New study tracks a mammoth’s travels across Alaska

A single tusk is all that remains of a mammoth that lived approximately 14,000 years ago. Yet that one tusk has enabled scientists to uncover remarkable details about her life. Using ancient DNA, researchers determined her sex and how she was related to mammoths that left fossils nearby. Using analysis of isotopes found in the tusks, they re-created her approximate movements over two decades, from birth to death, learning that she frequented areas once inhabited by ancient humans.

Combined with Indigenous knowledge and earlier work tracking the movements of a male mammoth, we are beginning to gain unparalleled insight into the lives of specific animals, information that has implications for future understanding of Pleistocene ecology and its extinctions.

Long in the tooth

Mammoth tusks are essentially one long tooth, and their growth captures significant moments throughout the mammoth’s life. "Reading" information contained within tusks, paleontologists can, for example, determine when and if a mammoth starved, when it was pregnant or going through musth, and the season in which it died. It also contains a record of where it likely roamed throughout its life—if you have the right tools.

Those tools include the ability to "read" isotopic information from the tusk and relevant isotopic maps—or isoscapes—that match those isotopes to the landscape.

Such tools were employed In 2021 when team members tracked a male mammoth’s travels across Alaska approximately 17,100 years ago. At first, the Kik mammoth stayed in a relatively small area in northern Alaska—something the authors interpreted as possibly reflecting a young mammoth staying with its herd. Later in his almost 30 years of life, however, he roamed a great deal while repeatedly returning to certain areas. He ultimately died of starvation in either winter or spring.

The mammoth described in a paper published Wednesday in Science Advances lived approximately 3,000 years later in a wetter and warmer environment. Her tusk was found with fossil remains of some relatives—a juvenile and a baby mammoth—at Swan Point, an archaeological site in the Shaw Creek Basin of Alaska.

What’s in a name

Her name is Élmayųujey’eh (its pronunciation can be heard here), or Elma for short. Co-authors Evelynn Combs and Gerad Smith explain that she was named by the Healy Lake Village Tribe, a “Descendant Community” with members who descend from people who traditionally occupied the Shaw Creek Area.

The Healy Lake Village Tribe is part of a First Nations culture known as “Dene” (also known as “Athabascan”).

Finding the name for this animal was “tough,” according to Combs, the cultural resources manager for Healy Lake Village, as the Dene name for “mammoth” isn’t known. So Combs initiated informal conversations throughout the Tribe. The name they eventually chose was a word often used by Combs’ late grandmother, Elder Linda Kirsteatter.

Élmayųujey’eh, Combs explained, is an affectionate term emblematic of Dene humor and difficult to translate. You might use it to describe “your goofy, very beloved, silly animal.” The closest translation is "hellava looking." It came about, Combs said, after one of her cousins announced, “If Aunt Linda were here, she would’ve called it ‘Élmayųujey’eh.’”

Tracking a mammoth

Finding Elma’s path in life required tracing isotopes found in different layers of her tusk. One such isotope was unknowingly ingested simply when the mammoth ate plants wherever she went. Plants incorporate strontium isotopes from the soil. Strontium and a few other elements act as great geological markers; different ratios of isotopes can be traced back to specific locations.

Mat Wooller is a professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he directs the Alaska Stable Isotope Facility. He described the link between isotopes and the landscape: “The geological map of Alaska is diverse. That diversity translates into a corresponding patchwork of strontium isotope signatures in the underlying geology. The underlying geology imparts a signature on the overlying soils and then the plants that grow on those soils. When herbivores like a mammoth move across this patchwork, they end up reflecting that patchwork of strontium isotope variability in their tusk, which grows over time.”

The team used strontium and oxygen isoscapes—landscapes with isotope ratios tracked—as well as a new sulfur isoscape created by Audrey Rowe. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the lead author of this current paper. To determine Elma’s random set of walks, Rowe implemented code that co-author Clement Bataille created, tweaking it “to suit [her] code-writing style better.”

Elma’s tusk was found at Swan Point, indicating she either met her death there or nearby. Determining where she ultimately roamed in her life meant starting at Swan Point and moving backward over her life. Rowe described the algorithm as having the mammoth “take a step in any random direction,” and then checking for matches between its strontium isotopes and the isoscape. If the step takes the mammoth to a location where its isotopes don’t reflect those in the landscape, or if the mammoth is about to walk in a glaciated area, the program stops and starts again in another direction, repeating it until a match is found. Once the process is done, they take the successful walks and run them through again to match the oxygen and sulfur isoscapes.

“And when you do this 20,000 times,” Rowe said, “you get some walks [where] all the data fits. It’s very cool.” It also takes “several gigabytes of data” and means leaving her computer on overnight to complete its task.

The team found that Elma didn’t roam as much as the Kik mammoth, an aspect the authors suggest might signal similarities to modern female elephant behavior. Other differences included a preference for highlands, an apparently healthy life, but a young death at about age 20.

Although they favored different types of landscape, she and the Kik mammoth nonetheless frequented some similar areas. Even more, some of the places in which Elma roamed overlap with many of the known sites of ancient humans.

Proboscideans and people, oh my

The authors emphasize that finding mammoth fossils in close association with archaeological evidence doesn’t necessarily mean humans were hunting them. Even if they were, the evidence at Swan Point doesn’t point to a human cause behind mammoth extinction. Ben Potter, a co-author and professor of anthropology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, told Ars, “What this paper is saying is that there’s overlap in habitat. Mammoths like to be where humans liked to be. And there is the potential for hunting. That’s a long way from saying there’s an overkill.”

No direct evidence of hunting has yet been found in Alaska. And parts of Alaska were still heavily glaciated at the time of Elma’s death, so the human-mammoth overlap may have simply been a matter of finding favorable terrain.

“Understanding the mammoth part of the equation,” as Potter puts it, could help answer some of the questions archaeologists ponder about ancient humans and their interactions with megafauna. But there are still many unknowns about human hunting, including whether they targeted mammoths at all or focused on more manageable prey animals like bison and elk.

That’s where Indigenous knowledge could be critical. Smith, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Alaska Anchorage, is very interested in the context in which mammoths appear in Kaska Dene stories. In most, he said, humans “kill the mammoths because they’re rampaging through their camps or villages. They’re dangerous beasts. They’re not actively out there hunting them for meat.”

Paulette Steeves, author and anthropology-sociology department chair at Algoma University, was not involved in the research. “There are Indigenous communities in the Western Hemisphere in areas known today as North America that have oral traditions of mammoths, songs and dances of mammoths,” she wrote in an email to Ars. “This [implies] that they respected mammoths as a being with a spirit and honored them in many ways.”

For Combs, the connection to the people who co-existed with Elma is profound: These are her ancestors. Noting that what she expressed is her personal view and that she can’t speak for everyone in the tribe, she compared it to her connection with her great-great-grandparents. “I didn’t know them. I don’t really recall what they looked like at all because the only photo I’ve seen of them was dark and black and white, but I knew they lived [here]. I’ve seen where they walked. I’ve walked where they walked. I’ve hunted where they hunted,” she said.

That Combs and her ancestors are separated by tens of thousands of years or more “doesn’t really influence my connection to that generation of ancient people. They’re still a living part of my identity.”

An evolving picture

One of the things Wooller said he and the team wondered at the beginning was whether Elma spent most of her time in the area near Swan Point. “And I think that’s what’s really cool about this particular study is that she really didn’t originate from where she ended up dying,” he remarked.

“You are getting a sense of her decision process,” said Chris Widga, a paleontologist at Penn State who was not involved in the research. He suggested that we can now think about whether she is choosing to roam south or north and when those choices were made. This, he said, can only be done through “a fine-grained understanding of the life histories of animals.”

“We know with [the Kik mammoth] that it actually struggled in its diet at the end,” Reuther mused. “And what’s unique about the Swan Point mammoth is that it didn’t. We found it in an area where we have numerous age groups represented at Swan Point—older mammoths, younger mammoths—and it also overlaps with evidence for human occupation. So that brings in a nuance to our models of how people were interacting on the landscape where mammoths are also inhabiting. That’s unique for this paper, I think. It’s pretty exciting.”

The isotope maps developed for this work will undoubtedly be used to track additional animals in the future. “It’s just a tour-de-force of data,” Widga said. “They built this dataset in order to interpret this one mammoth, which was a huge amount of work. And it’s going to pay dividends for future researchers just to be able to chase down different questions.”

For him, the importance of this research goes beyond “a story about a mammoth and some humans 14,000 years ago in the Arctic.” It has implications for our struggles today with climate change and modern extinction, and he cautions that “if you don’t know history, you’re doomed to repeat it. But in this case, we’re just figuring out what that [history] is.”

For her part, Rowe emphasized that “it was a conscious decision” to refer to Elma in this research as ‘she/her’ rather than ‘it’ “to remind myself and the readers that this tusk is not just a cold museum specimen; we’re scrutinizing the life of a conscious, intelligent individual. We’re fortunate to be able to reach across millennia to bring new recognition and importance to this life.”

Science Advances, 2024. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adk0818