Bizzare Facts

Our collective imagination places the **Woolly Mammoth** firmly in the Ice Age, a lumbering giant sharing the landscape with saber-toothed cats and cavemen painting on rock walls. In a sense, that's true: most mammoths vanished around 10,000 years ago. However, a remnant population of these shaggy giants survived on a small, remote refuge: **Wrangel Island** off the coast of Siberia.

Protected from mainland hunters and environmental changes, a genetically unique, dwarfed population persisted on this tiny island until approximately **1650 BCE**. Compare this to the timeline of Egyptian civilization: the **Great Pyramid of Giza** was completed around **2560 BCE**. This means that when the Egyptian civilization was flourishing—with pharaohs, bureaucracy, massive architectural projects, and fully developed writing—the last of the woolly mammoths were still roaming the northern tundras.

These massive, hairy creatures were breathing on Wrangel Island for nearly a thousand years *after* the pyramids became ancient landmarks. The final extinction of this iconic prehistoric creature occurred not in a distant Ice Age, but at a time when the world was already developing sophisticated bronze-age societies, long after history had seemingly passed them by. It's the ultimate overlap of the prehistoric and the proto-historic.