Noted: Each meter of cored sediment reaches further back in time. As team member Jack Williams of the University of Wisconsin-Madison guides the sixth segment into a tube, he notices the mud changes from a warm brown with a pudding-like texture to a blacker, firmer consistency. The team estimates it corresponds to deposits from roughly 6,000 to 8,000 years ago, spanning the period when Graham’s mammoth died in the cave. That means this segment could include the period of extinction, if mammoth DNA is present in its lower, older layers but absent from the top. “There’s mammoth in there,” Williams predicts.
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