Why Are Mammoths Extinct?

<p>In the ice age, megafauna roamed North America: mammoths, saber-toothed cats, even giant land sloths! What happened to them? In this episode we answer questions about the ice age: What was it? Did birds live during that time period? How about giraffes? Did people live with woolly mammoths? Why did mammoths go extinct? We'll answer your questions with Ross MacPhee, senior curator at the <a href="https://www.amnh.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">American Museum of Natural History</a> and author of <a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/End-of-the-Megafauna/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">End of Megafauna: The Fate of the World's Hugest, Fiercest, and Strangest Animals</a>. And we'll hear from Nathaniel Kitchel, a Dartmouth researcher who used carbon dating to discover the age of a mammoth rib. Plus, John Moody, of the Winter Center for Indigenous Traditions in Norwich, Vermont, on how mammoths appear in the oral history of the Abenaki people.</p> <p><em>Download our learning guides: <a href="https://www.vpr.org/sites/vpr/files/202103/why_are_mammoths_extinct.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">PDF</a> | <a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1KKbSaPi2ziHy81m5SbOBPfGkcybwfVFe6SK1yMCg7bk/copy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Google Slide</a> | <a href="https://www.vpr.org/sites/vpr/files/202103/But_Why_149_Mammoths_TRANSCRIPT.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Transcript</a></em></p> <blockquote> <p>"What was the ice age?" -Karen, 5, Wilmington, Delaware</p> </blockquote> <p>In the Pleistocene era, which lasted from 120,000 years ago to 15,000 years ago, ice covered the landscape in much of the northern hemisphere. Ice covered all of Canada down into the Northern United States and all of northern Europe. And there were smaller ice sheets in Russia. How did this happen? Scientists think it was a buildup of ice over time.</p> <p>"The theory is that the winter never ended," explained Ross MacPhee. "You would have snowfalls in the winter and it never really got warm enough to get rid of it completely. T