Small Population of Woolly Mammoths Survived for Centuries, Against All Odds » Explorersweb

Ten thousand years ago, as the Pleistocene ended and the Holocene began, sea levels rose and trapped a small group of woolly mammoths — possibly as few as eight — on Wrangel Island off the Siberian coast. What happened next is what science calls a “bottleneck event.” It’s when a species faces a combination of a tiny population and external factors like environmental pressures, disease, or hunting. Meanwhile, the genetic variation thought to be necessary for a species to recover …