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
Manis Mastodon Site Manis Mastodon Site The Manis Mastodon site is a archaeological site on the Olympic Peninsula near Sequim, Washington, United States. During the dig, the remains of an American mastodon was recovered which had a 13,800 year old projectile made of the bone from a different mastodon embedded in its rib. The site was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. On August 8, 1977, a farmer named Emanuel Manis was digging his property with a backhoe when he found the tusks of an American mastodon. An archaeological excavation led by Dr. Carl Gustafson of Washington State University