The woolly mammoth was about the size of today’s African elephant (Loxodonta africana). The largest males stood about 3.5 metres at the shoulder and weighed over 8 tonnes. Females were somewhat smaller. The woolly mammoth’s closest living relative is the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus).

In what is now Poland, the mammoth’s natural predators were the large sabre-toothed cats of the genus Homotherium, as well as cave lions and cave hyenas, which hunted mainly young animals.

Modern humans (Homo sapiens) encountered woolly mammoths as they spread out of Africa into Eurasia around 50,000 years ago. Mammoths provided people with meat, hides and bones; the bones were used to make tools and to build simple, round dwellings covered with hides. Mammoth tusks were carved into figurines, pendants and other objects, including the ceremonial boomerang found in Obłazowa Cave in southern Poland.

The ancestors of the Indigenous peoples of North America also hunted mammoths. With the environmental changes of the early Holocene, however, and after the disappearance of the mammoths and other megafauna, bison became one of the most important game animals on the vast plains of North America, although people had been hunting them before then.

The woolly mammoth survived the climatic changes at the end of the Pleistocene, but its populations shrank rapidly and retreated northwards. The last woolly mammoths lived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean until about 4,000 years ago. By then, writing had already been in use in Mesopotamia and Egypt for more than a thousand years.