This list of "mind-blowing" historical facts has been shared by quite a few of my friends on Facebook during the last few days. I was expecting to cringe like never before, but it seemed mostly decent. Some of the comparisons were a bit dumb, but nothing that immediately made my alarm bells ring.
The one thing that really did catch my eye was the one about isolated populations of wooly mammoths surviving for far longer than is commonly understood and only finally dying out a touch under 4000 years ago. I have vague recollections of reading this claim previously, followed by an immediate correction along the lines of "oups, that was actually an urban legend lol". I was about to smugly let all of my friends know about this, but a quick googling and the Wikipedia page for mammoths seemed to support it.
Can anyone tell me for certain if this claim is actually true, or just a widely reported piece of misinformation?
I believe you are referring to the dwarf mammoths of Wrangel Island in the Siberian Arctic. They are believed to have persisted until 7,000 to 4,000 ya. Terrestrial mammoths were pretty much gone by 9,500 ya. Mammoth populations that were trapped on islands due to rising sea levels often adapted by growing smaller which may have enhanced their capability to persist well into the Holocene. See this article.