How was the Siberian unicorn who inhabited the earth with humans?

A new investigation has highlighted the origin and extinction of a giant rhinoceros and hairy of the Ice Age known as the Siberian unicorn.

An international team of researchers from Adelaide, Sydney, London, Netherlands and Russia, solved a long debate about the relationship between the Siberian unicorn and live rhinos and revealed that it had survived much later than expected, to the point of overlapping time with modern humans.

Posted in the magazine Nature Ecology and Evolution and led by the museum of natural history from London, researchers say the Siberian unicorn has gone extinct 36,000 years. This was most likely due to the reduction of the steppe grasslands where he lived, due to climate change rather than human impact.

Today, there are only five surviving rhino species, although in the past there have been 250 species.

The Siberian unicorn (with a huge horn and weighing up to 3.5 tons)Elasmotherium sibiricum), which crossed the steppes of Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and northern China, was without a doubt one of the most impressive.

However, the genetic analyzes carried out in the Australian Center for the ancient DNA (ACAD) of University of Adelaide showed that the Siberian unicorn was the last surviving member of a single family of rhinoceros.

"The ancestors of the Siberian unicorn have separated from the ancestors of all living rhinos more than 40 million years ago," says the co-author and researcher of ACAD, the Dr. Kieren Mitchell, who analyzed the DNA of the Siberian unicorn. This is the first time that DNA is recovered from E. sibiricum.

"This makes the Siberian unicorn and African white rhinoceros cousins ​​farther apart than the humans of the monkeys."

This new genetic evidence cancels previous studies suggesting that the Siberian unicorn was a close relative of woolly rhinos and live rhinos. Sumatra.

For a long time, it was assumed that the Siberian unicorn had extinguished well before the last Ice Age, maybe even up to 200,000 years.

In this study, 23 specimens of Siberian unicorn bones were dated, confirming that the species survived until at least 39,000 yearsand maybe 35,000 years ago. The last days of the Siberian unicorn were shared with the first Modern humans and Neanderthals.

"It is unlikely that human presence is a cause of extinction," says co-author, Professor Chris Turney, a climate scientist at the University of California. University of New South Wales.

"The Siberian unicorn seems to have been severely affected by the beginning of the ice age in Eurasia when a steep drop in temperature caused an increase in the amount of frozen soil, reducing hard and dry grasses and impacting populations in a large area, "he explained.

Other species sharing the environment of the Siberian unicorn were less dependent on the grass, such as the woolly rhinoceros, or more flexible in their diet, such as saiga antelope, and escaped the fate of the Siberian unicorn, although the woolly rhinoceros is gone 20,000 years later.