An island refuge at the end of an age
After the last Ice Age, as glaciers retreated and sea levels rose, most of the world's woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) vanished. By about 10,000 years ago, they were gone from the mainlands of Siberia and North America. But one population held on. On Wrangel Island, a remote piece of land in the Arctic Ocean, a small group of mammoths was cut off from the mainland by the rising waters. This isolation created a unique environment, allowing the species to survive for another 6,000 years.
Radiocarbon dating of remains found on the island shows that these mammoths persisted until about 4,000 years ago, or 2000 BCE. This means they were still alive during the construction of the Great Pyramids of Giza in Egypt and the flourishing of Bronze Age civilizations in Mesopotamia. The population on the island was small, likely numbering only a few hundred individuals at any given time. This small population size, combined with thousands of years of isolation, had severe genetic consequences.