Were woolly mammoths alive when the pyramids were built?
Last mammoths: ~2000 BC
HistoryYes. An isolated population of woolly mammoths survived on Wrangel Island in the Siberian Arctic until about 4,000 years ago, roughly 2000 BC. The Great Pyramid of Giza was finished around 2560 BC, some 500 years earlier. A 2024 genome study found the Wrangel population was stable for 6,000 years and then collapsed suddenly, for reasons still unknown.
Source: Dehasque et al. (2024), Cell; Vartanyan et al. (2008), Quaternary Science Reviews
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