We live in a tiny age.

Think about it. Once upon a time, 65 million years ago, there were living things wandering across the surface of the earth that were as tall as a skyscraper. There used to be King Kong-esque apes, gigantic bugs, gigantic llamas, basically just giant [insert animals here]. Even human beings are not immune to this: it is said that with the adoption of agriculture, our average height dropped by a staggering four inches. How the mighty have fallen.

Indeed, it’s been this way for a while now, seemingly. Arguably, since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago, when the massive ice caps gave way to the comparatively pathetic (and constantly melting) ones that now take up space on our planets poles. It was around this time that humanity discovered agriculture, making itself shorter, and giving it the ability to kill almost all of the world’s remaining megafauna, leaving us with the paltry assortment we have now.

Perhaps the greatest victim of this phenomenon was the mighty mammoth. Sure, they’re not great megafauna. They’re basically just hairy elephants, but A) elephants are pretty cool, and B) they’re very big, which seems to be important to this adjunct Freudian philosophy I seem to be constructing in the prior paragraphs.

But alas, the austere hairy elephants were not long for this world. After millenia of wandering the steppe, stately and proud, they were wiped out by man, mighty hunter.

Except one place.

As mankind spread further and further out into the world, the ammmoths were driven to more and more marginal corners of the world, until they finally ended up in farthest Siberia. And when that didn’t work, they walked over the dry seabed to go to a place at the end of the world: Wrangel Island.

Wrangel Island is a tiny, rocky, miserable hunk of ice sitting just north of the Russian coast that, despite the name, is not inhabited by a race of Inuit Marlboro Men who spend their days wrangling wild mammoths. Instead, it’s filled with nothing but the ruins of horrific mines, gulags and air bases, with a couple of reindeer munching on whatever meager grasses have managed to sprout up.

Seems like an inauspicious last stand for one of the earth’s largest creatures. And yet here, the last of the mammoths set up shop. They lasted until around 2100 BC, when human hunters crossed over the ice and massacred them. At that point, they were dwarves, and more inbred then a “Deliverance” extra.

2100 BC. Just to put that in perspective, 2100 BC isn’t that long ago. Agriculture is over 6,000 years old at this point, and settled societies are 2,000 years old. People were writing crap down at this point, telling stories that people still read today in the form of the epic of Gilgamesh.

400 years before, the Great pyramids had been built. And they would be the biggest thing in the world until the 19th century.

While all this was going on, the noble mammoth still wandered the earth.