page_title: Woolly mammoth
section_title: Relationship with humans
hierarchical_section_title: Woolly mammoth / Relationship with humans
caption_attribution_description: Woolly mammoth carved in ivory, discovered by Édouard Lartet in 1864.
context_page_description: The woolly mammoth is an extinct species of mammoth that lived during the Pleistocene until its extinction in the Holocene epoch. It was one of the last in a line of mammoth species, beginning with Mammuthus subplanifrons in the early Pliocene. The woolly mammoth began to diverge from the steppe mammoth about 800,000 years ago in East Asia. Its closest extant relative is the Asian elephant. The appearance and behaviour of this species are among the best studied of any prehistoric animal because of the discovery of frozen carcasses in Siberia and Alaska, as well as skeletons, teeth, stomach contents, dung, and depiction from life in prehistoric cave paintings. Mammoth remains had long been known in Asia before they became known to Europeans in the 17th century. The origin of these remains was long a matter of debate, and often explained as being remains of legendary creatures. The mammoth was identified as an extinct species of elephant by Georges Cuvier in 1796.
  The woolly mammoth was roughly the same size as modern African elephants. Males reached shoulder heights between 2.7 and 3.4 m and weighed up to 6 metric tons.
context_section_description: Modern humans coexisted with woolly mammoths during the Upper Palaeolithic period when the humans entered Europe from Africa between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago. Before this, Neanderthals had coexisted with mammoths during the Middle Palaeolithic, and already used mammoth bones for tool-making and building materials. Woolly mammoths were very important to ice-age humans, and human survival may have depended on the mammoth in some areas. Evidence for such coexistence was not recognised until the 19th century. William Buckland published his discovery of the Red Lady of Paviland skeleton in 1823, which was found in a cave alongside woolly mammoth bones, but he mistakenly denied that these were contemporaries. In 1864, Édouard Lartet found an engraving of a woolly mammoth on a piece of mammoth ivory in the Abri de la Madeleine cave in Dordogne, France. The engraving was the first widely accepted evidence for the coexistence of humans with prehistoric extinct animals and is the first contemporary depiction of such a creature known to modern science.
  The woolly mammoth is the third-most depicted animal in ice-age art, after horses and bison, and these images were produced between 35,000 and 11,500 years ago. Today, more than 500 depictions of woolly mammoths are known, in media ranging from cave paintings and engravings on the walls of 46 caves in Russia, France, and Spain to engravings and sculptures (termed "portable art") made from ivory, antler, stone and bone. Cave paintings of woolly mammoths exist in several styles and sizes. The French Rouffignac Cave has the most depictions, 159, and some of the drawings are more than 2 metres (6.6 ft) in length. Other notable caves with mammoth depictions are the Chauvet Cave, Les Combarelles Cave, and Font-de-Gaume. A depiction in the Cave of El Castillo may instead show Palaeoloxodon, the "straight-tusked elephant".
  "Portable art" can be more accurately dated than cave art since it is found in the same deposits as tools and other ice-age artefacts. The largest collection of portable mammoth art, consisting of 62 depictions on 47 plaques, was found in the 1960s at an excavated open-air camp near Gönnersdorf in Germany. A correlation between the number of mammoths depicted and the species that were most often hunted does not seem to exist, since reindeer bones are the most frequently found animal remains at the site. Two spear throwers shaped as woolly mammoths have also been found in France. Some portable mammoth depictions may not have been produced where they were discovered, but could have moved around by ancient trading.
caption: Woolly mammoth engraved on ivory, discovered by Édouard Lartet in 1864
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