The Last Woolly Mammoths Overlapped With the Construction of the Great Pyramids
Woolly mammoths were still around when the ancient Egyptian Great Pyramids were built. The hairy beasts, such as Manny from the Ice Age animated movie franchise, flourished during the Pleistocene epoch. The now-extinct pachyderms were roughly the size of modern African elephants, and males reached shoulder heights greater than eleven feet, and weighed in at around six tons. While no man ever saw a live dinosaur, mankind and its hominid ancestors did share the planet with woolly mammoths for hundreds of thousands of years. Woolly mammoths, in fact, were still around while the Ancient Egyptians were busy building the Great Pyramids.
Most woolly mammoths were hunted by humans into extinction and disappeared from the continental mainland of Eurasia and North America between 14,000 and 10,000 years ago. The last mainland population, in the Kyttyk Peninsula in Siberia, vanished about 9650 years ago. However, small populations survived in offshore islands, such as Saint Paul Island in Alaska, where woolly mammoths existed until 5600 years ago.
The last known population survived in Wrangel Island, in the Arctic Ocean, until 4000 years ago, or roughly 2000 BC. That was well into the era of human civilization and recorded human history. By the time the last woolly mammoth died, the ancient Egyptian civilization had been around for more than a thousand years. The Great Pyramids of Giza, whose construction concluded around 2560 BC, were already centuries old before woolly mammoths finally went extinct.
