They’re rock bottom certain that a warming world may might possibly we feel killed off the Mammoths
Climate Change Wiped Out the Mammoth, New DNA Study Shows
A decade-long study of environmental DNA indicates that glacial melt may have doomed the hairy animals.
Does the study say it or not? Because that “may” is rather iffy
Humans are very rarely the good guys in extinction narratives, given our proclivity for pushing species to the brink of extinction, and often over it. But we’re almost certainly absolved of guilt in the case of the woolly mammoth, according to an international team of scientists who spent the past 10 years sifting through traces of mammoth urine, feces, and skin cells in the ground to figure out what truly caused the species’ extinction.
“The most recent Ice Age—called the Pleistocene—ended 12,000 years ago when the glaciers began to melt and the roaming range of the herds of mammoths decreased,â€Â Yucheng Wang, a geogeneticist at the University of Cambridge and lead author of a new paper of the team’s results, said in a St. John’s College press release.
“We zoomed into the intricate detail of the environmental DNA and mapped out the population spread of these mammals and show how it becomes smaller and smaller and their genetic diversity gets smaller and smaller too, which made it even harder for them to survive,†Wang added.
Woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) were a charismatic species of mammoth, hairy cousins of elephants that are not to be confused with the contemporaneous mastodon. Though a holdout population of mammoths survived on Russia’s Wrangel Island until about 4,000 years ago, around the same time Stonehenge was nearing completion, all other mammoths were long gone by then.
How much did the end of the glacial age contribute to the extinction of the Mammoth? Especially when there were several subspecies scattered around the Northern Hemisphere? Maybe most, maybe some. The big question here is “what caused the end of the last glacial age and a warming world?” Because, really, that’s where Gizmodo and the study is going with this
“The change happened so quickly that they could not adapt and evolve to survive,†said Eske Willerslev, a geogeneticist at the University of Cambridge and co-author of the paper, in the same release. “This is a stark lesson from history and shows how unpredictable climate change is—once something is lost, there is no going back.â€
Aaaaand, this is meant to imply that a tiny increase in the globe’s temperature since the Little Ice Age ended in 1850 means utter doom, and this is your fault.
Inaction on climate change imperils millions of lives, doctors say
Climate change is set to become the “defining narrative of human health,” a top medical journal warned Wednesday – triggering food shortages, deadly disasters and disease outbreaks that would dwarf the toll of the coronavirus. But aggressive efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions from human activities could avert millions of unnecessary deaths, according to the analysis from more than 100 doctors and health experts.
In its annual “Countdown on health and climate change,” the Lancet provides a sobering assessment of the dangers posed by a warming planet. More than a dozen measures of humanity’s exposure to health-threatening weather extremes have climbed since last year’s report.
This is the same organization which came up with utter bullshit statistical study on civilian deaths in Iraq from the 2003 war. Anyhow, when are the doctors going to give up their luxury vehicles and homes and go carbon neutral?
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