Tag: Crash Test Dummies

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circa 1650 BCE — the last mammoths become extinct

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It’s unclear exactly what killed the mammoths off, although there are two leading contenders: the end of the last Ice Age made climates generally warmer (although the last ice age ended several thousand years before the extinction was complete) and predation – the predator in question being, of course, us.

At one point, mammoths were found across most of the northern reaches of Europe, Asia and America, in several different species, but bit by bit, these were hunted to extinction. The shrinking of their optimal habitat as the ice retreated probably made the hunting easier, but their extinction was a certainty as soon as our ancestors developed a taste for mammoth-meat.

The last known population of mammoths, that on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Sea to the north of Chukotka (the easternmost part of Asia), became extinct in about 1650 BCE, having survived their relatives on St Paul Island, Alaska, by about 1100 years.

Grotte de Rouff mammut.jpg
By Cave painter – Own work, Public Domain, Link

As mentioned in:

In The Days Of The Caveman — Crash Test Dummies

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circa 9600 BCE — The most recent Ice Age ends

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The most recent Ice Age – or more precisely, the most recent glacial maximum of the current Ice Age – ended a little under 10,000 years ago, having lasted some 70,000 years itself. The abrupt climactic changes (abrupt in a geological sense) contributed to mass extinctions of various animal species, notably the woolly mammoth, although it is also believed that hunting by early humans also contributed to at least some of these extinctions.

In geological terms, the end of the last Ice Age is recorded as the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene epochs.

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circa 25,000 BCE — the last Neanderthals become extinct

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It’s unclear exactly how our nearest hominid relatives went extinct, but the leading candidates are our direct ancestors: whether fucking or fighting.

I mean that quite literally: some of them interbred with homo sapiens until they no longer existed as a separate species, or they just plain got killed by other homo sapiens. At their widest range, Neandertals occupied lands from Ireland and Spain in the west through to the southern Urals in the East. They did not go extinct everywhere at the same time, of course, but the precise details are somewhat obscured by the incompleteness of the fossil record.

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circa 600,000 BCE — The first Neanderthals evolve

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The classic ‘caveman’, Neanderthals – homo neanderthalensis – were native to Europe, Western Asia and Central Asia. The earliest Neanderthal characteristics evolved at around this time – fossil evidence (admittedly incomplete) suggests that the full differentiation of the species had taken place by 130,000 BCE.

They were not, as is often thought, the ancestors of modern humanity, but rather a rival species that our ancestors wiped out in a competition for space and resources.