The former is thought to be the ancestor of later forms. The first known members of the genus Mammuthus are the African species Mammuthus subplanifrons from the Pliocene and Mammuthus africanavus from the Pleistocene.

africanavus, one of the earliest known species of mammoth, from North Africa. The following cladogram shows the placement of the genus Mammuthus among other proboscideans, based on hyoid characteristics:

Among many now extinct clades, the mastodon is only a distant relative of the mammoths, and part of the separate Mammutidae family, which diverged 25 million years before the mammoths evolved. The family Elephantidae is known to have existed six million years ago in Africa, and includes the living elephants and the mammoths. The closest relatives of the Proboscidea are the sirenians and the hyraxes. The earliest known proboscideans, the clade that contains the elephants, existed about 55 million years ago around the Tethys Sea area. primigenius), developed about 400,000 years ago in East Asia, with some surviving on Russia's Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean, as well as possibly the Taymyr Peninsula on mainland Siberia, until as recently as roughly 3,700 to 4,000 years ago, still extant during the construction of the Great Pyramid of ancient Egypt. The last species to emerge, the woolly mammoth ( M. Descendant species of these mammoths moved north and continued to propagate into numerous subsequent species, eventually covering most of Eurasia before migrating into North America around 1.5-1.3 million years ago, becoming ancestral to the Columbian mammoth ( M. subplanifrons), appeared around 5 million years ago during the early Pliocene in what is now southern and eastern Africa. The oldest representative of Mammuthus, the South African mammoth ( M. Mammoths are more closely related to living Asian elephants than African elephants. They were members of the family Elephantidae, which also contains the two genera of modern elephants and their ancestors. They lived from the Pliocene epoch (from around 5 million years ago) into the Holocene at about 4,000 years ago, and various species existed in Africa, Europe, Asia, and North America. The various species of mammoth were commonly equipped with long, curved tusks and, in northern species, a covering of long hair. primigenius (formerly Elephas primigenius)Ī mammoth is any species of the extinct elephantid genus Mammuthus, one of the many genera that make up the order of trunked mammals called proboscideans.

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