Mammoths are among the best-known inhabitants of the last ice age, but their travels across the tundra have long remained a mystery. Now experts have used the chemical composition of a 17,100-year-old mammoth tusk from Alaska to map out where the animal wandered during its lifetime. They found it put in almost enough miles to loop around the world twice.
Woolly mammoths roamed North America, Europe and northern Asia during the last ice age. Most died out about 10,000 years ago, with a few populations surviving until around 2000 B.C. on a small island in the Arctic Ocean. Millions of long, hefty tusks from the now extinct giants are buried in the Arctic and Siberian earth today, still so intact that they are sought after as sources of commercial ivory. But their value is not just ornamental. "Tusks are like timelines," says Matthew Wooller, a paleoecologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and first author of the new paper.