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"Tembo, Mother of Elephants" by Randy McDonald, on Flickr

My only problem with Derrick Stephan Hudson's 2002 statue "Tembo, Mother of Elephants", standing in the middle of CIBC's Commerce Court complex in downtown Toronto, is that its unique presence reminds me that there is not one species in the whole order Proboscidea left in Canada. The woolly mammoth disappeared a bit more than ten thousand years ago from the country, as part of a global extinction event. The human hunting following by the rapid transformation of the woolly mammoth's Ice Age environment was too much.

What would it take for the woolly mammoth to survive, anywhere? Was it too narrowly concentrated in a fragile environment to take the shock of contact with humans? Is it imaginable that it might have become more of a generalist, perhaps ranging more towards the prairies of North America (or Siberia) on the model of some of its African kin?
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