Woolly mammoths were still roaming the earth when the Egyptians were actively building the Great Pyramids at Giza.

A closer look

Woolly mammoths were still roaming the earth when the Egyptians were actively building the Great Pyramids at Giza. A small isolated population of these massive hairy elephants managed to survive on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean until roughly 1650 BC. Pop culture insists on separating ice age megafauna from human civilization, putting cavemen with spears in one box and advanced agricultural societies in another. But technically speaking, a highly ambitious pharaoh could have theoretically ordered an expedition to go hunt a prehistoric beast to serve at a royal banquet. The image of a guy in a linen loincloth trying to construct a geometrically perfect desert monument while a giant furry snow elephant wanders around a frozen island completely shatters our neat little historical timelines. History is not a straight line, it is a messy overlap of wildly contradictory events happening simultaneously