Wrangel Island

Yet against all odds, a tiny population of mammoths found refuge on a remote Arctic island.

On Wrangel Island, a small island north of Siberia, mammoths survived for another six thousand years after their mainland cousins had died out.

Incredibly, this means the last Wrangel Island mammoths were still alive around 2000 BC.

To put this in perspective, this means these great creatures were walking the Earth well after the construction of the great pyramids at Giza.

In the aftermath of the Ice Age, as glaciers melted and sea levels rose, Wrangel Island was cut off from the mainland.

A small herd of mammoths became marooned on this island around ten thousand years ago when rising seas turned a once connected coastal plain into an isolated sanctuary.

Scientists estimate that perhaps no more than eight to ten mammoths initially made up this stranded group.

Such a tiny founding population faced a serious genetic bottleneck, but they managed to survive and reproduce.

But woolly mammoths didn't all go extinct at once.

In fact, it's now accepted that a population of 500 to 1,000 woolly mammoths survived on Wrangel Island until around 4,000 years ago.

That's 1,000 years after the Great Pyramids of Giza were built.

Scientists think that the mammoths made it to the island across the land bridge of Beringia, which used to connect Alaska and Siberia before it was submerged under the Arctic Ocean.

But how? Why? Well, this topic has been intensely debated among human paleontologists for nearly a century.

Some suggest that natural climate change was to blame, as the dawn of the interglacial period meant that sea levels started to rise, cutting off the land bridges and melting the ice sheets that species needed to reach more thermally suitable habitats.

However, we've seen this explanation isn't a perfect fit, as some groups, like the Wrangel Island mammoths, survived far beyond this transition.

The other major theory was first proposed in the 1960s, and brings us to the next point on our ice age journey, humans.

It is not so efficient as the special alcohol stove invented by Perry for his expeditions, but as a general rule it does good work.

On our trip to Wrangel Island we used gasoline in these stoves, although warned by the directions in big red letters not to do so.

In spite of the directions, the gasoline worked well and did not need to be ignited by alcohol.

On the 16th I had the Eskimo dig out the seal meat which we had kept in the ice houses near the ship and put it on deck, so that we could have it handy in case the ice broke up around the ship.

As soon as it was light on the 29th, I kept a sharp eye out for land.

South by west by the compass I could see a blue cloud raised up on the horizon.

According to the soundings, we should have been nearer Wrangel Island than Herald Island.

I was inclined to think that it was Herald Island, although working out our position with our chronometer readings gave us Herald Island 60 miles to the south.

Okay, what are your top three bucket list destinations or experiences, places you have not yet been, highest on your list you'd most like to see?

North Pole, Wrangel Island in Russia, and space.

I love that.

All right, Jason, I want you to let folks know how they can come into your world, follow you on social media.

Do the-

... which is why we know that the Wrangel Island mammoths, the, the last living wooly mammoths on earth, uh, started out with like 10 animals.

[laughs] Like-

Jeez

Some animals survived far longer than the proposed impact date in isolated places.

Woolly mammoths, for example, survived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic until thousands of years after the Younger Dryas began.

That does not rule out an impact contributing to stress in some regions.

But it makes a simple one-day extinction story much harder to defend.