Some giant animals might have lived longer than we thought.
For ages, experts believed that big mammals like mammoths, giant sloths, and saber-toothed cats disappeared at the start of the Holocene, roughly 11,700 years ago, when the last ice age ended. However, new research is shaking up this idea.
One key finding is that woolly mammoths were still around 4,000 years ago. This raised eyebrows and got scientists looking closely at other megafauna. Fossil evidence shows that giant sloths and camel-like creatures lived in South America until about 3,500 years ago.
This new evidence makes us rethink why these large animals went extinct and suggests that it wasn’t a simple, uniform event.
Fábio Henrique Cortes Faria, a geologist from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, led a team that carbon-dated teeth from different megafauna found in Brazil. They discovered that two teeth were much younger than expected. One belonged to an extinct llama called Palaeolama major, and the other to Xenorhinotherium bahiense, a camel-like creature.
The findings suggest that these animals were alive during the middle and late Holocene. This means they coexisted with humans who arrived in South America between 20,000 and 17,000 years ago, hinting at a much longer shared history than previously recognized.
The extinction of large animals in South America has been linked to various factors, including climate change and human activity. Some theories, like the Overkill and Blitzkrieg theories, argue human hunting was a major cause. However, the recent evidence challenges this view.
Researchers suggest that the extinction process was more gradual and varied across different regions. It’s possible that some areas in Brazil offered a refuge for these animals, allowing some species to survive longer than others.
“The famous Pleistocene-Holocene extinction was a long-term loss of diversity in large mammals,” said Ismar de Souza Carvalho, a co-author of the study.
The study highlights how much more there is to learn about our planet’s history and the animals that once roamed it. It reminds us that the past may hold surprises that challenge what we think we know.
