Right up until 15,000 years ago our planet was inhabited by millions of mammoths. Their ancestors headed north from the savannas of Africa in a much earlier epoch and spread out over large portions of the globe. This migratory movement began in a warmer climatic phase, so when the Ice Age began the creatures were forced to perform one of the greatest feats of adaptation in the history of the earth. In this film Dick Mol, the world-famous expert on mammoths, traces the original mammoths back to Namibia, trawls the bottom of the North Sea for mammoth fossils and, with the help of gold-diggers in northern Canada, digs up perfectly preserved mammoth bones from the permafrost. Supported by a whole range of other experts, he traces the lives of these extraordinary animals and reconstructs the reasons why they finally became extinct 3700 years ago.