The lifelong journey of Elma, a female woolly mammoth who lived in North America 14,000 years ago, has been reconstructed: the study of the DNA and the growth layers of one of her tusks have made it possible to establish that she traveled more than a thousand kilometers in an area between what is now northwestern Canada and Alaska, only to die just 20 years after meeting the first humans to settle Alaska.
The results of the study are published in Science Advances by an international research team led by geneticist Hendrik Poinar of McMaster University in Canada.
The remains of the female mammoth (whose full name is Élmayuujey'eh) were found in 2009 in one of the oldest archaeological sites in Alaska, Swan Point, together with the remains of a young and a baby mammoth and the traces of an ancient human camp.
Remains of other mammoths were found in three other excavations within a ten kilometer radius.
DNA analyzes confirmed that two matrilineal herds of mammoths, closely related but distinct from each other, had converged in the Swan Point region.
The analysis of the isotopes fixed in Elma's tusk shows that the specimen had spent most of its life in a small area of the Yukon region, and then traveled over a thousand kilometers in just three years.
Elma would have settled in the Alaskan interior and died in her prime near two closely related young specimens, for whom she may have been the matriarchal guide.
The data collected suggests that in that period humans had structured their seasonal hunting camps in the areas where mammoths gathered and may have had an indirect role in their extinction, conditioned by a rapid change in climate and vegetation.
The study shows that Elma had not particularly suffered from this condition because she was not malnourished.
Her death would have occurred in the same season in which the human camp was set up where her tusk was found.
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