Sunday, 23 February 2025
A message from deep time?
Mammoth Bone Structure of 24,000 Years Ago Illuminates Stone Age
At ZME Science, science journalist Tibi Puiu reports on a circle of mammoth bones and tusks, 40-feet in diameter, rediscovered in 2020, that has remained in place for over 24,000 years.
Built by Stone Age hunters, it may be the remains of a now-vanished building. Puiu notes, “It’s one of the most surreal ancient structures ever built — and it’s just one of over 70 found thus far.”
The Kostenki 11 site, located near the Don River, just 300 kilometers from Moscow, is one of the most significant Upper Paleolithic sites in Europe. It contains several circular structures made from the bones of woolly mammoths, some of which are over 40 feet (12 meters) in diameter.
The site is not alone. These types of structures — more than 70 of which have been found thus far across Ukraine and western Russia — have been the subject of speculation for decades. Were they built from freshly hunted mammoths, or were the bones scavenged from long-dead carcasses? “This massive circular structure is made entirely of mammoth bones and skulls.”
“DNA now offers clues about how Ice Age hunters built it,” February 8, 2025 – Updated on February 10, 2025
The structure was built up over time. Back in 2020, science correspondent Brian Handwerk noted at Smithsonian Magazine:
Fires once burned within the structure and food scraps, including vegetables, remain. Several pits containing mammoth bones lie just outside of the bone circle and may suggest food storage. “You obviously get a lot of meat from a mammoth,” [Alexander] Pryor said, “so the idea that there were food processing and food storage activities going on at the site is something that we want to investigate more.”
To some, though, the grandeur of the structure suggests more than practical significance. “People have also speculated a lot about a likely ritual element to this and it’s really hard to say what that might have been,” Pryor adds. “Ritual 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.”
“A Mysterious 25,000-Year-Old Structure Built of the Bones of 60 Mammoths,” March 16, 2020
The DNA researchers note in their open-access article:
Biomolecular sexing of 30 individuals showed a predominance of females, suggesting the Kostenki mammoths are primarily from herds. We identify seven mitochondrial lineages across 16 samples, and thus the mammoths are not all from the same matriline.
Rey-Iglesia, Alba & Pryor, Alexander & Jager, Deon & Wilson, Tess & Teeter, Mathew & Margaryan, Ashot & Khaskhanov, Ruslan & Le Meillour, Louise & Troché, Gaudry & Welker, Frido & Szpak, Paul & Dudin, Alexandr & Lorenzen, Eline. (2024). Ancient biomolecular analysis of 39 mammoth individuals from Kostenki 11-Ia elucidates Upper Palaeolithic human resource use. Quaternary Environments and Humans. 3. 100049. 10.1016/j.qeh.2024.100049.
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