Hunting
Early humans hunted woolly mammoths for a number of reasons. Their meat, pelts, and bones were very valuable to early human civilizations. Around 10,000 years ago, mammoths were most likely plentiful, so human hunting probably did not have an impact on the population size, and if it did it was a very small percentage. This could have been true since one fully grown woolly mammoth potentially had enough meat to feed 400 people for several weeks. Also, early humans learned that they could preserve meat in the natural forms of refrigeration that was available to them, such as snow and ice. This meant that the tribes didn’t have to hunt as often, letting less food go to waste and more mammoths walk the plains.
Art
Mammoths appear to have had a strong cultural relationship with humans, being depicted in cave paintings and handcrafted art. It is partly because of these cave paintings that scientists know more about the woolly mammoth than any other prehistoric animal. The Rouffignac cave in France has 158 depictions of mammoths, making up about 70% of the represented animals that date back to the Upper Paleolithic period. Also shown in cave paintings, the woolly mammoth was not the only “woolly” type of animal at the time. Like the woolly mammoth, the woolly rhino adapted to the cold with a furry coat, as was depicted by early humans in cave paintings, and became extinct around the same time as the woolly mammoth. A set of intact woolly mammoth figurines made of ivory were found in the Swabian Jura, a plateau in the state of Baden-Württemberg, Germany. The figure is believed to have been made by modern humans some 35,000 years ago, making them one of the earliest examples of figurative art in Europe.
Housing
Woolly mammoth bones were used as materials for housing for both modern humans and Neanderthals. More than 70 housing units have been found and explored, though most are in the Russian Plains, and the size of the shelters ranged from 86 square feet to 258 square feet (8-24 square meters). As for the bones that were used to build the shelters, it is possible that they came from mammoths that were killed by humans, however, based on the different states that the bones are in, and that the ages of the bones vary by thousands of years, scientists believe that most of the materials used to build the shelters were collected from already dead animals.