FAIRBANKS, Alaska, May 11 (UPI) -- A U.S. researcher has concluded climate change might have helped cause the extinction of mammoths and other mammals more than 10,000 years ago.
"It was a special time of greater warmth and moisture," paleoecologist R. Dale Guthrie of the University of Alaska-Fairbanks said. "The mammoth, and the horses, which did well when it was cold, didn't survive."
Guthrie concludes mammals, including horses, in Alaska and the Canadian Yukon couldn't find adequate forage and became extinct, The Washington Post reported. The horses known today developed from European stock taken to the New World in the 16th century.
The extinction also included saber-toothed cats, mastodons, giant sloths and other animals, Guthrie said. Elk, being bark eaters, were not affected by the climate change.
Some paleobiologists disagree with Guthrie's findings, saying climate might have been a factor but humans ensured the extinctions.
"It might look like humans came in and got rid of the horses and mammoth," Guthrie said during a telephone interview with the Post. "But why are moose prospering and elk and bison surviving?"
His research appears in the journal Nature.
