When did mammoths go extinct?/Reply

Because bones are particularly resistant to decay, quantifying how their persistence changes across environments enables us to constrain the durations that dead individuals generally contribute to eDNA archives. The magnitude of temporal mixing in eDNA must, therefore, largely depend on the decay durations of bones and other tissues. Because DNA cannot be directly dated, the degree of temporal mixing cannot be estimated for an individual eDNA sample. Mammoth body fossils found in Northeast Siberia, Northwest and Central Siberia, and northern North America (n = 101, 468, and 394, respectively; Supplementary Methods and Supplementary Data 3) are known semi-continuously from around 50 cal kyr bp until their last occurrences. [...]their predicted extinction intervals12 (Supplementary Methods) are tightly constrained (Fig. 2). On the basis of the temperature of the most recent mammoth DNA-bearing site (MAT = -13.3 °C), we would expect bone persistence times of between 2.26 and 4.19 kyr (mean and upper 95% confidence intervals for never buried bones) to more than 8.0 kyr (upper 95% CI for potentially never buried bones). [...]using eDNA time series at face value implies that bones of the last mainland Siberian mammoths might still be persisting on today's landscapes.