DNA study suggests Ice Age hunters in Europe and North America favored female mammoths

For people living through the Ice Age, woolly mammoths were a key source of food, clothing, shelter, and tools. Fresh genetic research indicates that hunters were making deliberate choices about which animals to kill. The evidence, published in Current Biology, points to a strong bias toward female mammoths in some parts of Europe and North America. 

What's happening?

According to a new study summarized by Smithsonian Magazine, researchers analyzed DNA from 521 woolly mammoths. The sample included 421 animals from natural deposition sites across Europe and North America, along with 100 mammoths recovered from 11 bone accumulation sites linked to humans and dated to 20,000 to 30,000 years ago.

The two groups showed sharply different sex ratios: males accounted for 66% of the mammoths from natural contexts, while females made up 70% of the mammoths from human-associated sites.

Because human-linked sites produced such a different pattern from natural ones, the results strengthen the case that many huge mammoth bone piles were created by hunters instead of forming only through animals dying on their own.

In a statement, Love Dalén, an evolutionary geneticist at Stockholm University and co-author of the study, said, "By scaling up sample sizes, ancient DNA can go beyond evolutionary history to teach us about animal behavior and human culture tens of thousands of years ago."

The reasons for the female skew remain unresolved. Hannah Moots, a Stockholm archaeologist at the Center for Palaeogenetics and a co-author of the study, said, "While it is tempting to assume that hunters would have targeted females because they were smaller than adult males, the reality may have been more complex."

Why does it matter?

The finding offers deeper insight into how humans can reshape wildlife populations when their survival depends heavily on a single species.

Female mammoths likely traveled in herds with their young, which may have made them easier to track and trap than adult males who spent more time alone.

That kind of selective hunting can have serious consequences. Removing breeding females from a population can speed decline, limit recovery, and push a species closer to collapse, especially when environmental pressures are already mounting.

Ice Age communities relied on mammoths for calories, hides, and ivory. If hunters helped reduce mammoth numbers, they may also have weakened their own access to food and materials — a pattern that still affects communities when natural resources are depleted faster than ecosystems can recover.

Audrey Rowe, a paleoecologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, told New Scientist the findings raise "a new line of evidence that humans contributed to the extinction of mammoths."

Rowe added: "Sadly, they probably didn't realize they were contributing to the thinning of their own resources over time."

What's being done?

Researchers are increasingly using advanced ancient DNA tools to answer questions skeletal remains alone could not resolve.

In addition to identifying this hunting pattern, the study also reported a mammoth with XX/X0 mosaicism — the condition known as Turner syndrome in humans — marking the first documented case in an extinct species.

The work builds on other major mammoth genetics advances. According to ScienceDaily, in 2024, scientists reconstructed the 3D architecture of DNA from preserved woolly mammoth skin found in Siberia, helping researchers better understand how mammoth genes functioned and how similar methods could aid conservation science for living animals.

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