Investigations, has shown that 40,000 years ago the south of Andalucía was as cold as Scandinavia now.

If you think temperatures have been low in Andalucía of late, well an investigation by the CSIC, Superior Council of Scientific Investigations, has shown that 40,000 years ago the south of Andalucía was as cold as Scandinavia now.

Using the remains of woolly mammoths found in Granada, they can study what the climate was like in the south of Spain at the end of Pleistocene, the period that spans the world’s recent period of repeated glaciations.

They have published the study in the magazine ‘Quaternary Science Reviews’ which explains they studied the remains of three woolly mammoths found in peat in 1983. The remains are the most southerly registered in Europe and show they date from a very cold and dry time which affected all of Europe, and even the south of Spain between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago. The animals arrived in Spain from Siberia some 200,000 years ago and died out some 4,000 years ago.

Stable isotopes from the remains of their teeth and bones show that they lived in an area of arid steppe, dozens or even hundreds of kilometres to the west of El Padul where the bodies were found, and then from time to time they moved back to the area of the peat.
Their teeth continue to grow during their life and generate new layers of enamel over the years, and it is that which gives the scientists an idea of how the environment changed over the life of the animal.
The woolly mammoth remains used in the investigation are now on show at the Granada Archaeology Museum, and in the city’s Science Park. Some items are also in the Granada University which collaborated in the study.