Human populations in East Asia about 30,000 years ago developed at dramatically different rates, following a pattern that appears to reflect the availability of mammoths and other large game.

In the part of the region covering what is now northern China, Mongolia and southern Siberia, vast plains teemed with large, now extinct mammals such as mammoths, mastodons and woolly rhinoceroses and the number of early human beings grew appreciably between 34,000 and 20,000 years ago.

Further south, where the terrain was covered in thick forest, the population expansion began much later — between 18,000 and 12,000 years ago.

Chris Tyler-Smith, of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, Cambridgeshire, who led the research, said: “We asked ourselves what differentiated these two groups — what was different about the environment in the north? The most appealing explanation is the vast abundance of the “Mammoth Steppe” — a time and a region when large numbers of grazing animals and their predators roamed the grassy plains.

“At that time, the southern regions of East Asia were probably densely forested and impenetrable to humans. The only robust explanation for the early success of the northern populations is that they enjoyed a better and richer diet: they thrived on mammoths and other large animals.”

A diet rich in mammoth meat would have improved overall nutrition, giving people a ready source of protein and fat that would have been invaluable during the last Ice Age, Dr Tyler-Smith said. “The mammoths’ value would not just have been for food: they would also have provided materials such as skins and bones for use in clothing, shelter and tool-making. This would have been very important in survival.”

In the study, details of which are published in the journal Genetics, Dr Tyler-Smith’s team used DNA sequences from 27 groups in modern China, Mongolia, South Korea and Japan to trace the history of how populations grew tens of thousands of years ago.

As populations expand in number, their genomes become more diverse: a young population will be more genetically uniform than one that has been established for much longer. By measuring the frequency of genetic variation, researchers can reconstruct how and when major expansions took place.

The Y chromosomes of groups originating from northern East Asia were much more diverse than those found further south, indicating that human numbers increased in the north at a much earlier date.

There is little direct evidence to connect mammoth-hunting to this trend, but Dr Tyler-Smith said that greater access to large game species was the explanation that made most sense.

Bones bearing cut marks from stone tools indicate that early humans ate mammoth meat elsewhere in Asia and Europe. These were found at a site dating to 50,000 years ago that was discovered near Thetford, Norfolk, in 2002.

The extinction of mammoths and many other large mammals has also been persuasively linked to the arrival of humans on different continents: the decline of the creatures in North America, for example, correlates closely with the date at which a human presence there has been confirmed.

Scientists think it likely that Stone Age man hunted mammoths by ambushing them and attacking them with spears at close range. As the vast animals had no other natural predators they would have been easy prey. It is also possible that hunters drove them into traps or off cliffs.

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