Grove Koger

The world’s last mammoths survived until less than 4,000 years ago—on an island you’ve probably never heard of.

The island is Wrangel (or, in Russian, Ostrov Vrangelya) and it lies north of eastern Siberia at 71°14’N—well within the Arctic Circle. It also lies astride the 180th meridian, which was chosen in 1884 as the International Date Line, although the line was set eastward in order to avoid dividing Wrangel and the Siberian mainland.

The island is named for Russian explorer and cartographer Ferdinand P. Wrangel (1797-1870), who pinpointed its location based on the reports of indigenous Siberians but who many never actually have set foot on it himself. (Accounts differ.) Subsequently, Russian and American fur traders visited the island, and it was it was eventually annexed by the Soviet Union, which proceeded to settle permanent residents there in 1926. Wrangel and its surrounding waters were declared a nature reserve in 1976 and a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2016.

A prime breeding ground for polar bears, walruses, and the like, Wrangel is also noted for being the last refuge of the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), a species that once ranged widely over northern Eurasia and North America. Rising sea levels left the island’s mammoths isolated about 10,000 years ago, but while they became somewhat smaller than those on the mainland as a result, they never developed into a dwarf variety, as occurred on the Channel Islands off California. The lack of genetic diversity also led to a growing number of defects among the animals, but their relatively abrupt disappearance about 4,000 years ago suggests that something other than inbreeding led to their demise.

Could human hunters have been a factor, as they were in other parts of the world? There’s evidence of human presence at the Chertov Ovrag site on the southwestern coast of Wrangel, but, so far, no indication that hunting might have played a part in the mammoth’s disappearance. An extreme weather event may be the likeliest cause, but there’s doesn’t seem to be evidence of what, exactly, that event might have entailed. For the time being, the mammoths’ disappearance is more of a mystery than their survival.

But were Wrangel’s mammoths really the last? In his landmark study On the Track of Unknown Animals (London: Hart-Davis, 1958), Bernard Heuvelmans discusses tantalizing accounts suggesting that they might have survived much longer, possibly into the earliest years of the twentieth century. Heuvelmans was a cryptozoologist, but a cautious one, as his carefully worded approach to the subject indicates. The English translation of his book, by the way, includes an introduction by the famous Gerald Durrell!

The image of the wooly mammoth at the top of today’s post is from the Naturkundemuseum Stuttgart and is reproduced courtesy of Wikipedia. The map was created by Norman Einstein under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, and is reproduced courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. The third image is a 2012 Russian postal souvenir sheet commemorating the Wrangel Island nature reserve, and the fourth is a 2012 stamp from the Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan.