If you stepped outside 20,000 years ago you would need your thermals and coat, even in the summer. It was a time when humans lived along side a now extinct group of elephants called mammoths.

 

This upper right milk molar, which is 12cm from crown to root, belonged to a young woolly mammoth about 5 to 6 years old who roamed the earth in the Devensian period - a British-Irish Ice Sheet which covered approximately two thirds of Britain and Ireland around 27,000 years ago.

 

We humans have two sets of teeth, our baby teeth and our adult teeth, but mammoths had six sets of teeth! When we lose our baby teeth, our adult teeth replace in the same spot. This is not true for mammoths. Once a mammoth tooth is worn down from too much grinding, a new tooth grows behind it. The new tooth slowly moves forward and pushes the old one out. This leaves a fresh set of ridges for grinding food.

 

Mammoths were herbivores — they were grazers. They ate grass and  foraged on small nutritious flowering plants using their tusks to dig under snow.