Climate Change Meets Evolution

They seem like different subjects,
but they have a lot in common.

Evolutionists are ignoring the mammoth in the room. Or, that is, the mammoth in the permafrost. Instead of approaching the puzzle of millions of frozen mammoth bones and tusks in the Arctic circle, from Alaska to Siberia, they play with their favorite toys: climate change and evolution.

Humans did not cause woolly mammoths to go extinct – climate change did (University of Cambridge). In its rush to include the trendy phrase “climate change” in yet another press release, this article fails to even mention the vast numbers of mammoth bones and mummified animals trapped in the ice, often with organs intact.

For five million years, woolly mammoths roamed the earth until they vanished for good nearly 4,000 years ago – and scientists have finally proved why.

It was climate change, they say. In today’s Big Science circles, climate change is the default explanation for everything, just like demons were in the middle ages. The Cambridge geniuses exonerate humans for hunting mammoths to extinction, but this time, they can’t blame them for past global warming. Eske Willerslev explains:

Professor Willerslev said: “Scientists have argued for 100 years about why mammoths went extinct. Humans have been blamed because the animals had survived for millions of years without climate change killing them off before, but when they lived alongside humans they didn’t last long and we were accused of hunting them to death.

“We have finally been able to prove was that it was not just the climate changing that was the problem, but the speed of it that was the final nail in the coffin – they were not able to adapt quickly enough when the landscape dramatically transformed and their food became scarce.

Humans exonerated from driving the mammoths extinct (La Brea tar pits mural). Note: the hunters probably wore clothes, but the artwork makes them look more primitive as if they were evolving.

Proof or Goof?

“Proof” is a risky word in science. A story is not enough. Evidence is required, and even then, scientists are usually reticent to say their favored model has been proven. This prof professed proof. He could use a little epistemic modesty.

Fossils and artifacts show that humans hunted mammoths just thousands of years ago, and not only mammoths, but other extinct ice age fauna. “Humans lived alongside woolly mammoths for at least 2,000 years – they were even around when the pyramids were being built,” the article says. But this is where the “climate change” explanation begins to falter. If it were true, why was the climate change so fast this time (after five million Darwin years of climate swings), so that evolution couldn’t rush in to save the beasts? They seemed adapted enough to live in a vast range of climate zones. If they didn’t like the cold, why didn’t the mammoths move to better conditions? After all, they lived all over and could travel vast distances.

Mammoths could travel a distance equivalent of going around the world twice during their lifetime and fossil records show they lived on all continents except Australia and South America. Populations were known to have initially survived the end of the last Ice Age in small pockets off the coasts of Siberia and Alaska – on Wrangel Island and St Paul Island – but the research found they actually lived longer elsewhere too and the breeds of mammoths on both the islands were closely related despite being geographically separated.

If the rapid climate change did not drive humans and elephants extinct, why was it selective for mammoths and certain other Pleistocene animals? By ignoring the thawing mammoth in the room, they are missing out on the most mysterious part of the story: the quick-freezing of the huge beasts such that the contents of their stomachs are often exceptionally preserved. Here’s their rescue device to ignore these important details:

“When the climate got wetter and the ice began to melt it led to the formation of lakes, rivers, and marshes. The ecosystem changed and the biomass of the vegetation reduced and would not have been able to sustain the herds of mammoths. We have shown that climate change, specifically precipitation, directly drives the change in the vegetation – humans had no impact on them at all based on our models.”

But surely there was vegetation in scattered places to support at least some mammoths. These wide-ranging mammals could have followed the grass. This scenario, furthermore, is the opposite one needs to explain mammoths and even wolf pups frozen intact in ice (see 26 December 2020). Something had to happen very suddenly.

Mammoths and mastodons traveled far and wide and lived in a variety of climates. Credit: Beth Zaiken/Centre for Palaeogenetics

The selectivity of the extinctions belies the climate change story. Wolves survive to this day, but saber-tooth tigers do not. Camels are doing well in Egypt, but not in southern California, where only their fossil bones are found. The alleged climate change scenario leaves many questions unanswered. Ignoring the mammoth questions in the room, the Prof goes into sermon mode:

Professor Willerslev said: “This is a stark lesson from history and shows how unpredictable climate change is – once something is lost, there is no going back. Precipitation was the cause of the extinction of woolly mammoths through the changes to plants. The change happened so quickly [how? why?]that they could not adapt and evolve to survive.

Evolution is fast except when it is slow. Climate change is slow except when it is fast. These two subjects are so similar, they must have a common ancestor!

Update 11 Nov 2021: Actually, humans are at fault for killing off the mammoths, say scientists at the University of Adelaide. These scientists found a way to blame humans after all.

“Our analyses strengthens and better resolves the case for human impacts as a driver of population declines and range collapses of megafauna in Eurasia during the late Pleistocene,” he said.

“It also refutes a prevalent theory that climate change alone decimated woolly mammoth populations and that the role of humans was limited to hunters delivering the coup de grâce”.

This narrative allows the best of both favorite things for leftists to blame: humans and climate change. Funny how the humans killed all the millions of mammoths up in the Arctic Circle when they hadn’t invented clothes yet. When it’s impossible to witness an event, any story you can get published increases your fitness.

We really need to break up the monopoly in Big Science and let critical thinkers in. Suggestion: stop paying taxpayer money to purveyors of a fossilized consensus. The storytellers might go extinct, unable to adapt and survive fast enough outside the echo chamber.

Recommended Resources: Creationists offer alternative explanations for the sudden extinction of mammoths. Dr Walt Brown has one in his book that specifically addresses the frozen mammoths in his flood model, comparing all the secular theories for strengths and weaknesses. Michael Oard has a different model based in post-flood ice age weather, which he has presented in technical papers but also portrayed in his book for young people. Other non-moyboy models can be searched for on the internet. Whichever is preferred, these all at least offer explanations for the primary evidence of rapid death of these beasts in the Arctic Circle without ignoring the mammoth in the ice tomb.