FURTHER doubt has been cast on the idea that human hunters suddenly wiped out many of the world’s species of large mammal at the end of the last ice age. Some, including mammoths, musk oxen and horses, seem to have bounced back after disappearing from much of Siberia for more than a millennium.
Carbon-dating of preserved bones shows that many species vanished from Siberia about 11,000 years ago. Some, such as the woolly rhinoceros, left no later remains, but others reappeared almost simultaneously more than a thousand years later, Ross MacPhee of the American Museum of Natural History in New…
