Dr Hannah Moots, lead author of the study, said: \u201cWhile it is tempting to assume that hunters would have targeted females because they were smaller than adult males, the reality may have been more complex.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf mammoths behaved like modern elephants, females living in matriarchal herds may have had group defences that would have made encounters with herds equally or even more risky.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnother possibility is that female-led herds moved across the landscape in more predictable ways than solitary males, meaning Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers may simply have encountered them more frequently, whether for hunting or scavenging.\u201d<\/p>\n
The researchers said mammoths were a vital resource for Ice Age human populations<\/a>, providing meat, fat, hide and bones for building structures, and ivory for tools, art and ornaments.<\/p>\n The mammoth bone accumulations included in the study span 11 key Ice Age archaeological sites across Eurasia, dating to around 20,000 to 30,000 years ago.<\/p>\n The team analysed 100 individuals from the human-associated site accumulations with 421 mammoths<\/a> from natural depositional settings.<\/p>\n The unprecedented scale provides a rare look at how ancient humans and woolly mammoths<\/a> interacted.<\/p>\n Prof Love Dal\u00e9n, co-senior author of the study, of Stockholm University, said: \u201cThis research demonstrates the power of ancient DNA studies to answer long-standing archaeological questions<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cBy scaling up sample sizes, ancient DNA<\/a> can go beyond evolutionary history to teach us about animal behaviour and human culture<\/a> tens of thousands of years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dr Hannah Moots, lead author of the study, said: \u201cWhile it is tempting to assume that hunters would…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":800177,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[110551,18380,1155,200,3,79,615,231734],"class_list":["post-800176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ancient-history","tag-archaeology","tag-dna","tag-genetics","tag-news","tag-science","tag-standard","tag-us-content"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=800176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800176\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/800177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=800176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=800176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=800176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}