挖掘过去43

The scientific value of this is that we can reconstruct what the animal was eating, and so then we go to look at what the habitat was doing through time, and of course if this animal's preferred food, in this case grass, started to disappear, then we've got a potential reason for why its range shrank and it eventually went extinct. So the climate changed and basically the mammoth's world changed? Yeah, precisely, yeah. It couldn't adapt fast enough to that change? That's right. That's right. I mean It had evolved over millions of years to become this very specialised creature for living in the cold environment, feeding on grass. Then the climate warmed dramatically at the end of the last ice age, quite naturally, of course, unlike the present day warming, and that caused the forests to spread right over that grassland habitat and so the mammoth's habitat disappeared and its own range shrank and eventually went extinct. And of course, this is relevant to today's situation because we've got further climate warming happening now caused by human influence, which goes way beyond the natural changes, and so we can, you know, have an example here of what happens. Species actually die out, their habitats disappear, they go extinct. That's very germane to what's happening to many species today.

它的科学价值在于我们能重现猛犸象当时的食物。然后我们查阅了它们栖息地的大事年表，发现如果猛犸象偏爱的食物。比如说草 开始消失。那么我们就能大致推断出猛犸活动范围变小，最终灭绝的原因。 所以说，气候变化使猛犸象的生活环境变化了。 没错 -它来不及适应吗 -没错，经过上百万年的进化，它渐渐只能生活在寒冷中，只能以草为食而最后一个冰期的后期，气温显著提升，这很自然，和现在的全球变暖不同。变暖导致森林蔓延，刚好覆盖了猛犸生活的草原，于是猛犸象的栖息地就消失了。它的活动范围变小，最终走向了灭绝。这也值得当代人参考，由于现代人类活动的影响，气候变暖更为严重。这些远非自然变化，而这就是我们的前车之鉴，物种灭绝了，它们没有了栖息地，就走向了灭绝。这和现在很多物种的经历相似。