How did ancient people obtain mammoth bone for building the structure at the Kostenki 11 site?
At the end of last year, an interesting (and, dare we say, controversial) article based on excavations at Kostenki was published in the prestigious journal Quaternary Environments and Humans by a large international team of researchers. The work is devoted to the famous third bone-and-earth complex of the Kostenki 11 site, which is currently being prepared for museum display. The ancient structure was built by people during the Last Glacial Period from 3,000 mammoth bones belonging to approximately 65 individual mammoths.
Overview of the third complex of the Kostenki 11 site (material from the original article)
A team of biologists, archaeologists and paleogenetics specialists from Denmark, the United Kingdom, Canada and Russia raised the question of how ancient people obtained mammoth bones to build this structure. To answer this, the lower jaws of mammoths uncovered during the 2015 excavations were analyzed (excavation leader — I.V. Fedyunin).
Dating identified two mammoth lower jaws that turned out to be older than the others by approximately 200–1200 years. This suggests that skeletal material from long-deceased individuals was collected and used in construction. Biomolecular sex analysis of 30 individuals showed a predominance of females, meaning that the mammoths at Kostenki most likely lived in herds.
A mammoth herd, like that of modern elephants, consisted only of females and immature young. When male calves reached a certain age they were driven out of the female herd. The males thereafter continued to live separately.
Mammoth lower jaw (material from the original article)
Close-up of mammoth bones composing the structure, showing six jaws of different sizes (material from the original article)
Thus, the most intriguing question asked by visitors to the Kostenki museum-reserve — how ancient people living in Kostenki 25,000 years ago could have killed more than 65 mammoths to build the structure — is partly resolved.
A very welcome development was the appearance of another series of dates for this cultural layer — they precisely corroborate the previous two series (that is, results from three different independent laboratories agree, which confirms their accuracy). And these dates indicate that people visited this circular mammoth-bone structure twice: at the time of construction and then later again. This is consistent with our archaeological data. It turns out that people knew this place well, remembered it, and considered it important.
Large tooth in a mammoth lower jaw — an example of what the samples for analysis look like (material from the original article)
