Mastodons descended into civil war due to human hunting

Giant ice age animals similar to woolly mammoths that roamed the Earth more than 11,000 years ago may have died out after descending into civil war as their numbers were picked off by human hunters.

Research on the remains of mastodons, a distant relative of modern elephants that vanished after the end of the last ice age, is revealing new evidence for the role of mankind in the extinction large mammals like mammoths.

Palaeontologists have found signs that humans tended to kill the biggest and most dominant males while hunting for food, which led to pitched battles between younger males as they competed to fill the gaps left.

Puncture wounds from tusks and smashed bones in female mastodons suggest that these battles affected all of the normally stable animal societies. [...] telegraph.co.uk

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