A Mysterious Ice Age Structure Made From the Bones of 60 Wooly Mammoths Has Been Unearthed in Russia

A 25,000-year-old Ice Age
structure made from the bones of 60 wooly mammoths has been
unearthed in Russia. 

A team of scientists have been
working to excavate the 40-foot-wide circular arrangement of bones
at a paleolithic site located some 300 miles south of Moscow since
2014. The structure contains several walls, fire pits, and areas
for butchering, according to the findings shared
in the journal Antiquity this week.

“The sheer number of bones that
our Paleolithic ancestors had sourced from somewhere and brought to
this particular location to build this monument is really quite
staggering,” Alexander Pryor, an archaeologist at the University of
Exeter who co-authored the report, told the New York
Times. “It does
boggle my mind.” 

As many as 70 similarly shaped
mammoth structures have been discovered throughout Europe,
including two uncovered at the site, Kostenki, in the 1950s and
‘60s. The oldest of these sites date back 22,000 years—3,000 years
earlier than the one recently found in Kostenki. They’re also
significantly smaller, with most measuring less than 10 feet wide.
Researchers believe they were used as modest protective dwellings
during the frigid conditions of the ice age. 

Researchers are still struggling
to understand why the structure, the oldest and largest of its
kind, was made and what it was used for. “Clearly a lot of time and effort went into
building this structure so it was obviously important to the people
that made it for some reason,” Pryor told Smithsonian
Magazine.

Some have suggested it was a
site of ritual, but Pryor isn’t so sure. “Ritual,” he says, “is embedded in human lives
in all sorts of ways. The fact they might have designed a structure
of this type as part of both their ritual and their sustenance
activities is very reasonable.”

There is some evidence pointing
scientists in the right direction, though. Animal
remains, which have consistently
been found alongside other mammoth constructions, were not found in the
Kostenki bone circle, suggesting it might not have been a place
where people stored food or stayed for a lengthy period of
time. 

Excavators did, however, find
vegetable tissue and charcoal from burnt wood—clues that tell us
there was plant life nearby, even during the ice
age. 

Still, the biggest question
remains: Where did all these mammoths come from? No place else in
the world have so many skeletons from the extinct animal been found
in one place. Scientists aren’t sure if the mammoths were killed or
found dead, nor do they know how the bodies—which are roughly the
same size of elephants—were transported.

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of 60 Wooly Mammoths Has Been Unearthed in Russia appeared
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