Woolly behemoths ruled the frozen steppe for hundreds of thousands of years. Were they wiped out by climate change, a killer asteroid – or our ancestors?
IN 1643, workers unearthed some huge bones in a field outside Bruges in Belgium. The naturalists who studied them were convinced they had come from a human-like giant. Their length, after all, tallied with a biblical reference to Og, a giant king supposedly slain by Moses.
In 1728, British anatomist Hans Sloane identified similar remains from Siberia as belonging to elephants. But what were animals that lived in hot climes doing in Siberia? It wasn't until the end of the 18th century that French zoologist Georges Cuvier concluded that giant bones like these were from a relative of elephants that died out long ago - the mammoth.
So where did these mysterious giants come from? What were they like? And what drove ...