Woolly Mammoth - Relationship With Humans

Relationship With Humans

Modern humans coexisted with woolly mammoths during the Upper Palaeolithic period when they entered Europe from Africa between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago. Prior to this, Neanderthals had coexisted with mammoths during the Middle Palaeolithic. Woolly mammoths were very important to ice age humans, and human survival may have depended on the mammoth in some areas. Evidence for such coexistence was not recognised until the 19th century. William Buckland published his discovery of the Red Lady of Paviland skeleton in 1823, which was found in a cave alongside woolly mammoth bones, but he mistakenly denied that these were contemporaries. In 1864, Édouard Lartet found an engraving of a woolly mammoth on a piece of mammoth ivory in the Abri de la Madeleine cave in Dordogne, France. This was the first widely accepted evidence for the coexistence of humans with prehistoric extinct animals and is the first contemporary depiction of such a creature known to modern science.

The woolly mammoth is the third most depicted animal in ice age art, after horses and bisons, and these images were produced between 35,000 and 11,500 years ago. Today, more than five hundred depictions of woolly mammoths are known, in media ranging from cave paintings and engravings on the walls of 46 caves in Russia, France and Spain to engravings and sculptures made from ivory, antler, stone and bone. The latter category is termed "portable art", and such can be more accurately dated than cave art since it is found in the same deposits as tools and other ice age artefacts. The largest collection of portable mammoth art, consisting of 62 depictions on 47 plaques, was found in the 1960s at an excavated open-air camp near Gönnersdorf in Germany. There does not seem to be a correlation between the number of mammoths depicted and the species that were most often hunted, since reindeer bones are the most frequently found animal remains at the site. Two spear throwers shaped as woolly mammoths have also been found in France. Cave paintings of woolly mammoths exist in several styles and sizes. The French Rouffignac cave has most depictions, 159, and some of the drawings are more than 2 metres (6.5 ft) in length. Other notable caves with mammoth depictions are the Chauvet Cave, Les Combarelles Cave, and Font-de-Gaume.