Alice Roberts: Rudolph and our early ancestors – a love story

Reindeer have been revered and hunted by man for tens of thousands of years. They are a living, breathing connection to a lost world

... The end of the ice age saw a massive global extinction: many large mammals fell prey to changing climate and the effect of some rather formidable hunters sharing their landscape. There was a decline in the genetic diversity of reindeer after the peak of the last ice age 20,000 years ago – probably due to a warming climate as well as those palaeolithic hunters – but reindeer survived, and thankfully they don't look likely to become extinct any time soon. [...] guardian.co.uk  / Via john hawks


Swimming reindeer

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