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Scientists behind a new genomic study now say the last woolly mammoths on Earth were wiped out in a violent storm or plague — meaning that if extinction didn’t occur, they could still be around today.

These giant Ice Age beasts crossed the then tundras of North America, Europe and Asia as early as 300,000 years ago. They later became extinct about 4,000 years ago on an isolated island off the coast of Siberia in the Arctic Ocean.

The latest analysis shows that several hundred woolly mammoths were confined to the tiny island of Wrangel for about 6,000 years, but scientists say they did not die due to inbreeding, The Guardian reported.

A long-held theory was that woolly mammoths eventually accumulated enough harmful genetic mutations to cause a “genomic crash.”

“We can now confidently reject the idea that the population was simply too small and that it was doomed to extinction for genetic reasons,” said evolutionary geneticist Lav Dahlen of the Center for Paleogenetics, a collaboration between Stockholm University and the Swedish Museum of Natural History.

“That means it’s probably just some random event that killed them, and if that random event hadn’t happened, then we’d still have mammoths today,” he continued.

Dahlen and his colleagues analyzed the genomes of 21 mammoth specimens found on Wrangel Island and the Siberian mainland, based on 50,000 years of existence.

They found that the prehistoric creatures went through a “severe hardship” after being trapped on Wrangel Island by rising sea levels as the earth warmed.

At one point during the Holocene period (11,500 years ago to the present), the total population was eight or less.

“These findings suggest that Wrangel Island may have been founded by a herd of woolly mammoths,” according to the study.

The authors of the study said that normally you would expect a species to undergo “accelerated genomic decline”, but this did not happen.

“The population recovered quickly after the predicament and subsequently remained stable. More precisely, we even find evidence that the recovered population was large enough or possibly changed its behavior to avoid inbreeding with close relatives… during the 6,000 years of isolation on the island,” the study said.

So if they were able to avoid incest in the end, what killed them?

It’s unclear and will probably never be known with exact specificity, but Dahlen believes something like bird flu may have doomed the species.

“Perhaps mammoths would be vulnerable to this given the reduced diversity we identified in immune system genes.” Alternatively, something like a tundra fire, a layer of volcanic ash, or a really bad weather season could have caused a really bad year for Wrangel’s plants to grow.

“Given how small the population was, it would have been vulnerable to such random events,” Dahlen said, adding: “It seems to me that maybe the mammoths just got lucky.”

The paper’s lead author, Marian Dehask of Uppsala University, told the Guardian that this new story of how mammoths died out is a lesson for today’s world, as biodiversity declines more and more each year.

The World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report 2022 found that wildlife populations have declined by an average of 69 percent over the past 50 years.

“Mammoths are an excellent system for understanding the ongoing biodiversity crisis and what happens genetically when a species goes through a population bottleneck, because they mirror the fate of many modern populations,” DeHask said.