Our results suggest that it is climate change, through the effect it had on the vegetation, which caused the reduction of the population and the ultimate extinction of mammoths and other large herbivores," he said. Professor Huntley and his colleagues created a computer simulation of vegetation in Europe, Asia and North America over the past 42,000 years.
To do this, they combined estimates of how the climate was in this period with models of how different vegetations grew in different conditions.
And they found that cold and dry conditions during the ice age, with low concentrations of carbon dioxide, did not favor the growth of trees.
So instead of forests there were immense areas of grass, which were ideal for large herbivores, such as woolly mammoths.
As a result of a more temperate and humid climate, and the increase of carbon dioxide at the end of the ice age, trees emerged at the expense of large areas of pasture.
"At the height of the ice age, mammoths and other large herbivores would have had more food to feed on," Huntley explained.
"But as we move into the post-glacial era, the trees displaced the herbaceous ecosystems and significantly reduced the pasture area," he concluded.
John Montagu fue un aristócrata británico que ocupó cargos de cierta relevancia en la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII. No obstante, dicho personaje no ha pasado a la historia por su carrera política o militar, sino por ser el inventor del sándwich.
Todavía se debate si esto es cierto, pero el autor Pierre-Jean Grosley popularizó en su libro Tour to London un anécdota que muchos dan por verdadera. Al parecer John Montagu era un empedernido jugador de cartas y le resultaba molesto tener que interrumpir sus partidas para comer. Es por ello que comenzó a ordenar a sus sirvientes que le sirvieran la comida, generalmente carne, entre dos rebanadas de pan. Con ello el aristócrata podía continuar jugando sin hacer pausas que le resultaban molestas, un hábito que se extendió primero entre sus compañeros de partida y conocidos y acabó por generalizarse en todo el país británico.