They certainly could have migrated.
Caribou do so today, over distances that would be comparable, and they also deal with permafrost, taiga and tundra.
Elephants are known to travel such distances also. And they are not a bit slow-moving in fact. I don’t see why mammoths have to be assumed to move slowly.
They could also, like other still existent arctic animals, have dealt with ice ages by simply displacing their range southwards. That sort of thing is well documented in the fossil record. Since it is also well documented that the earth has been through numerous ice age cycles, obviously the mammoths survived several of these.
I think the best explanation for why they disappeared is that people showed up, and the Mammoths proved to be easy prey.
By that logic why aren’t African and Indian elephants extinct too? Wouldn’t they also be easy prey?
I absolutely agree.
It was man.
What these scientists are not thinking about is that over the past several million years, ice ages have come and gone. The wooly mammoth survived all of them save one.
The one when man gained mastery over the planet.
So, despite food sources changing from one glaciation to another, oscillating every 30,000 to 75,000 years, the mammoth learned to go to the food, or adapt to new foods, and in fact, proboscisian species proliferated. Until Mankind became truly human during this LAST (so far; algore, you listening?) glacial maximum.
I really think they want to remove mankind due to political correctness, as they can’t blame the excesses of primitive peoples on Western Male Christian Conservatives...