A study of fossils of woolly mammoth found in the Shropshire suggests that these animals would be extinct in the north-west Europe much later than we thought. In addition, they have disappeared because of climate change, not hunting.

Professor Adrian Lister of the Natural History Museum, has re-examined the fossilized remains of an adult male and at least four young mammoth that had been dug in Condove near Shrewsbury in 1986. “We have always believed that the extinction of mammoths in the north-west Europe dating from approximately 21,000 years,” he says.

But the new techniques of carbon-14 dating have enabled him to make a more accurate estimate of their age. The professor believes that even if the hunters and the cold touched the populations of mammoths in England, the animals would have returned later from the hotter zones of Europe and would have survived until 14,000 years ago.

At that time, global warming has allowed the trees to thrive and forests have developed through the south of Britain which has massively reduced the food resources for grazing mammoths. Species would have survived the hunters during the Ice Age, the latest to disappear when the forest has gained ground on their pastures.

The earliest fossils of mammoths have been dated back 4.8 million years or so, and these animals have survived in Siberia even longer than in Great Britain. The last known population would have died on the Wrangle island in the Arctic Ocean, approximately 5,000 years ago.

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