ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2009
Ancient DNA reveals late survival of mammoth and horse in interior Alaska.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 60 papers.
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60 citing papers in PubMed.
- Holocene shifts in marine mammal distributions around Northern Greenland revealed by sedimentary ancient DNA.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Read Length Dominates Phylogenetic Placement Accuracy of Ancient DNA Reads.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Rewilded horses in European nature conservation - a genetics, ethics, and welfare perspective.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Mitochondrial genomes of Pleistocene megafauna retrieved from recent sediment layers of two Siberian lakes.eLife · 2024Article
- Genomics for monitoring and understanding species responses to global climate change.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2024Review
- Environmental DNA: The First Snapshot of the Vertebrate Biodiversity in Three Sicilian Lakes.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Article
- Paleoecology of extinct species.BMC ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Quantitative PCR (qPCR) assay for the specific detection of the Chinese mystery snail (Cipangopaludina chinensis) in the UK.PloS one · 2023Article
- Spatiotemporal influences of climate and humans on muskox range dynamics over multiple millennia.Global change biology · 2022Article
- Why eDNA fractions need consideration in biomonitoring.Molecular ecology resources · 2022Review
- A theoretical analysis of taxonomic binning accuracy.Molecular ecology resources · 2022Article
- Review
- Microstratigraphic preservation of ancient faunal and hominin DNA in Pleistocene cave sediments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Late Pleistocene shrub expansion preceded megafauna turnover and extinctions in eastern Beringia.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Collapse of the mammoth-steppe in central Yukon as revealed by ancient environmental DNA.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Article
- Ancient DNA preserved in small bone fragments from the P.W. Lund collection.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Climate change, not human population growth, correlates with Late Quaternary megafauna declines in North America.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Sedimentary DNA tracks decadal-centennial changes in fish abundance.Communications biology · 2020Article
- Micro Methods for Megafauna: Novel Approaches to Late Quaternary Extinctions and Their Contributions to Faunal Conservation in the Anthropocene.Bioscience · 2019Article
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18 authors.
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Abstract
Causes of late Quaternary extinctions of large mammals ("megafauna") continue to be debated, especially for continental losses, because spatial and temporal patterns of extinction are poorly known. Accurate latest appearance dates (LADs) for such taxa are critical for interpreting the process of extinction. The extinction of woolly mammoth and horse in northwestern North America is currently placed at 15,000-13,000 calendar years before present (yr BP), based on LADs from dating surveys of macrofossils (bones and teeth). Advantages of using macrofossils to estimate when a species became extinct are offset, however, by the improbability of finding and dating the remains of the last-surviving members of populations that were restricted in numbers or confined to refugia. Here we report an alternative approach to detect 'ghost ranges' of dwindling populations, based on recovery of ancient DNA from perennially frozen and securely dated sediments (sedaDNA). In such contexts, sedaDNA can reveal the molecular presence of species that appear absent in the macrofossil record. We show that woolly mammoth and horse persisted in interior Alaska until at least 10,500 yr BP, several thousands of years later than indicated from macrofossil surveys. These results contradict claims that Holocene survival of mammoths in Beringia was restricted to ecologically isolated high-latitude islands. More importantly, our finding that mammoth and horse overlapped with humans for several millennia in the region where people initially entered the Americas challenges theories that megafaunal extinction occurred within centuries of human arrival or were due to an extraterrestrial impact in the late Pleistocene.
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