Dynamics of the relative abundance of wooly mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius (Blumenbach, 1799) in northwestern Chukotka at the end of the Late Pleistocene

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Abstract

An analysis of radiocarbon dating series of Late Pleistocene woolly mammoth remains, Mammuthus primigenius, from northwestern Chukotka and the Wrangel Island is given. A mixture of Bayesian and frequentist methods was used to present the datasets of radiocarbon dating and to estimate the dynamics of the relative abundance of woolly mammoths. The series of dates from northwestern Chukotka was compared to the similar series from the New Siberian Islands, the Taimyr Peninsula, and the North Slope of Alaska.

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About the authors

G. K. Pavlyukov

N. A. Shilo North-East Interdisciplinary Scientific Research Institute, Far East Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences; Institute of Biological Problems of the North, Far East Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences

Author for correspondence.
Email: georgiypavlyukov@gmail.com
Russian Federation, Magadan; Magadan

G. K. Danilov

Peter-the-Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), Russian Akademy of Sciences

Email: gleb.danilov.spb@gmail.com
Russian Federation, St.-Petersburg

V. I. Tsigankova

N. A. Shilo North-East Interdisciplinary Scientific Research Institute, Far East Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences

Email: tsigankova.valeriya@mail.ru
Russian Federation, Magadan

S. L. Vartanyan

N. A. Shilo North-East Interdisciplinary Scientific Research Institute, Far East Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences

Email: sergey-vartanyan@mail.ru
Russian Federation, Magadan

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Supplementary files

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2. Fig. 1. Map of locations of dated remains of M. primigenius; clustering method applied.

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3. Fig. 2. Kernel probability density estimate (KDE_Model) of a series of radiocarbon dates on mammoth remains from northwest Chukotka; a – summary density function (SPDF) of calibrated radiocarbon dates; b – mean value of ensembles of instantaneous KDE distributions from MCMC analysis (relative abundance); c – deviation of ensembles in 1σ; max – maximum KDE value from MCMC analysis, max/2 – half of the maximum KDE value from MCMC analysis.

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4. Fig. 3. KDE_Model based on radiocarbon dates from mammoth remains from the Taimyr Peninsula, New Siberian Islands, Northwest Chukotka and the North Slope of Alaska; designations as in Fig. 2; GS, GI – climatic stadials and interstadials, respectively, determined from data from Greenland ice cores (Rasmussen et al., 2014).

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