Mammoth

Neither climate change nor human hunting killed the woolly mammoth. Both did. The mammoth's extinction reveals how stresses that are individually survivable become fatal when they compound—and why K-selected organisms are particularly vulnerable to dual-shock scenarios.

For hundreds of thousands of years, mammoths had survived climate oscillations. Ice ages came and went; the mammoth persisted. Researchers now estimate that suitable habitat shrank by 90% between 42,000 and 6,000 years ago, compressing mammoth populations into Arctic refugia like Wrangel Island in Siberia and Saint Paul Island in the Bering Sea. This was stressful but not immediately fatal—small populations can persist indefinitely if left undisturbed.

Then humans arrived. With spears and coordination, they could take down even the largest adults. Archaeological sites preserve mammoth skeletons with projectile points embedded in their bones. Modeling studies suggest that hunting pressure alone, combined with shrinking habitat, tipped the population dynamics into a death spiral. The last mainland mammoths disappeared around 10,000 years ago; the Wrangel Island population survived until approximately 4,000 years ago—contemporary with the Egyptian pyramids.

The K-selection vulnerability is key. Mammoths took 15-20 years to reach reproductive maturity. Females produced one calf at a time after pregnancies lasting nearly two years. A population that loses adults faster than it can replace them enters a demographic death spiral regardless of remaining habitat quality. The math is unforgiving: if annual deaths exceed annual births, extinction is inevitable—the only question is when.

The business parallel emerges in crisis compound: organizations that survive one stress often fail when two hit simultaneously. A retail chain can survive either a recession (demand shock) or a logistics disruption (supply shock)—but not both at once. Inventory buffers that work for one stress are depleted by the other. WeWork might have survived either the pandemic or the governance crisis, but not both. Silicon Valley Bank might have survived either rising interest rates or a social-media-accelerated bank run, but not both.

K-selected businesses—those with long development cycles, high capital intensity, and slow customer acquisition—face similar vulnerabilities. Aerospace companies take a decade to develop new aircraft. Pharmaceutical companies spend 10-12 years bringing drugs to market. Nuclear plants take 15+ years from approval to operation. These organizations cannot pivot quickly; their reproductive rate, metaphorically, is too slow to recover from population crashes.

The mammoth's 10,000-year extinction was not a single event but a spatially complex phenomenon. Some populations died early; others persisted in refugia. The pattern suggests that collapse is not instantaneous—warning signs precede final failure. For businesses, this means dual-stress scenarios often provide lead time to respond, but only if leaders recognize the compound nature of the threat.

The mammoth survived ice ages and survived hunters—but not both at once. Organizations should stress-test not just individual scenarios but their combinations.