Mammoths were alive when the pyramids rose

We file mammoths away in a hazy past, next to cavemen and cave paintings. And the pyramids at the dawn of civilisation. They seem like two worlds split by an abyss of time.

But the numbers don't lie. The Great Pyramid of Giza was finished around 2560 BC. And on Wrangel Island, a scrap of frozen land north of Siberia, an isolated population of woolly mammoths survived until roughly 2000 BC. In other words: when the final block crowned the pyramid, there were still mammoths breathing on the planet, and they kept at it for another five centuries.

They were the last mammoths on Earth: a shrinking, isolated population whose genome grew ever poorer after centuries of inbreeding. Pharaohs and mammoths shared a world without knowing it. History doesn't move in tidy lines: sometimes two eras we thought were ages apart end up shaking hands.