The Children’s Newspaper confidently declaring the mammoth a “mistake” in 1922, there.
Wikipedia tells me that mammoths lived through the Pliocene epoch (5 million years ago) to the woolly mammoths of the Holocene epoch (dying out 4,500 years ago – although we are still in this epoch). As a species, they lived through multiple epochs, over millions of years, and were still around when Ancient Egypt was a well established civilisation. In fact, if the mammoth died out around 4,500 years ago, that is around the same time as the Great Pyramid of Giza was being built. I know that Egypt got started on the whole civilisation thing earlier than most of humanity, but it blows my mind that mammoths were roaming the earth at the same time as the Pharoahs were strapping on their false beards.
Seems a bit harsh in the circumstances to dismiss them as a mistake, especially as they seem to have died out largely because of either climate change or being hunted by humans. And seeing as modern humans have been around a mere 200,000 years.
And there’s also a good chance that one day the woolly mammoth will be resurrected, Jurassic Park-style, by cloning frozen DNA found in a Siberian specimen, the 40,000-year-old Buttercup.
On another note, look at this! A real, live teddy bear from Edinburgh Zoo, from the same issue. Awwww. Not a mistake, this one.
