Andreas Pernerstorfer thought he had come across a piece of wood that his grandfather had buried. This Austrian winemaker was renovating his cellar in Gobelsburg, a small village in the Krems district (Lower Austria) that boasts some of the oldest vineyards in the Danube region.
It wasn't long before Pernerstorfer remembered a story his grandfather told him about finding teeth in the basement during an old renovation of the site decades ago. It was then that he decided to dig deeper and stumbled upon a true “archaeological sensation,” as experts describe it.
The skeleton of three enormous mammoths
In front of him appeared huge bones that turned out to be part of the skeleton of three different mammoths that lived between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago. “This is the most important finding of this kind in over 100 years,” say the researchers from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) who are now studying the discovery.
The place where they were found could be the same site where the animals died. Hence, this discovery made in Gobelsburg raises many interesting questions, such as how the Stone Age people could hunt these huge animals.
Andreas Pernerstorfer thought he had stumbled upon a piece of wood that his grandfather had left buried.
“We know that people hunted mammoths, but we still know little about how they did it,” stated Hannah Parow-Souchon in a press release. She is leading an excavation that has only examined a 12-square-meter area so far (they plan to return in August to expand the study).
The specialists' hypothesis is that our human ancestors could have set a trap for them right where Pernerstorfer's winery is located today, or that they took advantage of the natural topography to capture them.
Mammoths, including woolly mammoths, are the extinct ancestors of modern elephants. These enormous mammals with tusks roamed the Earth during the Pleistocene and early Holocene, before disappearing approximately 4,000 years ago.
The researchers consider this discovery a “archaeological sensation”
Since early May, ÖAW archaeologists have discovered at least 300 superimposed mammoth bones. “Such a dense layer is rare,” notes Parow-Souchon. “It is the first time we can examine something like this in Austria with modern means: a unique opportunity for research,” she adds.
However, this is not the first time a similar discovery has been made in the area. 150 years ago, another layer of bones, flint artifacts, decorative fossils, and charcoal were found in a neighboring cellar. The findings from that time indicate an age of between 30,000 and 40,000 years and likely belong to the same prehistoric deposit.
The cellar may be located on the site where ancient humans used to hunt mammoths.
Hannah Parow-Souchon and her team believe that there is a significant bone assemblage that presents a unique opportunity. “Other similar sites in Austria and neighboring countries were excavated at least 100 years ago and have largely been lost to modern research,” the Austrian researcher points out.
The archaeologists are finishing examining the unearthed remains and will then transfer them to the Vienna Natural History Museum, where they will be restored. Earlier this year, another group of experts discovered hundreds of prehistoric animal bones, including the remains of a cave lion and a mammoth, in the so-called Cave of Paradise (Jaskinia Raj) in Poland.
