Where elephants and mammoths lived, 21,000 years ago to today

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Where elephants and their mammoth cousins lived in the wild, from the peak of the last Ice Age (~21,000 years ago) to today. Colours show species; white shows the ice sheets. During the Ice Age, sea level was ~120 m lower, so some ranges extend over what was then dry land (the Bering land bridge, the North Sea, the Sunda Shelf). Highlights: woolly mammoths shrank from a range spanning Europe, northern Asia and North America to two small islands (St Paul, ~5,600 years ago; Wrangel, ~4,000 years ago). Columbian and pygmy mammoths vanished ~13,000–12,500 years ago. Asian elephants once lived from Syria and the Yellow River to Java; today they hold perhaps 15% of that range. African elephants occupied almost all of Africa south of the Sahara (and the Sahara itself when it was green) until the ivory trade and farming fragmented their range from the 1800s on. Note on the timeline: the map tool cannot store dates before 4713 BC, so the five Ice Age frames (21,000 to 9,000 years ago) are squeezed into 4700–4300 BC on the time slider. Their labels give the real ages. Ranges are hand-drawn approximations at continental scale, not survey data: prehistoric ranges come from dated fossils and climate models; historical ranges from written records; recent ranges are generalised from the African Elephant Database and IUCN maps. Ice-age coastlines are approximated with the 200 m depth contour. Main sources: Stuart et al. 2004 (Nature) and Stuart 2005; Nogués-Bravo et al. 2008 (PLoS Biology); Nadachowski et al. 2018 (Quaternary Research); Graham et al. 2016 (PNAS, St Paul Island); Vartanyan et al. (Wrangel Island); Dyke 2004 and Hughes et al. 2016 (ice sheets); Elvin 2004, The Retreat of the Elephants, and Wen Huanran (China); Çakırlar & Ikram 2016 (Syrian elephants); Sukumar 2003, The Living Elephants; de Silva et al. 2023 (Scientific Reports, Asian elephant habitat since 1700); Thouless et al. 2016, African Elephant Status Report (IUCN); Douglas-Hamilton 1987 (1979–1987 African elephant numbers).

Text version: https://www.movingpolygons.com/map/chrisjager/where-elephants-and-mammoths-lived-21000-years-ago-to-today.md