Woolly Mammoth: Secrets from the Ice Page #3

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At London's Natural History Museum,

Professor Adrian Lister

has traced those origins

through his collection of bones,

tusks, and, in particular, teeth.

What we've got here is a lower jaw,

or mandible, of a very early mammoth.

So here's the jawbone,

and this is a kind of molar tooth

that is adapted for eating plant

matter, as all elephants and mammoths do,

and, by counting the number

of enamel ridges in this tooth -

this one's got about ten -

we get an idea of what kind

of plant food these animals ate.

This one would suggest that this creature

was eating the leaves of trees and shrubs,

quite soft vegetation.

Teeth like this show that mammoths

shared a common ancestor with living

elephants about six million years ago.

Over the next three million years,

mammoths separated into different species

as they moved north

from their Southern African origins.

It was the early mammoths

that grew truly huge,

some standing over four metres tall

at the shoulder,

and weighing twice as much

as an African bull elephant.

From about three million years ago,

we pick up the first remains of the

mammoth line out of Africa, north of Africa.

As they moved through

the Middle East and into Eurasia,

mammoths evolved very quickly.

Adapting to the cooling conditions,

their tails and ears shrank

to conserve heat.

Woolly mammoths eventually ended up

the same size as Asian elephants.

Just like elephants, they probably

spent most of their day eating,

but the plants of the steppe

were far tougher than

those available in the tropics.

Mammoths had four molar teeth.

To cope with the wear and tear

caused by their new diet,

these molars evolved to have

more ridges and higher crowns

than seen in their relatives.

And so we have fossils

like this molar, from Siberia,

and that is just about as far

as it got, that's the limit.

So you can see that there's

about 26 of these enamel ridges.

They're very closely packed.

This is an almost 100% grass eater,

which is a late Pleistocene woolly

mammoth. This is from the last ice age.

As members of the elephant family,

it's believed that mammoths would have behaved

in a very similar way to their modern relatives.

They would have lived

in extended social groups,

females of all ages,

young males and infants.

Now,

remains from the Siberian permafrost

are revealing far more than

just teeth and bones ever could.

The frozen baby Lyuba shows that

mammoths possessed an unusual tool,

perfect for feeding on the steppe.

She's got this very particular shape

to the end of her trunk,

which is quite different

from modern-day elephants,

and it's designed

to be able to delicately pull up

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