Audio Player
Lately, Audrey Rowe has been a bit preoccupied with a girl named Elma. Rowe is a paleoecologist and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. And Elma is a woolly mammoth she’s studying.
The mammoth’s full name, Élmayųujey’eh, was given to her by the Healy Lake Village Council – the Mendas Cha’ag People – a tribe native to Interior Alaska.
This mammoth is particularly interesting because she lived and died at a time when Interior Alaska was in great flux – 14,000 years ago, around the end of the Ice Age.
Around then, the woolly mammoths’ habitat was changing in ways they weren’t built for, and early settlements of human hunters were encroaching in. “Things were getting warmer and wetter,” says Rowe, “and that would’ve allowed trees and shrubs to start creeping in.” It also became a more hospitable environment for humans, who overlapped with woolly mammoths in Interior Alaska for only about 1,000 years.