They certainly did. Incredibly, the last mammoths only died out some 4,000 years ago on Wrangel Island in the Chukchi Sea off the north-east coast of Russia, which means they were still around when the first pyramids were being built in Egypt!
While what we know as our elephants – African savannah, forest and Asian elephants – were evolving into their modern forms some 6-7 million years ago, though they weren’t the exact same species.
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But did they live in the same places?
Well, neither African nor Asian elephants lived on Wrangel Island – it was far too cold! – but what isn’t often understood is that mammoths actually evolved in Africa. Early species of mammoth started to appear around 3.6-3.8 million years ago. Fieldwork that has been carried out in Woranso-Mille in the Afar region of northern Ethiopia found fossilised remains of not only mammoths, but also species in the Elephas and Loxodontagenuses – effectively early ancestors of both Asian and African elephants.
This work also revealed the presence of a strange proboscidean (that’s a term that encompasses a whole range of elephant-like mammals) known as the gomphothere – gomphotheres included numerous species, with some having long trunks like the ones we see today, while others had much shorter ones that were more like those of tapirs. They differed from our elephants in also having two pairs of tusks – one extending from the upper jaws and one from the lower.
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What about elephants and woolly mammoths?
Woolly mammoths – which go by the scientific name Mammuthus primigenius – are what most people imagine when you say the word mammoth. Though they are undeniably elephant-like in their appearance, they also differ in some important ways – those long brown shaggy coats for a start, but also their improbably long curving tusks, their sloping backs and their much smaller ears.
They evolved from what we call steppe mammoths after spreading into Eurasia some 3 million years ago. Some 800,000-600,000 years ago, they became adapted to the northern, very cold, treeless environments where they subsisted on grass.
The range of elephants in the Elephas genus – effectively, Asian elephants – was much broader around the time that woolly mammoths were emerging than it is today. It extended from Anatolia in modern-day Turkey and the Levant (the geographical region encompassing the Eastern Mediterranean) to the Indian sub-continent (where they are largely found today) and as far east as southern and central China. They lived almost as far north as where Beijing is located today.
But that’s still a long way from the woolly mammoth’s Siberian heartlands, and while the former became specialised as a grassland species, the Asian elephant is more of a forest one. So, while they overlapped in time, it seems unlikely that they ever actually met.
Where do Columbian mammoths fit into this picture?
Columbian mammoths were also large elephant-like creatures like their woolly relatives, and while they were just as enormous, they were less shaggy. Though what we know is far from complete, it’s possible this species arose as a result of interbreeding or hybridisation between woolly and steppe mammoths at least half a million years ago or so.
There were no other elephants in North America, but the American mastodon – not a close relative of elephants exactly, but nevertheless a probiscidean – survived from Alaska to Central Mexico until 13,000 years ago. So, they definitely overlapped in terms of their distribution, but their preferred habitat was coniferous forest and wetlands, as opposed to the expansive grasslands that mammoths liked. However, a remarkable mammoth skeleton was found in the same deposit as a mastodon at the bottom of the Aucilla River in Florida. “They were contemporaneous,” the Florida Museum notes on its website. Whether that means they physically encountered each other is not clear – but it certainly seems possible.
