Mammoth construction of the Great Pyramid of ancient Egypt. The earliest known proboscideans, the clade that contains the elephants, existed about 55 million years ago around the Tethys Sea area. The closest relatives of the Proboscidea are the sirenians and the hyraxes. The family Elephantidae is known to have existed six million years ago in Africa, and includes the living elephants and the mammoths. Among many now extinct clades, the mastodon is only a distant relative of the mammoths, and part of the separate Mammutidae family, which diverged 25 million years before the mammoths evolved. The following cladogram shows the placement
Boaz mastodon and Anderson Mills mastodon the Anderson Mills mastodon dated to 12,910 ± 150 calendar years BP. Meanwhile, the Boaz mastodon is one of the most recent ever found, and dated to 12,220 ± 190 calendar years BP. Boaz mastodon and Anderson Mills mastodon The Boaz mastodon is the skeleton of a mastodon found near Boaz, Wisconsin, USA, in 1897. A fluted quartzite spear point found near the Boaz mastodon suggests that humans hunted mastodons in southwestern Wisconsin. Although the mastodon on display at the Geology Museum has long been known as "the Boaz Mastodon", it was recently discovered that two bones from the Boaz