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***There have been infrequent references to people in the early 1900’s having mammoth sightings in various places, ***

I have an old book,THE DEFEAT OF JOHN HAWKINS by Rayner Unwin in which survivors of a Spanish raid on their ships are dropped off near what is today Tampico Mexico.

ONE YEAR later one of the men, David Ingram, is picked up by a French ship, the GARGARINE off the coast of what is today NOVA SCOTIA.. He told of his journey overland in which he described elephants in the interior. He told his story to a committee chaired by Sir Francis Waslingham in 1582.

How did he get from Mexico to Nova Scotia in one year overland through completely unexplored country has never been explained.

Another interesting thing is some American explorers often found mammoth bones above ground and one group even propped some of the ribs up and made a temporary shelter out of them. How did such bones survive thousands of years above ground?

Even in modern times, some places are what most would consider “remote”.

Not geographically remote, remote as far as human habitation.

I spent some time in Western Ontario. Flat, flat, flat. Pothole lakes everywhere.

Skeeters by the billions. I never checked whether there have been verified deaths due to mosquito attacks on people, but an unprotected human there would be in dire jeopardy. Seriously!

But a mammoth? Probably wouldn’t bother him near as much. And because of it’s “remoteness” to human populations, seems to me it would be a simple thing for populations of some kinds of animals to survive and even thrive.

Anybody who says man wiped them out has a way, way, way too inflated view of the hunting and fighting capabilities of stone age man.

Stone age man killed some of them. But they DID NOT track down the remaining populations to cause them to go extinct.

By 1582 I'd say he rode a horse.

From the beginning of Spanish exploration of Mexico and North America they'd been losing horses left and right ~ by this time the Indians at Cahokia were already riding off toward the great herds of buffalo on the West bank of the Mississippi ~ and becoming the Sioux and Cheyenne we think of today.

North America was made for the horse. They prospered beyond all belief.

So, how did the bones survive? Well, the same way gigantic bear bones from the Ice Age survived all across the Midwest. Remember, the Ice Age in that region was typified as "subarctic desert". It was very dusty. There were vast silt storms. It piles up in hillocks of Wind Blow Loess and any bones lying about would be covered up.

The bones are safe until they uncovered, and that could happen thousands of years later during a pluvial. The boundary between the arid and wet zones in the Midwest runs pretty much along the 100 degree meridian these days. We know from other studies that it was sometimes 10 degrees further West and at other 10 degrees further East, and there were extensive salients here and there all across the continent.

This could happen repeatedly and you'd end up with bones from 250,000 years ago ending up with bones from 100,000 years back, and 10,000 years back, and 2 years back. These hills tend to form, on average, in the same spots in every interstadial ~ rivers, though, change differently even though the drainage basins that give rise to them might not change appreciably.