2010/03/31 by Veronica Nyström, Love Dalén, Sergey Vartanyan +3 · 34 citations
Arts and Humanities · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Social Sciences · #Allele #Ancient DNA #Biology #Demography #Ecology #Evolutionary biology #Extinction (optical mineralogy) #Forensic and Genetic Research #Founder effect #Genetic drift #Genetic variation #Genetics #Geography #Haplotype #Mammoth #Paleontology #Paleopathology and ancient diseases #Pleistocene #Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology #Population #Population bottleneck #Zoology
paper · pdf · doi:10.1098/rspb.2010.0301
published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences 277(1692), 2331-2337 (Royal Society)
openalex publication_date 2010/03/31 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
During the Late Pleistocene, the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) experienced a series of local extinctions generally attributed to human predation or environmental change. Some small and isolated populations did however survive far into the Holocene. Here, we investigated the genetic consequences of the isolation of the last remaining mammoth population on Wrangel Island. We analysed 741 bp of the mitochondrial DNA and found a loss of genetic variation in relation to the isolation event, probably caused by a demographic bottleneck or a founder event. However, in spite of ca 5000 years of isolation, we did not detect any further loss of genetic variation. Together with the relatively high number of mitochondrial haplotypes on Wrangel Island near the final disappearance, this suggests a sudden extinction of a rather stable population.