Genetic study rules out inbreeding, points to sudden mystery event in woolly mammoth extinction

For six thousand years, a remnant population of woolly mammoths endured on a remote Arctic island, descended from just a handful of survivors yet managing, against expectation, to hold genetic collapse at bay. A new genomic study published in June 2024 has overturned the long-held assumption that inbreeding sealed their fate, revealing instead that when the last mammoths vanished four thousand years ago, they were biologically viable — struck down not by the slow erosion of their own DNA, but by something sudden and still unnamed. In dismantling one answer, science has uncovered a more unsettl