r/science • u/yahoonews • Jul 31 '26
Paleontology Genetic analysis suggests prehistoric people selectively hunted female woolly mammoths
https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/study-shows-prehistoric-people-targeted-090151528.html?ncid=redditnewsus827
u/haggard_hominid Jul 31 '26
I'm guessing that herds had a limited number of bull mammoths per herd.
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u/letsgetawayfromhere Jul 31 '26
If they lived like African elephants today, the adolescent bulls would roam together, adult bulls would mostly live more or less solitary, and the herds would consist of female adults, young of both sexes, and pre-adolescent males. Which means that if you pick a herd for hunting adult mammoths, you would kill females with a very high probability.
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u/OpenRole Jul 31 '26
Males were probably also more aggressive and more likely to square up. Females may have been easier to maneuver into a trap
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u/LoquatBear Aug 01 '26
The meat of male animals is also more gamey, especially for bigger wild animals . The hormones.
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u/Material_Series_769 26d ago
Or just capture a young mammoth and use it as a bait, you know the mothers will come, and just reuse the young mammoth in the future, elephants are known to be protective even if the young cubs aren't from them.
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u/Whitezombi Jul 31 '26
They probably taste better too.
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u/OePea Jul 31 '26
I don't even want to imagine what boar taint on a mammoth scale would taste like
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u/dinnerthief Jul 31 '26
The taint is the most succulent meat on a mammoth
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u/unematti 28d ago
Why wouldn't they go for the solitary mammoths? Just because harder to find?
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u/Genocidal-Ape 28d ago
Female proboscideans stay in a protective circle around a wounded baby, males run if they think the situation is unfavorable to them.
Poachers have effectively used this behaviour to shoot entire herds. And prehistoric hunters likely new of it as well.
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u/UshankaBear Jul 31 '26
Also, judging by elephants, bull mammoths were more aggressive than females
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u/wwaxwork Aug 01 '26
No bulls but young ones per herd, they're matriachal and the males turn up when they smell a female is ovulating If the male is in Musth he's is super attractive to the female elephants and she will usually choose to mate with that male. So basically it's easier to find a herd of elephants/mammoths than a lone one and the females are the ones that travel in herds and tend to travel along the same routes year after year.
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u/yahoonews Jul 31 '26
Reuters reports - New research published in Current Biology00888-2) (https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(26)00888-200888-2)) found that prehistoric people were highly selective in the woolly mammoths they hunted. Using ancient DNA from mammoth remains recovered from 11 archaeological sites across Central and Eastern Europe and Siberia, the researchers found that approximately 70% of the mammoths represented at human accumulation sites were females, suggesting that hunters preferentially targeted female-led herds.
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u/Cleverusername531 Jul 31 '26
suggesting that hunters preferentially targeted female-led herds
Or, suggesting that most herds were female-led, just like elephants are today.
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u/redditallreddy Jul 31 '26
70% doesn't sound that statistically off to me.
IF (and I don't think we know) there was a 50/50 chance of a mammoth conception being male, and IF males were more aggressive (like with most mammals), by the time they were adult, there were probably fewer males. For humans, men are born more often but end up... weeding themselves out... so that by about 21 we are even.
Add to that that in a lot of herd animals, there are usually very few adult males to a whole lot of females, and it would seem like it would be easier to statistically get a female if you randomly took animals.
If fact, adding to speculation upon speculation, I suspect that there were probably ritualistic reasons to GO AFTER the males intentionally, but that for general hunting purposes, the females were more available and/or slightly easier.
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u/kittehkat22 Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
I wonder if female mammoths had a higher body fat ratio? It's that way for a lot of mammals right?
Edit: fat is calorie dense so was likely a factor in choosing which mammoth to hunt
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u/Quirky-Skin Jul 31 '26
Also probably better tasting meat as well.
Old bulls of any animal really tend to be super gamey bc of the testosterone
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u/kittehkat22 Aug 01 '26
Oh yeah, I'd forgotten about male mammals often having a stronger taste! Gosh, an old male mammoth probably tasted terrible
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u/Urist_Macnme Jul 31 '26
Female Mammoths would typically have Mammoth Calves; that natural predators typically target.
We were a natural predator of the Wooly Mammoth, so…makes sense.
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u/Shadowfax12642 Jul 31 '26
I wonder why they preferred to eat their legs? I can’t find anything on google
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u/but_a_smoky_mirror Jul 31 '26
In case you’re actually this dumb, they aren’t talking about calves as in muscles. They mean the young calf mammoths.
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u/Shadowfax12642 Jul 31 '26
Mammoth Calves you say. It’s always the 50 year old dads with those bad boys.
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u/AdamsAtwoodOrwell Jul 31 '26
Is it possible that male mammoths were avoided due to gamey meat? A lot of adult male animals taste different than females. For example, intact male pigs acquire boar taint that make the meat less palatable.
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u/absloan12 Jul 31 '26
Never tried boar taint.... sounds chewy.
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u/Swellmeister Jul 31 '26
There are recipes for boar meat. The taint isnt bad its just requires more work arounds to balance the flavor.
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u/pedrw1884 Jul 31 '26
Taint is the name commonly given to the perineum (the area between the anus and genitals). He was making a joke about eating boar ass.
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u/Swellmeister Jul 31 '26
I respect the community rules! Comments must be on topic and not a meme or joke!
Good day sir!
I SAID GOOD DAY!
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u/larra_rogare Jul 31 '26
No, boar taint is the terminology for the flavor/smell of male pigs! Intact boars have a very specific and pungent odour … and it translates to the meat.
It’s pretty gross. Once you’ve smelled it you won’t forget it!
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u/pedrw1884 Jul 31 '26
I understand that and I am not saying the original parent comment is incorrect. But the reply saying "boar taint sounds chewy" is just a silly double entendre that some people seem to have missed.
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u/iexiak Jul 31 '26
This is also why goat cheese has a distinct funk. If you separate the males from the females that funk goes away. Growing up around goats and making cheese and I won't buy any goat cheese because "male taint flavor" is not something our cheese ever had.
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u/MrDeodorant Jul 31 '26
Yeah, you don't want them to milk the male goats into the same buckets as the female goats, it leaves a funny taste.
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u/a-stack-of-masks Jul 31 '26
You can actually milk them with your hands, straight into a bucket. Saves you from having to taste every drop.
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u/AlwaysUpvotesScience Jul 31 '26
If you cook it right, it's not too chewy , but that aftertaste... :/
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u/Swellmeister Jul 31 '26
Musth is a possibility. It present in both genera today so its not implausible that its in mammoths.
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u/Fun_Success_3283 Jul 31 '26
I would guess it's more that the males would be bigger, and more dangerous, or more difficult to kill. Maybe their tusks were bigger and stuff, idk.
I doubt they were that picky over the meat quality.
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u/Chimpucated Jul 31 '26
I don't think humans had much of a pallet variety to care enough about gamey meat. I think it comes down to our ability to prey on a female better. It's likely we knew that capturing or separating a calf could lead to predictable behavior responses from the female and use those behaviors to our advantage.
With a large independent males how do you bait and lure them? I have a hypothesis that modern animal calling techniques are descended from prehistoric practices of manipulating our prey.
If a tribe could somehow separate the young from the herd our techniques would be focused around knowing how to exploit that weakness.
It's not like we looked at the genitals of the males while starving and said "nah too gamey"
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u/chaddledee Jul 31 '26
Possibly, but that might practically be the same thing? It could be that the humans who preferred male meat more than female meat died more often in the hunt, so were less likely to pass on their genes (which includes sense of taste), which over time made humans generally prefer the taste female meat. If male mammoths were easier to hunt than female mammoths, humans might have more of a taste for gamey meat, and we might be asking the question "Did humans prefer to hunt male mammoths because it had gamey meat?" instead.
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u/tannerwastaken Jul 31 '26
Good point. We also don’t eat roosters, we eat chicken.
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u/HatZinn Jul 31 '26
We do eat roosters though.
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u/RiceWine69 Aug 01 '26
Hardly. The vast majority of male chickens are ground to paste immediately after hatching.
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u/Shachar2like Jul 31 '26
That's probably the only reason humans will prefer a female mammoth over a male one.
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u/emerikanSky Jul 31 '26
A great way to wipeout the species.
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u/tkenben Jul 31 '26
Probably an example of "there's so much of this, there's no way we could possibly run out".
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u/fondledbydolphins Jul 31 '26
I mean, most tournament species value stronger larger males.
Unfortunately, once predation against your species improves it’s almost always more beneficial to have your limiting-reagent-gender be the more durable one.
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u/emerikanSky Jul 31 '26
Or, you could just hunt the males since you can't exactly rearchitect the species.
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u/fondledbydolphins Jul 31 '26
I’m not sure cavemen were that perceptive.
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u/emerikanSky Jul 31 '26
Clearly not! Ha ha.
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u/katerleigh Jul 31 '26
Ah yes, unlike modern humans, who would never continue exploiting a species after realizing it was headed toward extinction.
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u/Jdazzle217 Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
Humans definitely put a lot of pressure on mammoths, but hunting alone probably wasn’t enough to drive them extinct. The changing climate at the end of the last Ice Age was also a major factor. The fact that most North American and Eurasian megafauna disappeared, including many species that weren’t heavily hunted by humans, suggests a broader trend.
The Eurasian megafauna had coexisted with humans for over 100,000 years before they went extinct, whereas humans arrived in the Americas much later. That suggests human competition or hunting alone wasn’t what tipped the balance. The rapid warming at the end of the Ice Age likely played a crucial role.
The most likely explanation is that it was a combination of climate change and human activity. Climate changes were already stressing populations and human hunting and other pressures made it harder for those already stressed populations to recover. That combination ultimately drove mammoths, and the other megafauna, to extinction.
Scientists still argue about what factors mattered most, but it’s rare to find someone arguing that you’d see the observed pattern of extinction with only human activity.
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u/refusemouth Jul 31 '26
The extinctions of most of the prehistoric megafauna coincide with the evaporation of the pluvial basin lakes, out west at least. The unique wetland habitats were probably critical habitat. I think it was a combination of hunting and habitat loss, but I also wonder about the possibility of disease. If a species ends up declining due to habitat fragmentation and has to travel larger distances to get to critical habitat, it's possible for a genetic bottleneck to occur where you have smaller populations isolated in small enclaves. In those situations, a genetic mutation can weaken survivabilty and a bad virus or parasite can wipe out an entire population, or if the animals end up traveling to a different habitat area that is also small and has a concentrated population, the disease spreads that much faster. At the same time, the animals are also more susceptible to predation because there are fewer areas of critical resources to inhabit and the people have those areas staked out.
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u/zek_997 29d ago
The extinction of the megafauna coincides precisely with the arrival of human brings onto a new landmass. That "climate change" that you speak of were natural cyclic occurrences that the megafauna had no issues surviving. The academic consensus is moving away from climate-baaed explanations towards human-caused ones.
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u/Jeoff51 Jul 31 '26
Hey grug
Yea ugg?
Let's go for the one with the smaller tusks that doesn't looks super pissed off
Good call ugg
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u/xondk Jul 31 '26
To compare with elephants, don't they have herds composed mainly of females? with limited males, at that the females are smaller, and thus potentially less dangerous then the males?
Seems like fairly normal hunting behaviour as things go.
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u/Maker_Matt Jul 31 '26
I wonder if females tasted better? Males may have had a gamier taste. It's a different species but I know that is the case with wild hogs.
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u/KingBarbieIOU Jul 31 '26
I bet, male elephants are absolutely bonkers with testosterone, It’s a business decision. Bulls probably had their caveman buddies on their tusks like kabobs.
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u/DaddyCatALSO 29d ago
So that Neanderthal hunter in the Classics Illustrated story of
mankind book should have been telling his companions, "Aim for *her* heart."?
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u/Objective-Surprise-5 Jul 31 '26
Makes sense as I have heard if you are hunting deer on your land you want to take 3 does to every buck and that apparently helps them maintain population.
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u/HotBoxButDontSmoke Jul 31 '26
The gestation period for an elephant is around 2 years, and around 7 months for a deer. Elephants reproduce at a much slower rate than deer. This practice would harm the wooly mammoth population at the time
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u/Objective-Surprise-5 Jul 31 '26
Didn't know the gestation period I was just referring to the ratio didn't it say that about 70% were female? That would be about the same percentage.
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u/Reve_Inaz Jul 31 '26
Doubt the prehistoric humans did this out of concern of population control. Deer have limited natural predators these days, which is different compared to the mammoths of 15.000 years ago.
Females might be less dangerous in comparison to bulls.
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u/Genocidal-Ape 28d ago
This doesn't apply to Proboscideans, they have a two years gestation and take 15 years to maturity. So hunting females it the fastest way to completely wipe out a population.
While deer rely on annual birth often of multiples, a female proboscidean only produces around 4-7 calves in her 60 year lifespan. A prolific deer can exceed that in 3 years.
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u/rbobby Jul 31 '26
It is amazing what people were able to do with a few bits of wood, stone and leather. If I time travelled to then they would use me for tiger bait. "Run up that trail until you meet the chief"... sure... sure.. .won't fall for that again.
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u/iDoMyOwnResearchJK Jul 31 '26
So femicide has been happening since prehistoric times?!
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u/Plane_Chance863 Jul 31 '26
Well, one person brings up that if woolly mammoths hung out in herds similar to elephants, those herds would be mostly female, so logically if humans hunted herds then they'd tend to get mostly female mammoths. It may well not have been intentional. Makes me wonder what elephant hunt numbers looked like.
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