A mammoth error and a few woolly half-truths

Peter Hellyer takes issues with the video narrative that accompanies the display of the woolly mammoth in Marina Mall

The video accompanying the display of a woolly mammoth skeleton in Marina Mall is full of factual errors, says Peter Hellyer. Sammy Dallal / The National

I’ve never found it easy to accept the dissemination, by publication or otherwise, of errors. Grammatical mistakes I can sometimes overlook, not least because English, like all other languages, is in a constant state of evolution. Factual errors? If sufficient research is done, it’s generally possible to avoid them, even if it may be necessary to update information as the results of new research become available.

I can pass over the occasional error of fact – if it’s on a topic in which I have only a passing interest, it tends to slip from the mind. When, though, it's continually put before me, it becomes increasingly irritating until, eventually, I’ve had enough.

So it was this weekend when I walked past the woolly mammoth skeleton on display at Abu Dhabi’s Marina Mall for the umpteenth time. The accompanying video is so replete with errors and half-truths that it's utterly misleading.

In summary, it suggests that woolly mammoths appeared around 5 million years ago, eventually moving from Africa into the Eurasian continent around 3 million years ago. There they roamed amid forests and pastureland until a changing climate brought the ice. They were, the script said, “the largest creature on earth at the time”, up to 10 tonnes in weight. Subject to attacks from Neanderthal hunters and, it was suggested, suffering from a lack of water, the mammoths, the script went on, eventually moved eastward to “their final destination” on St Paul’s Island in Alaska, where they were depicted sinking into the sea as icebergs melted beneath them. That, it was stated, was the end of the story until the Marina Mall skeleton appeared.

What a farrago of pseudoscience, half-digested gobbledygook and nonsense.

The last shared ancestor of mammoths, their closest surviving relative, the Asian elephant, and the African elephant lived between 6.6-8.8 million years ago. By 5.8 to 7.8 million years ago, the lineage of mammoths and Asian elephants diverged. A descendant, the “Southern mammoth”, an early ancestor of the woolly mammoth, was endemic to Europe and Central Asia between 2.5 million to 700,000 years ago. Only after a further phase of evolution did the woolly mammoth appear, perhaps around 350,000 years ago.

Big they certainly were, weighing up to 6 tonnes, but woolly mammoths certainly weren’t “the largest creature on earth at the time”. The blue whale then, and now, exceeded 100 tonnes, the largest animal ever known.

Woolly mammoths seem to have disappeared from mainland Europe and Asia about 10,000 years ago. They, or a close relative, had previously, around 100,000 years ago, reached North America by means of the land-bridge that formerly existed across the Bering Strait, stretching as far as western Canada. Neanderthals certainly seem to have hunted them in Europe and Western Russia, as, indeed, did modern humans. But since Neanderthals appear never to have gone further eastward than the Altai Mountains, in Central Asia, they certainly cannot have been responsible for eradicating them in north-eastern Siberia.

Two populations of woolly mammoth are known to have survived on islands. On St Paul's Island, in the Bering Sea, they seem to have lasted until 6,400 years ago, but became extinct there before there is any evidence of humans having reached the island, perhaps as a result of rising sea levels after the end of the Ice Ages and a shrinking habitat. Another small population survived on Wrangel Island, in the Russian Arctic, to the east of Alaska, until around 4,000 years ago and there, indeed, it is possible that the arrival of humans (not Neanderthals) was responsible.

It's a great story – and certainly one which, with a bit more thought, could have been turned into an excellent video film to accompany the Marina Mall beast.

Instead, passers-by attracted, not surprisingly, by the towering skeleton who stop and watch the accompanying film are being fed a diet of inaccurate and misleading information. How sad.

Peter Hellyer is a consultant specialising in the UAE’s history and culture