Four thousand years ago, on an island off the coast of what is now Siberia, the world’s last woolly mammoth took its final breath.
Living on that island, isolated from other mammoths, could have led to fatal levels of inbreeding and catastrophic population drops, leading to extinction, scientists have said. A new study confirms that the woolly mammoth population on Wrangel Island was inbred but suggests they were not doomed to die. The mammoth population gradually lost harmful genetic mutations that would affect survival, indicating that some other random event — such as disease or environmental changes — sealed the mammoths’ fate, researchers report June 27 in Cell.