Not a Mammoth's Best Friend: Early Dogs May Have Helped Hunters

The disappearance of woolly mammoths remains a mystery, but new scientific findings indicate that domesticated dogs may have helped people ambush and kill the massive animals.

"This is the first time that someone's gone out on a limb and suggested something different than what we thought before," said Angela Perri, a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and an expert on dog domestication, as quoted by Science. "But it's still very speculative at this stage."

Central Europe and North Asia have around 30 "mammoth megasites" filled with bones left by the hairy elephant ancestors, some of which have tens of thousands of bones crammed together in areas that can be as small as 200 square feet.

"They're crazy sites," said researcher Pat Shipman, an anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, as quoted by Science. "The sheer number of dead mammoths is astounding."

At Berelekh, a site along the Siberian river not far from the Arctic Ocean, researchers have excavated more than 160 mammoths along with such animals as wild horses, deer, foxes and more.

Scientists aren't sure why these areas hold so many mammoth remains in one tightly packed space, but recent findings show that hunters may have killed mammoths in the same location for generations, possibly because the spots were ideal points for ambush.

Shipman compared the bones in mammoth megasites to demographics for elephant die-offs, which differ according to the reason. Droughts and other natural disasters will kill the youngest and oldest elephants, while herds falling through ice will kill young, old, male and female alike.

The new research indicates that dogs may have been part of mammoth hunts since skulls with canine characteristics have been found among mammoth bones at several of the "graveyards."

Shipman's speculation is that domesticated dog ancestors could have kept the mammoths in one place while hunters moved in for the kill and then protected the site from scavengers.