History
Were woolly mammoths still alive when the pyramids were built?
The short answer
Yes. The Great Pyramid of Giza was built around 4,500 years ago. A population of woolly mammoths survived on Wrangel Island, off the coast of Siberia, until about 4,000 years ago. For several centuries there were both mammoths and pyramids on Earth at the same time.
Mammoths feel like creatures of the Ice Age, and mostly they were. On the mainland they died out around 10,000 years ago as the climate warmed and the grasslands they ate turned to forest and bog. But as the seas rose, a group was cut off on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean, and there, with no people and plenty of grass, they carried on.
The island population held out for another six thousand years. Radiocarbon dating of their bones, first reported in the journal Nature in 1993, shows them alive until roughly 4,000 years ago, well after the pyramids at Giza were finished. Recent genetic work has found the herd descended from as few as eight animals and grew to a few hundred, inbred but stable, until something ended them suddenly.
What that something was is still unknown. A bad winter that iced over the grass, a disease, a first boat of humans arriving: the evidence has not settled. What is settled is the timing. Somewhere in Egypt a scribe was recording grain harvests in the shadow of a finished pyramid while, on an island at the top of the world, the last mammoths were still grazing.