more large-mammal extinctions in North America, where there is little evidence for late-Ice Age climate shifts, than in Europe. Martin stands by his theory that human hunters wiped out many North American species between 12,000 and 10,000 years ago (SN: 10/31/87, p.284).

"Considering how thoroughly most late-Ice Age British deposits have been examined, the news is that mammoths are found so rarely and were probably scarce in Europe at that time,' adds Martin. "I'm not bullish on too many more mammoth specimens turning up at late-Ice Age sites in Europe.'