Extinct Megafuana that Stuck Around

The world held many species of large, wonderful creatures that became extinct at the end of the Pleistocene Era, which concluded around 10,500 years ago. At that point, the world entered the era known to science as the Holocene.

The Holocene was the era during which humans began to dominate the globe. Agriculture was developed in Eurasia, the Fertile Crescent and in the Americas. Written language was developed and early literature that has survived in some form today was written about 4,600 years ago. The pyramids were built. The Biblical city of Jericho in Palestine was founded around 11,000 years ago. A world that we would recognize as civilization begins in the early Holocene.

Some of that Pleistocene megafauna hung on while our ancestors were creating the building blocks of the modern world. Generations after the Pleistocene ended, they were still alive and very real to the people who encountered them. Counter to modern impressions, our ancestors may have encountered these animals. They lasted longer than you think.

Glyptodon was a genus of giant armadillos in South America that included species which were literally the size of a Volkswagon Beetle. We have good archaeological evidence of humans using empty glyptodont scutes as shelter during bad weather. Humans definitely co-existed with these animals for thousands of years. They disappeared as recently as 9,700 years ago.

At this time, potatoes and squash were being developed as domesticated crops in the Americas where Glyptodon roamed. Wheat and barley were being domesticated in the fertile crescent. Goats, sheep and cattle were also being domesticated.

Megaloceros Giganateus, sometimes called "the Irish elk," drops off of the fossil record around 7,700 years ago.

Megaloceros had a massive rack of antlers, which like all deer had to be regrown each year before being shed after the mating season.

By this time, there were around forty million humans living on the Earth, enabled by the Neolithic Revolution. People had tamed the aurochs -- wild bovids of Eurasia that survived into modern times through domestication -- and had started making cheese in Poland. People were probably making wine only a few hundred years later.

We don't know why megalorceros died out. It was a widespread species, extending across Europe and Asia and into Japan. Lasting millions of years across such a large area, it is unlikely that it could have been so successful if its huge antlers were a deadly encumbrance in forests, despite such speculation.

The gomphotheres were a group of proboscideans which are distant relatives of modern elephants and of mammoths and mastodons. They thrived in the Americas with their strange, downturned tusks. Overshadowed by their more iconic relatives, they were an important, common and widespread group of animals for millions of years.

The last of them made it until at least 6,060 years ago in Colombia.

The Kingdom of Egypt was established in this era. Agriculture was spreading across Eurasia. Cuneiform writing was being developed. Astronomy, civil law, sail boats, and the potter's wheel were invented.

Giant sloths were a group of species from South America that radiated into North America after the Great American Interchange about a million years ago when an area of seabed thrust upwards and became the Isthamus of Panama, connecting the North and South American continents. Some looked like bipedal giants out of Lord of the Rings. Others were smaller, but still dwarfed humans. Some species colonized islands in the Caribbean and thrived until only 4,200 years ago.

On the other side of the world, painted pottery was about to be mass-produced in Sumerian cities with populations of over 10,000 each.

Domestication of llamas in the Americas had started.

Toxodon bones were last dated in South America about 5,000 years ago.

This was once a large group of many species found throughout South America. It was an herbivore close to 9 feet long and probably weighed over 3,000 pounds. We don't know much about it's lifestyle and scientists debate whether it was terrestrial or had a semi-aquatic lifestyle like a modern hippopotamus.

When the last known Toxodon died, Stonehenge was being built. Troy was founded. "Ötzi," a man frozen in an Italian glacier, was killed with an arrow to his back which would not be noticed until 2001, ten years after his body had been collected by scientists.

The mammoths of Wrangel Island, off the coast of Siberia, hold a special place in the imagination. They left the world only about 4,000 years ago, while their distant relatives on St. Paul Island (Alaska) date to only 5,600 years ago.

The Wrangel Island mammoths probably arrived there during the last ice age, over land and ice (sea levels were much lower at the time, due to water being trapped in glaciers and the poles). The plant community is still more broader there than it is in most other regions at that latitude, and the biome that mammoths depended on may have persisted on Wrangel for longer than it did elsewhere as the planet warmed, providing the animals with a robust source of forage.

There were only around 300 mammoths eking out a living on Wrangel towards the end. While that was happening, horses were being domesticated in Eurasia. The Bronze Age was starting in China. The first Minoan palace on Crete was built. The Indus Valley Civilization was actually in decline at this point. They had already long since been constructing water supply systems and houses of baked bricks along planned urban grids like something we'd make in Simcity.

The Aurochs was the ancestor of modern cattle. With its lithe, strong figure and lyre-like horns, the aurochs dominated Eurasia as a very important herbivore as it was locally domesticated throughout it's range into regional varieties of cattle. The last wild aurochs lived in a royal Polish forest in the 1630's where they were protected but isolated and couldn't quite make it.

Aurochs were probably a species of the open grasslands for most of their history, while open European grasslands were transformed into farmland. Their restriction to forest provided them with royal protection but also inadequate nutrition while inbreeding closed in.

Yet their descendants have survived in the form of modern cattle and a major back-breeding program that cross-breeds cattle with throw-back characteristics of aurochs promises to restore a new version of the species. At least for this late-surviving species of Pleistocene megafauna, their relationship with humans might also provide their renewal.

Many groups of Pleistocene megafuana lasted well into what we think of as an age of civilization. While it is easy to mourn the gomphotheres and megaloceros that our recent ancestors saw, it is still pretty special that we can see the creatures like the rhinoceros and the elephant and the musk ox. Without devoted and well-funded efforts to protect these modern Pleistocene survivors, this could be one of the last generations to remember them.