22. Woolly Mammoths Were Still Around When the Pyramids Were Built
Woolly mammoths like Manny from the Ice Age animated movie franchise flourished in the Pleistocene epoch and lasted into the Holocene in which we now live. The now extinct pachyderms were roughly the size of modern African elephants. Males reached shoulder heights greater than eleven feet and weighed in at around six tons. Females reached nearly ten feet at the shoulders, weighed around four tons, and calved newborns that were around two hundred pounds at birth. The furry pachyderms are most commonly associated with the ice age.
Their shaggy coats were comprised of outer layers of long guard hairs atop a shorter undercoat. That made them well adapted to the harsh winter environments of their frozen era. Other evolutionary woolly mammoth adaptations included short ears and tails, to minimize heat loss and frostbite. They were thus able to thrive in the Mammoth Steppe – the earth’s most extensive biome in the ice age, which extended from Canada and across Eurasia to Spain, and from the Arctic Circle to China. We commonly associate them with the stone age, but as seen below, woolly mammoths still existed when the Great Pyramids of Ancient Egypt were built.
