Hulking ancient skeletons of long-extinct woolly mammoths found in first EVER 15,000-year-old human-built hunting traps
HUMANS may have planned deadly attacks on Woolly Mammoths 15,000 years ago.
Over a dozen skeletons belonging to the extinct elephant-sized creature were found in gigantic man-made traps near Mexico City.
Two pits in Tultepec, just north of Mexico’s capital are the first Woolly Mammoth traps to ever be discovered.
The pits held the remains of at least 14 Woolly Mammoths – totalling around 800 bones.
Scientists think the dead bones indicate that early humans hunted down the humongous mammals with torches and branches.
They think the hunters who built the traps used these tools to herd them into the pits – both 5ft 6in deep and 82ft in diameter.
Experts from National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) initially thought humans would only kill the creatures if they were trapped or hurt.
But this groundbreaking discovery – that the traps were built by humans, strongly indicates that hunters planned the brutal attacks.
Diego Prieto Hernández, director of INAH said: “This represents a watershed, a turning point in what we until now imagined to be the interaction between hunter-gatherers with these huge herbivores”.
INAH say archaeolgoists have been digging up the pits for the last ten months.
The museum think even more traps may soon be unearthed, housing bones of the furry animal that went extinct around 4,000 years ago.
This comes after news that the Woolly Mammoth may be on track to roam the Earth once again by 2028.
It’s all thanks to a Jurassic Park-style project spearheaded by Colossal Biosciences, understood to be the world’s first deextinction company.
Colossal announced it has reached a major milestone in the journey to bring the Woolly Mammoth back to life.
Scientists have had a breakthrough in elephant ‘pluripotent’ stem cells, also known as iPSCs, which can grow into any cell in the body.
They are essentially the building blocks needed to de-extinct the great Woolly Mammoth.
According to Eriona Hysolli, Head of Biological Sciences at Colossal Biosciences, it’s be a long road to success.
“In the past, a multitude of attempts to generate elephant iPSCs have not been fruitful.
“Elephants are a very special species, and we have only just begun to scratch the surface of their fundamental biology.
“The Colossal mammoth team persisted quite successfully as this progress is invaluable for the future of elephant assisted reproductive technologies, and advanced cellular modelling of mammoth phenotypes.”