Ice Age hunters were selective about which woolly mammoths they killed for meat, hides and tools, according to a new study reported by The Independent.
Mammoths were prized by prehistoric people across Eurasia and North America because a single animal provided large amounts of meat and fat. Their hides were used for clothing, while bones and tusks were made into tools, weapons and art. The largest bones were even used as building material.
Researchers analyzed genetic data from bones found at 11 archaeological sites in Poland, Austria, the Czech Republic and Germany. They found that hunters killed mostly female mammoths.
About 70 percent of the mammoth bones examined from these hunting sites belonged to females, with 30 percent from males. By comparison, of mammoth bones found in natural settings, 66 percent belonged to males and 34 percent to females.
Female-led herds may have been more predictable
Hanna Mutz, the study's lead author, said one possible explanation was that if woolly mammoths lived in female-led herds, like modern elephants, those groups likely moved across the landscape in a more predictable, seasonal way. She said female elephant herds today have relatively stable home ranges and movement patterns, while adult males tend to be more solitary and wander much wider territories, which may have made female-led herds easier for Ice Age humans to find.
Such herds were likely matriarchal, made up of adult females and young of both sexes. Love Dalen, an evolutionary geneticist at the Center for Palaeogenetics and one of the study's senior authors, said it would also have been easier to track a herd with young animals, since females would not want to flee.
Dalen added that female mammoths were generally smaller than males, which may have made them easier to kill. An adult male weighed up to 6 tons and stood about 3.4 meters at the shoulder, while an adult female weighed about 4 tons and stood about 2.9 meters.
Researchers also found that hunters likely used the landscape itself against the animals, driving them into traps or natural hazards such as cliffs or bogs. David Diez-del-Molino, another senior author and evolutionary geneticist at the Center for Palaeogenetics, said ancient people probably used terrain to their advantage, imagining they used mud or bogs to immobilize animals before attacking with spears, darts or arrows.
