The elephant has some distant relatives called mammoths, which lived in the Stone Age. More than 15,000 years ago people painted pictures of them on cave walls. Then, astonishingly, in 1799, a man walking along the banks of the River Lena in Siberia -didhadmadetook a startling discovery. Peering into a wall of ice, he could -justquiteratherwell see the shape of a massive,hairy mammoth, apparently -looking afterlooking outwatching outwatching over at him.He immediately ran -acrossawayoutpast in terror,but several days later he -experiencedfeltfoundgrew the courage to return and cut the mammoth’s tusks – its two enormous teeth – out of the ice to sell them.Mammoth tusks are the biggest teeth of any known creature, some -completingexpandingincreasingreaching a length of five metres.These tusks were -heldkeptputset to good use, protecting the mammoths' young from other animals, and brushing away snow.

To most of us, mammoths are probably the most -familiarfrequentregularusual of the elephant’s extinct relatives, but thousands of years earlier, in the woodlands of eastern North America, lived another of the elephant’s re­latives called the mastodon.Like mammoths, mastodons may also have had a hairy coat, but -asevenwhenwhile mammoths mainly ate grass on the plains,mastodons -desiredenjoyedpreferredselected to eat twigs and leaves.

We do not know why mastodons -becamecameturnedwent extinct.However, computer studies of the decrease in mammoth -amountsnumbersquantitiestotals suggestthat it was a particular -additionattachmentcombinationconnection of over-hunting by humans,and -adjustmentsdiversionschangestransformations in the climate at that timewhich -causedguidedinfluencedled to their disappearance.