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Genetically, Central American mammoths were weird

We tend to lump all mammoths together as big, hairy elephant-like beasts with enormous tusks. But there were a number of mammoth species, including less furry ones that inhabited temperate regions. And the furry ones include at least three species: the Eurasian steppe mammoth, the Arctic-specializing woolly mammoth, and the late-evolving North America-only Columbian mammoth. Because these species inhabited the Arctic, it has been remarkably easy to obtain DNA from them, providing a genetic pict

A mammoth tusk boomerang from Poland is 40,000 years old

A boomerang carved from a mammoth tusk is one of the oldest in the world, and it may be even older than archaeologists originally thought, according to a recent round of radiocarbon dating. Archaeologists unearthed the mammoth-tusk boomerang in Poland’s Oblazowa Cave in the 1990s, and they originally dated it to around 18,000 years old, which made it one of the world’s oldest intact boomerangs. But according to recent analysis by University of Bologna researcher Sahra Talamo and her colleagues,

How Prehistoric Mammoth Tusks Could Help Bust Modern-Day Ivory Smugglers

Selling elephant ivory—a hard white material from elephant tusks, for which elephants are often killed—is illegal. Selling ivory collected from the remains of extinct Mammoths, however, is—somehow—not. Because the two are hard to tell apart, illegal traders are slipping under the radar by mixing elephant ivory with legally traded mammoth ivory. A new forensic tool, however, might soon put an end to this nefarious trick. Wildlife forensic scientists in China suggest that authorities can differen

Scientists Just Solved a 14,000-Year-Old Puppy Mystery

In 2011 and 2015, two approximately 14,000-year-old pups were pulled from northern Siberia’s permafrost roughly 25 miles (40 kilometers) from the village of Tumat. Within the same layers of icy soil, researchers found woolly mammoth bones with evidence of human processing. This led some to wonder whether the “Tumat Puppies” may have been tamed wolves or even early dogs waiting around for scraps at a prehistoric butchering site. In a new study, an international team of researchers analyzed the p