- In China, farmers had begun to plant rice. The first
orange groves were bearing fruit in India, the North Africans had domesticated
the cat and large communities in Mesopotamia had begun to rear cattle,
keep accounts and use tokens. Across the Atlantic, settlers in the Tehuacan
valley of Mexico already grew corn, squash, beans and peppers and in Neolithic
Britain hunters speared salmon, gathered hazel nuts and made huts covered
with hide. In Thessaly, Crete and the Cyclades, the earliest Greeks had
begun to cultivate wheat, barley and lentils.
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- And on an island in the Bering Sea, a family of stranded
woolly mammoths clung on, oblivious to their species' extinction everywhere
else.
-
- Dale Guthrie, an Arctic biologist at the University of
Alaska in Fairbanks, reports in Nature today that although mammoths vanished
from Siberia and the American Arctic before the end of the ice age, they
survived on St Paul Island in the Bering Straits as late as 7,900 years
ago. Wiped out everywhere else by climate change and stone-age hunters,
the mammoths became stranded on the island as sea levels began to rise
13,000 years ago. A similar group of mammoths is known to have survived
for at least as long on Wrangel Island off the north coast of Siberia.
-
- Dr Guthrie used radiocarbon evidence to date a fossil
fragment of a mammoth tooth. The puzzle is: if humans had hunted the great
beasts to extinction elsewhere, how did some mammoth clans cling on.
-
- "Why did they not find and kill off mammoths on
St Paul?" he writes. "Mammoths on that earlier island complex
at 13,000 years before the present would have been easily visible in a
treeless landscape, when St Paul was separated from the mainland by a narrow
channel, in the most likely path of coastal watercraft colonists."
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1240442,00.html
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