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SCIENTISTS have revealed how a common condition suffered by millions could have also been what wiped woolly mammoths off the face of the earth.
The shocking new theory claims to prove how the animal’s allergies may have impaired its ability to locate a partner and breed.
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Four mammoth remains have been revealed to contain plant pollen, and researchers have also identified the first indication that the animal had allergies.
It is thought by scientists that allergies to plant pollen may have harmed the precursors of elephants, impairing their ability to detect, find a mate, and procreate.
According to researchers, this hay fever may have caused a long-term drop in birth rates, which ultimately resulted in the extinction of the species around 4,000 years ago.
About 10,000 years ago, the previous ice age ended, bringing with it a period during which time plants and trees flourished.
Researchers from private Israeli firms collaborated with scholars at the Russian Academy of Sciences and in Italy to examine tissue samples from four extinct mammoth bodies that were excavated from the permafrost of northeastern Siberia and are currently on display in a museum.
The specimens’ immunoglobulins, or antibodies—chemicals produced by the immune system in reaction to a foreign body—were extracted and examined using new technology.
The study’s first author Gleb Zilberstein, co-founder at Spectrophon, told The Telegraph: “This was the first study where fragments of immunoglobulins were found in remains tens of thousands of years old.
“In parallel, fragments of proteins of highly allergenic plants and their pollen were found in these remains.
“We found evidence in mammoth samples of allergies and they may have gone extinct because mammoths developed allergies to pollen during the breeding season which stopped them being able to find each other to reproduce.”
The conventional theory is that after millennia of greater isolation and population decrease following the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago, climatic change caused the woolly mammoths to go extinct 4,000 years ago.
Rapid climate change, according to a 2021 study by experts at Cambridge University, is “the final nail in the coffin” for the species, which can reach heights of 12 feet and weights of eight tonnes.
The ten-year study discovered that the woolly mammoth’s typical grassland habitat was replaced by trees and wetland plants due to the warmer environment.
The extinction of mammoths has been attributed in large part to the depletion of vegetation.
But the new study “proposes a new evolutionary mechanism for the extinction of mammoths,” which was published in the recently launched Earth History and Biodiversity magazine by Elsevier.
The scientists wrote: “A new hypothesis and mechanism for the extinction of mammoths is proposed based on a decrease in the likelihood of mating due to allergies and decreased sensitivity to odours.”
Mr Zilberstein added: “Our theory of the extinction of mammoths is the first one that pointed to markers of diseases – allergies to plants.
“It showed that the extinction was a slow process of decreasing the mammoth population due to the destruction of chemical communication (recognition by smell) between animals during the breeding season.”
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