An international team of archaeologists led by the University of Exeter (England) has discovered a house made of mammoth bones at the Palaeolithic site of Kostenki, located on the banks of the River Don in Eastern Europe. It is the oldest structure in the region.
An ice age house in Russia
Kostenki 11 is a well-known archaeological site located about 500 kilometers (310 miles) south of Moscow. Here, archaeologists from the University of Exeter found a 9-by-9-meter circular structure built almost entirely from large mammoth bones used to house ancient humans during the last ice age, which began in northern Europe around 75,000 years ago and ended about 18,000 years ago. The climatic reconstructions of the time suggest that the summers in the region were short and cool, while the winters were long and extremely cold, often with temperatures of -20 ° C or even colder.
The structure, which dates back about 25,000 years, is not uncommon in Eastern Europe. About 70 structures or “houses” like this are known to exist in Ukraine and in the eastern plain of central Europe.
What characterizes these “houses of the Ice Age” is a concentrated ring of mammoth bones several meters in diameter, and they are almost always surrounded by a series of large pits, whose interpretation is very varied: perhaps they were used for the storage of food, garbage disposal or simply as a store of bones. This house, specifically, was built with a total of 51 lower jaws and 64 individual mammoth skulls.
These prehistoric homes were made from bones sourced from animal burial grounds to line the walls of the structure and then scattered throughout the interior. But they also found bones of horses, reindeer, wolves, bears, horses or red foxes.
Kostenki 11, also known as Anosovka 2, was discovered by a team of Soviet archaeologists led by AN Rogachev in 1951.
“Kostenki 11 represents a rare example of Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers living in this hostile environment,” said Alexander Pryor, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter, in the journal Antiquity, which reports on the study. And it is that this finding can offer us clues about how humans managed to survive the Pleistocene epoch, a stage in which homo sapiens shared a rapidly changing planet with animals such as saber teeth, mastodons and giant sloths around them.
Within the structure found in Russia were also the remains of charred wood and other soft, non-woody plants, suggesting that humans burned wood and bones for warmth and fodder plants for poisons, medicines, rope and cloth. The additional discovery of more than 50 charred seeds suggests that they were likely cooking plants, meaning they would have learned to find edible plants even in the face of extreme shortages brought on by the harsh winter. Nearby, hundreds of small stones and flint chips were found, which were probably used to hunt and kill animals.
What could have brought the ancient hunter gatherers to this place?
One possibility is that mammoths and humans may have come to this area in droves because it had a natural spring that would have provided unfrozen liquid water throughout the winter, something quite rare in this period of extreme cold.
Referencia: Alexander J.E. Pryor, David G. Beresford-Jones, Alexander E. Dudin, Ekaterina M. Ikonnikova, John F. Hoffecker, Clive Gamble. The chronology and function of a new circular mammoth-bone structure at Kostenki 11. Antiquity, 2020; 1 DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2020.7
