The oldest mammoth representative, Mammuthus subplanifrons, appeared around 6 million years ago during the late Miocene in what is now southern and Eastern Africa.

In the mythology of the Evenk people, mammoths were responsible for the creation of the world, digging up the land from the ocean floor with their tusks.

[5] The word mammoth was first used in Europe during the early 17th century, when referring to maimanto tusks discovered in Siberia,[6] as recorded in the 1618 edition of the Dictionariolum Russico-Anglicum.

[8] In the American colonies around 1725, enslaved Africans digging in the vicinity of the Stono River in South Carolina unearthed molar teeth recognised in modern times to belong to Columbian mammoths, with the remains subsequently examined by the British naturalist Mark Catesby, who visited the site, and later published an account of his visit in 1843.

While the slave owners were puzzled by the objects and suggested that they originated from the great flood described in the Bible, Catesby noted that the slaves unanimously agreed that the objects were the teeth of elephants similar to those from their African homeland, to which Catesby concurred, marking the first technical identification of any fossil animal in North America.

[9][10] In 1796, French biologist Georges Cuvier was the first to identify woolly mammoth remains not as modern elephants transported to the Arctic, but as an entirely new species.

[3] By the Late Pliocene, mammoths had become confined to the northern portions of the African continent with remains from this time assigned to Mammuthus africanavus.

Around 1.5–1.3 million years ago, M. trogontherii crossed the Bering Land Bridge into North America, becoming ancestral to Mammuthus columbi (the Columbian mammoth).

The largest known species like Mammuthus meridionalis and Mammuthus trogontherii (the steppe mammoth) were considerably larger than modern elephants, with mature adult males having an average height of approximately 3.8–4.2 m (12.5–13.8 ft) at the shoulder and weights of 9.6–12.7 tonnes (21,000–28,000 lb), while exceptionally large males may have reached 4.5 m (14.8 ft) at the shoulder and 14.3 tonnes (31,526.1 lb) in weight.

[37]While early mammoth species like M. meridionalis were probably relatively hairless, similar to modern elephants,[39] M. primigenius and likely M. trogontherii had a substantial coat of fur, among other physiological adaptations for living in cold environments.

[40] Scientists discovered and studied the remains of a mammoth calf, and found that fat greatly influenced its form, and enabled it to store large amounts of nutrients necessary for survival in temperatures as low as −50 °C (−58 °F).

[42] Woolly mammoths evolved a suite of adaptations for arctic life, including morphological traits such as small ears and tails to minimize heat loss, a thick layer of subcutaneous fat, and numerous sebaceous glands for insulation, as well as a large brown-fat hump like deposit behind the neck that may have functioned as a heat source and fat reservoir during winter.

[43] Based on studies of their close relatives, the modern elephants and mammoths probably had a gestation period of 22 months, resulting in a single calf being born.

[47] In living proboscideans, broken tusks sometimes occur during, for example, fights between males or when elephants of both sexes shove each other to reach critical resources such as water.

[53] Following the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, the range of the woolly mammoth began to contract, disappearing from most of Europe by 14,000 years ago.

This contraction is suggested to have been caused by the warming induced expansion of unfavourable wet tundra and forest environments at the expense of the preferred dry open mammoth steppe, with the possible additional pressure of human hunting.

[52] The timing of the extinction of the dwarf Sardinian mammoth Mammuthus lamarmorai is difficult to constrain precisely, though the youngest specimen likely dates to sometime around 57–29,000 years ago.

[59] The youngest records of the pygmy mammoth (Mammuthus exillis) date to around 13,000 years ago, coinciding with the reducing of the area of the Californian Channel Islands as a result of rising sea level, the earliest known humans in the Channel Islands, and climatic change resulting in the decline of the previously dominant conifer forest ecosystems and expansion of scrub and grassland.