Study Suggests Weather and Not Hunting Killed Off Wooly Mammoths

Big Hairy Ian writes, quoting the BBC: "A DNA analysis shows that the number of creatures began to decrease much earlier than previously thought as the world's climate changed. It also shows that there was a distinct population of mammoth in Europe that died out around 30,000 years ago. ... Dr Dalen worked with researchers in London to analyse DNA samples from 300 specimens from woolly mammoths collected by themselves and other groups in earlier studies ... [The researchers] speculate that it was so cold that the grass on which they fed became scarce. The decline was spurred on as the Ice Age ended, possibly because the grassland on which the creatures thrived was replaced by forests in the south and tundra in the north."

Comments

Re:It's a conspiracy!

[Anne_Nonymous]

>> point me to the right meme I'm supposed to employ against evil scientists

Try this: Those dumb scientists are blaming climate change for everything, including killing the Mammoths.

Re:It's a conspiracy!

[dreamchaser]

>> point me to the right meme I'm supposed to employ against evil scientists

Try this: Those dumb scientists are blaming climate change for everything, including killing the Mammoths.

It was obviously all the SUV's that Cro Magnons were driving.

Re:How history changes

[i kan reed]

Or you know, the scientific method was used that refines theories, based on new evidence.

Maybe we should be like you, where we know that there's no human-induced climate change because we ignore the unprecedented rate of change in temperature over the past 2 centuries, and keep all our understanding exactly the same as when we were born.

Mammoth burgers

[onyxruby]

Look, who's the bigger villain, humans with their penchant for turning anything that moves or doesn't move into a ___burger or climate change that is the current boogeyman?

Who knows? Let's face it, any number of factors from volcanoes to natural predators to climate change to caveman barbeques all likely shared guilt. The world isn't black and white and people need to stop thinking of everything as having a singular one dimensional true answer.

Re:Mammoth burgers

[Piata]

It didn't help the Galapagos tortoises or the Passenger Pigeon.

Well obviously. They were not delicious.

Re:Mammoth burgers

[PhilHibbs]

From Wikipedia:
Captain James Colnett of the British Navy wrote of "the land tortoise which in whatever way it was dressed, was considered by all of us as the most delicious food we had ever tasted."[108] US Navy captain David Porter declared that, "after once tasting the Gallipagos tortoises, every other animal food fell off greatly in our estimation ... The meat of this animal is the easiest of digestion, and a quantity of it, exceeding that of any other food, can be eaten without experiencing the slightest of inconvenience."[81] Darwin was less enthusiastic about the meat, writing "the breast-plate roasted (as the Gauchos do "carne con cuero"), with the flesh on it, is very good; and the young tortoises make excellent soup; but otherwise the meat to my taste is indifferent."

Re:It's a conspiracy!

[interkin3tic]

Good parody up until the last line. I don't think anyone who actually uses "Scientists are always changing their minds" are confused about anything ever. It takes like a microsecond for cognitive dissonance to kick in. Have you ever confronted someone with data that runs contrary to their established worldview? Usually not even a flicker of doubt crosses their face. Any "deep in thought" processes that go on are searching for a reason to throw out the new, unwelcome bit of data rather than considering it.

It's not specific to climate change deniers or conservatives obviously. I had a similar reaction last night to a deeply catholic friend's saying that natural family planning was the most effective form of birth control. I caught myself immediately going to wiki, which backed up his statement, and then I immediately decided no, they were both definitely wrong, I just needed to dig deeper to establish the truth, that NPF was a catholic conspiracy to make more catholic babies. So, we all suffer from it, or at least I do and so do other closed minded idiots. Don't try to prove me wrong on this point!

I prefer the Bedrock Theory

[GodfatherofSoul]

Their insatiable drive for 24/7 dishwashers eliminated the mammoth's ability to reproduce.

Re:Nonsense

[The Grim Reefer]

We all know they died in Noah's Flood.

I'm pretty sure it was Noah's ark and God's flood.

I wonder if the mammoths had a water bottle in their carry-on, so the TSA wouldn't let them board.

Mammoths throughout the ages

[Misagon]

Mammoth-type animals have actually appeared and gone extinct not once, but at about once every ice-age cycle.
That blew my mind when I heard it the first time.

That the last type the mammoths would have gone extinct because of climate change does not seem very far-fetched then, now does it.

Re:It's a conspiracy!

[rubycodez]

Absolutely false, laws are not "facts", they are uesful generalizations and most scientific laws have many exceptions.

You want examples? Ohm's Law, Hooke's Law, Charles Law, Boyle's law are all linear approximations that many materials obey but real world materials have higher order terms and some materials have *opposite* behaviour.

Second law of thermodynamics, one of the most useful laws, applies to closed systems, but there are no truly closed systems.

Coulomb's law, applies to electrostatic system but there are no pure electrostatic systems in the universe, it is approximation and so there is "the electrostatic approximation"

Re:It's a conspiracy!

[NeutronCowboy]

#1 thing to keep in mind: laws and theories refer to the same thing. Laws are just a historical anachronism when people used to call things laws of nature any time they found out a rule that seemed to be invariable in nature. Buoyancy, F=ma, etc.

#2 thing to keep in mind: theories are not just guesses. They are statements about how some things supposedly work, based on our current understanding of related things. They are fully independent of scientific facts, which are data. Sometimes though, theories and facts have the same name, but refer to different things. Example: the theory of evolution, and Evolution. The theory of evolution lays out how we think creatures evolve. Evolution is the fact (the data collected) that creatures evolve.

#3 thing to keep in mind: linguistically, a hypothesis and a theory is the same thing. In scientific vernacular, a hypothesis is what you have before you have data. A theory is what you have once you have collected some data and have the ability to support your theory with more than "cuz I say so."

#4 thing to keep in mind: laws, theories, hypotheses - all of these can and will be changed once data shows that they're not correct anymore. That is the hallmark of science. We've just gotten so used to things having been nailed down so well that they haven't been updated in a long time. That doesn't mean that they can't be in the future.

Re:How history changes

[PRMan]

Funny that you think the scientific method was used in relation to explaining ice ages and global warming/cooling... Historical sciences are guesses at best and typically have very little to do with the scientific method. This is why they are overturned often and in massive ways. The "faith" that people have put into global warming based on only history and computer models is staggering. And the zeal with which they have attacked anyone who disagrees smacks of burning people at the stake for believing in a round earth. It's closer to politics or religion than science, because a true scientist doesn't care if other people agree with his "side". In a true science, the facts will do that for them.

Of course, now we know that instead of their being no ice in 2013 (as predicted), there is actually so much ice that 20 ships are trapped in the arctic and most of the shipping lines are completely blocked. On the past 2 seasons of Deadliest Catch, they had to go home and take a break for a few weeks because the entire sea was full of ice, the most in 30-40 years.

This stuff is way more complicated than most people think and we are in the early stages of understanding it. To treat anyone as an idiot for having a difference of opinion at this early stage is just mind-blowing. And as for "unprecedented rate of change of temperature"? I don't think .5 degrees over 100 years is that big of a deal, especially when I question the accuracy being good enough to catch half a degree 100 years ago.

Climate changes. With or without man. We see a "fertile crescent" in Iraq that now looks like a massive desert (because they cut down all the trees). We see a California which was a desert which is now Mediterranean (because of man planting lots of trees). We see flash frozen mammoths (and don't know why). We know the earth has recovered from an ice age in the past, so it's pretty darn resilient.

The bottom line is you are right. We should do our best to keep learning because we really don't understand this stuff yet. But vilifying people that disagree and trying to stifle their funding and ruin their careers hampers that effort significantly. And that's what the GP was lamenting.

Re:It's a conspiracy!

[OlRickDawson]

Don't forget ColesLaw. It would probably go good with fried wolly mammoth.