One of the most contentious debates in all of archeology is when and how the Americas were first settled. For a while, it was claimed that the first people in the Americas were the “Clovis”. They were a group of big-game hunters with distinctive hunting tools that allegedly bypassed formidable glaciers through an inland ice-free […]
A study was published 3 years ago which explored the genomes of three Pleistocene black bear genomes found in eDNA in central Mexico and compared them to genomes of black bears in the eastern, southwestern, and northwestern contiguous US but also in southeastern and south-central Alaska. It revealed that the Mexican bears were closely related
If you don’t know, the very last population of woolly mammoths in the world survived until only about 4,000 years ago, the time the Egyptian pyramids were being built, on a small island called Wrangel island in northeast Siberia. These mammoths survived on this remote tundra island, today home to a large seasonal population of
If you’re well-versed in Pleistocene ecology, you’ve almost certainly heard about the steppe-tundra, also known as the mammoth steppe. During the Last Glacial Period, this biome covered vast parts of three continents: Europe, Asia, and North America. The name “steppe-tundra” refers to the fact that it contained a unique mixture of steppe and tundra species,
One of the coolest things about the ice age cycles of the last 2.5 million years is how species survived the various dramatic shifts in climate. One of the ways plants and animals survived unfavorable climatic phases was by retreating to relatively small areas where conditions remained tolerable, and then using those areas as bases
