Brian McDonald
Andreas Pernerstorfer was renovating his cellar in Gobelsburg, Austria, when he made a surprising discovery. It wasn’t a vintage wine – it was the giant bones of an extinct mammoth that date back 30,000 to 40,000 years.
He reported the bones to the Austrian Archaeological Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, which began excavating the Stone Age bones.
O researchers I realized that other artifacts, such as jewelry and fossils, had been discovered 150 years earlier in the cellar next door. Bones of this significance had not been found for more than 100 years, according to researchers.
© OeAW-OeAl/Th. Einwögerer
“Such a dense bone layer in mammoths is rare,” says Hannah Parow-Souchon, who is leading the excavation. “This is the first time we have been able to investigate something like this in Austria using modern methods.”
They found a layer of bones from three different mammoths, one on top of the other, a discovery that raises many questions about how Stone Age humans hunted mammoths. Researchers say the mammoths may have been trapped there by humans.
“We know that humans hunted mammoths, but we still know very little about how they did it,” said researcher Parow-Souchon.
© Yannik Merkl
After researchers examine the bones, they will be handed over to the Natural History Museum in Vienna.
Mammoths lived in Africa about 3 or 4 million years ago and their descendants moved to Europe and Asia, according to University of California Museum of Paleontology. Mammoth species on these continents lived from 200,000 to 135,000 years ago and after another Ice Age, woolly mammoths traveled to North America, crossing the Bering Strait between what is now Russia and Alaska, when the level the sea was low. These mammoths lived inland, as far as what is now Kansas.
© OeAW-OeAl/H. Parow-Souchon
According to Penn State University’s Mammoth Genome Project, during the Pleistocene epoch – 1.8 million to 10,000 years ago – humans hunted mammoths for their meat and building materials.
Researchers estimate that there were several million mammoths during the early to mid-Pleistocene epoch, but in the later years of this era, hunting may have affected the mammoth population.
