Projectile points embedded in mammoth bones show that Upper Palaeolithic (about 50,000 to 12,000 years ago) hunter-gatherers did sometimes directly hunt mammoths. The humans may also have scavenged material from carcasses. “While 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,” added study co-author Jarosław Wilczyński, an archaeologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences. “If 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.” Another possibility is that the female-led herds moved across the land in more predictable patterns than solitary males. “Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers may simply have encountered them more frequently, whether for hunting or scavenging,” said co-author Hannah M. Moots, an archeologist postdoctoral researcher at Stockholm University. Notably, the team identified one mammoth from Russia’s Wrangel Island that was neither biologically female (with XX chromosomes) nor biologically male (with XY chromosomes). This mammoth had a different sex chromosome combination known as X0/XX mosaicism instead. With X0/XX mosaicism, the organism has a single copy of the X chromosome in some cells, and two copies in others. X0/XX mosaicism is known as Turner syndrome in humans and this is the first time it has been documented in an extinct species. “This research demonstrates the power of ancient DNA studies to answer long-standing archaeological questions,” added co-author Love Dalén, an evolutionary genomicist at Stockholm University. “By scaling up sample sizes, ancient DNA can go beyond evolutionary history to teach us about animal behaviour and human culture tens of thousands of years ago.”
Kaynak: Popular Science
