The woolly mammoth could play a role in increasing carbon sequestration, which would impact the surrounding ecological community. Since the mammoth went extinct and the Pleistocene era ended, the area has shifted from a grassland ecosystem to a tundra ecosystem.

Mammoths played an important role for humans during the Pleistocene epoch, 1.8 million to 10,000 years ago. They provided the hunter/gatherers with much-needed meat, skins, and building materials for their huts. Mammoths might therefore have played a role in human survival similar to today’s farm animals.

(CNN) Some of the last mammoths on Earth suffered from mutated genes that reduced fertility, caused diabetes, affected their development and even kept them from being able to smell flowers, according to a new study.

Through grazing and trampling trees, the Zimovs believe herds of woolly mammoths would make grasslands flourish across Arctic Siberia, thereby helping slow the melting of Arctic permafrost: Andersen writes that Church believes he can deliver a mammoth to Pleistocene Park within a decade.

But what if they somehow survived? Our Arctic regions would look a lot different, and not just because there would be jumbo-sized, shaggy animals roaming around. There would be less elk, moose, and caribou because the woolly mammoth would out compete them for food.

While that DNA is “good quality,” it is not at the point necessary for resurrecting mammoths to be a feasible prospect. Van der Valk also expressed ethical reservations about the possibility of bringing back an extinct species. “I think there are serious ethical considerations with the resurrection,” he wrote to Salon.

Now a team at Harvard University are working on bringing back the woolly mammoth. So is that really possible? In order to do so, scientists need to be able to secure well-preserved remains of such animals in order to be able to revive a healthy set of mammoths. But it is near impossible to do so.

The cavemen used spears with blades made of flint. They threw the spears at the woolly mammoth, hoping they would penetrate the thick skin and kill the animal. Other approaches were riskier. A brave hunter covered himself with mammoth dung and waited for the animal to pass.

The cold didn’t just take out woolly mammoths, but a majority of North American megafauna including bear-sized beavers; claims a study published in Nature Communications. Previously, over-hunting has been cited as one of the extinction causes. Humans have been known to hunt these animals for meat, tusk, fur, and bones.

The humans who killed the mastodon were “carrying a toolkit that was durable, lethal and portable”, Waters says. The Manis site may even be a two-for-one discovery. “These people either scavenged bone from a fresh carcass,” Waters suggests, “or they had killed another mastodon to make the bone point.”

At the end of the last ice age, 10,000 years ago, many North American animals went extinct, including mammoths, mastodons, and glyptodonts. While climate changes were a factor, paleontologists have evidence that overhunting by humans was also to blame.

Extinction. Fossil evidence indicates that mastodons probably disappeared from North America about 10,500 years ago as part of a mass extinction of most of the Pleistocene megafauna that is widely believed to have been a result of human hunting pressure.