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We hunted the mammoth1/31/2024 ![]() And truck scales aren’t the easiest thing to lug around the African savannah, so field researchers monitor shoulder heights in tracing a growing elephant’s size. “It’s hard to weigh an elephant you need a truck scale,” Roth says. She developed formulas for the relationship of shoulder height to body mass from data published for modern captive elephants to estimate how large some of the herbivores found in fossil evidence would have been. “Blaire came to me with the question, ‘How big was a baby mastodon?'” Roth says. This led to the question of how large their prey could have been. “And in the fossil record, the one thing we’ve got a lot of is teeth,” she says. Well-established formulas allow researchers to make a reasonable estimate of an animal’s size based on just the first molar. ![]() Van Valkenburgh’s analysis estimated size ranges for Pleistocene predators based on the fossil record, including teeth. “We’re all just trying to understand the Pleistocene and how rich that ecosystem was,” Van Valkenburgh says. “I’m a carnivore person,” so she wanted to make sure the superpredators had a seat at the table, too. Most of the discussion at the conference in Oxford was on herbivores, Van Valkenburgh says. The work grows out of a 2014 symposium on the consequences of megafauna extinctions in the Pleistocene. “So much of our science is based on the last 50 or 100 years,” she adds, but populations of big cats and wolves would have been much larger before humans arrived on the scene. It’s also true that humans have picked off most of the larger predators, changing our estimates pretty dramatically, says UCLA paleoecologist Blaire Van Valkenburgh, lead author of the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “In fact, Pleistocene ecosystems were a lot more complex, and predators could have had a larger impact.” “From the present day, it seems that big animals like elephants are immune to predation,” says Duke University biologist V. Saber-tooth cats (Smilodon) working together may have been capable of taking down juveniles of the largest Pleistocene herbivores, such as this young hippo. And, hunting in packs, hyenas could bring down a 9-year-old mastodon weighing two tons. To answer that question, scientists used mathematical models and here’s what they found: The largest cave hyena might have taken a 5-year-old juvenile mastodon weighing more than a ton. Scientists call them hypercarnivores.īut were these hypercarnivores able to take down enormous herbivores like the Columbian mammoth, mastodons, and giant ground sloths? “The genetic potential for height in this region could then be the greatest in the world.During the late Pleistocene age (about 1 million to 11,000 years ago) ancient carnivores would have been about twice as large as the wolves, lions, and hyenas we know today. ![]() “Both nutritional standards and socioeconomic conditions are still deeply suboptimal,” the study says, offering an explanation for both the higher potential and for why DNA is likely the cause of male height rather than dietary and environmental factors. And despite their heights being among the tallest male values in the world - along with men from the Netherlands, Montenegro and Croatia’s Dalmatia region - the scientists say they likely haven’t even reached their full height potential. Although the national average was just below 6 feet, some regional averages were even higher. The modern men measured for the study were between 17 and 20 years old, and they came from dozens of schools across 37 towns in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Read: Ancient American Teen Gave Birth Before Falling to Her Death The ancient Gravettians had a similarly large average height - according to a report on the research, the Paleolithic men from that society hunted large game like mammoths and thus ingested a lot of protein, which contributed to their gradual increase in size that they passed down to their descendants. Researchers measured about 3,200 men from the country in southeastern Europe, which is bordered by Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro, to come up with an average national height of almost 6 feet tall. A study in the journal Royal Society Open Science says the DNA helps to explain why the modern men have such a large stature. That same gene has roots in ancient people called Gravettians who walked the Earth more than 20,000 years ago. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, a certain gene passed from fathers to sons can be found in about 70 percent of the people there. Men in one European country are taller than anywhere else because their ancestors hunted mammoths. Above, the Old Bridge (Stari Most) over the Neretva river in the city of Mostar, in southern Bosnia and Herzegovina.
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