![]() On either side of a sloth's head were round eyes. Sloths, being herbivores, had mouths with flat teeth, notably a pair of large buckteeth at the front, coupled with a usually bulbous nose on an ovular head, atop a long, usually thin, neck. The jury is still out on this one! But the more fossils we find, and the better we get at studying them, the closer we’ll come to understanding what happened all those years ago.Medium-sized mammals, sloths often inhabited trees, sleeping up in the branches, which they climbed using their sharp clawed hands and feet. Was the megafauna’s disappearance related to human activity? Or did climate change play a part here as well? There are no known kill sites, no cut marks on the animal bones, and no evidence of spear blades being lodged in ribs. Interestingly, we don’t find any reliable fossil evidence of these people hunting Australia’s ancient megafauna. They would have gotten very hot in those thick coats! But we did have giant animals known as megafauna, which went extinct between 5,000 and 17,000 years (depending on the species) after the First Peoples arrived. Australia’s own ‘mammoths’Īustralia didn’t have woolly mammoths. This may have made the remaining mammoths more vulnerable to increasing hunting as the human population grew. It could be that climate conditions at the time shifted away from what woolly mammoths preferred and caused a large drop in their numbers. Some scientists suggest the climate also played a role. If this was evidence presented in a murder trial, that human would be locked up straight away!Įven so, does that mean humans alone were responsible for wiping out all the full-sized woolly mammoths? A small part of a stone tool, made into a spear blade by a human, was found in the rib bone of a woolly mammoth. In Beringia, there is fossil evidence for mammoth kill sites, and cut marks on mammoth bones – so all the clues point to humans having hunted woolly mammoths.īut the strongest evidence was found in southern Poland in 2019. And when they pulled the meat off the bones to eat, they used stone tools that created cut marks or small notches in the bones. This created “kill sites”, which are literally huge piles of animal bones. When early humans hunted, they tended to kill many animals at the same time. Twentieth Century Fox/IMDB Hunting for clues The 2002 film Ice Age showed a face-off between Manny the woolly mammoth and a human. In the case of the dodo, a large flightless bird that went extinct, documents from 1690 make it clear that over-hunting by humans was the cause. ![]() So did humans hunt woolly mammoths to extinction? To answer this question we must look at clues in the fossil record, which is made up of the preserved remains of ancient life. Humans and woolly mammoths lived side by side for at least 15,000 years. Dinosaurs had already been extinct for about 62 million years by the time modern humans started roaming the planet!īut what about woolly mammoths? In this case, the movie Ice Age was actually correct. Well, we can safely assume dinosaurs never fell prey to humans – mainly because the two never even met (despite what the Jurassic Park films suggest). ![]() But can we add hunting and eating woolly mammoths and dinosaurs to the list? Humans can be blamed for a lot of things: chopping down rainforests, worsening climate change, and driving precious species like the Tasmanian Tiger to extinction. Did humans hunt and eat woolly mammoths or dinosaurs? – Jasmine, age 10, Central Coast NSW
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