In 1949, while carrying out household work on his plot, a local resident of the village of Kostenki, Ivan Ivanovich Protopopov, inadvertently contributed to a colossal discovery. Digging a cellar for his needs, he found massive bones. It seemed an astonishing find! But the villagers, who knew that their small homeland had for many centuries been famed for such bones, were more concerned with something else — the potential start of excavations on their plots. For many Kostenki residents it would have been preferable to conceal the find of giant bones, but Ivan Ivanovich was not such a man.
Perplexed, he turned to the eminent scientist Alexander Nikolaevich Rogachev for help. In 1951 the archaeologist examined the find and discovered in the cellar not simply bones, but an ancient construction built from them. In 1960 scholars completely cleared the structure, except for a small fragment under Protopopov's house. Later the find was carefully preserved and conserved under the vaults of the museum.
The layer with the ancient remains of the bone-and-earth dwelling was assigned the designation I 'a'.
The bone-and-earth dwelling (or bone-and-earth construction) originally consisted of large mammoth bones, earth, wooden poles, and animal skins. About 600 mammoth bones belonging to 40 individuals were used in its construction. Modern reconstruction shows that the dwelling had a circular bone-and-earth wall 9 meters in diameter, which served as a support for wooden poles that met at the top and formed a domed roof covered with reindeer hides. During the excavations five pits were also discovered, about 2 meters in diameter and 70 centimeters deep. Given that the period when this dwelling was inhabited by people coincided with the peak of glaciation of the Ice Age, a popular theory is that these pits were used as storage pits for food — the low temperatures for most of the year would have preserved meat.
It was the discovery of this bone-and-earth construction that became the defining factor in the creation of the Museum of Paleolithic History in Kostenki, at the initiative of the researcher of this cultural layer, Rogachev.
How many museum exhibits can boast that they were discovered before the museum in which they are displayed was built?
The bone-and-earth dwelling on layer I 'a' certainly can!
