CINCINNATI — A paleontologist at the University of Cincinnati has just published new findings related to when mammoths died out in Ohio and across the world.  Dr. Joshua Miller’s work challenges a study published last year that concluded that mammoths went extinct about 4,000 years ago.

“They started to find the DNA of mammoths in sediments that were way younger than the last mammoth fossil recovered,” Miller said.  “That suggested mammoths persisted for thousands of years after that last fossil found.”

Miller believes the DNA was shed by older bones that hadn’t fossilized yet that can persist for thousands of years in arctic climates, including Alaska.

“You have the opportunity to contaminate that environmental DNA signal to make it look like mammoths were persisting thousands of years longer than they actually were,” Miller said.

Miller and his team believe mammoths went extinct between 10,000-13,000 years ago. He said that in some remote island locations, they may have thrived for a longer period but that in most areas, they died off much later than last year’s study hypothesized. Both Miller’s study and the one he challenged were published in the journal "Nature." 

“What’s great about Miller’s study is that it’s actually putting more context into our understanding of mammoths,” said Dr. Glenn Storrs, the chief science officer at the Cincinnati Museum Center.

Storrs believes the study has implications for the study of other species as well.

“It provides a test case for the issue of dating environmental DNA and making sure that you are taking all of the possibilities for error into consideration,” Storrs said.

“Extinction is a really important factor in the life of any species,” Miller said. “Everything shows up and everything goes away and to understand how things go extinct, you really need to understand the timeline.”

Miller conducted his research along with some of his doctoral students at UC and co-authored the study with Carl Simpson at the University of Colorado at Boulder.