
25,000-Year-Old Structure Built of the Bones of 60 Mammoths - pseudolus
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/60-mammoths-house-russia-180974426/
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singularity2001
Göbekli Tepe traditions built on a long line of building experiments. There
are also earlier stone structures and undoubtably myriads of rotten and lost
wooden temples.

~~~
wyattpeak
I think "line of experiments" lends too much forethought and connectedness to
these things. It certainly exists within a context of increasing
sophistication in human architecture, but it was built more than ten thousand
years after the site in the article. Assuming the builders are related at all,
there wouldn't even be vague cultural memory extending back that far.

~~~
singularity2001
These are certainly different branches on the human development tree, So I
agree that there wouldn’t be any vague memory of the specific site. If there
was any memory it was in the form of habits just like stone making techniques
persisted for tens of thousands of years

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rimliu
Even the name of the place sounds like it is a derivation from кости: "bones".

~~~
baybal2
Yes, it's literally "bones" from Russian.

The area has been known for it

~~~
baybal2
Some more background: Russian folklore attributes the name to the event when
god Indra (Inder, Hindra in other spellings) was about to cross the Don river.

Indra tried to drink all of Don's water, and exploded.

The locality was then named for his scattered bones.

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krick
> Lioudmila Lakovleva

Iakovleva (Yakovleva), for God's sake...

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majos
This reminds me of a pretty niche article I found a couple months ago. It was
about the bones of a bunch of cave bears that a father and his young son found
in Drachenloch Cave in Switzerland in the early 1900s. They called in
naturalist Emil Bachler and he got to work finding more bones in the cave,
organized in tantalizingly structured ways.

> In Drachenloch, however, not only were there [crude stone] walls, but behind
> these walls were found accumulations of bear bones — the long bones of the
> legs and more or less complete skulls. The pattern was very consistent.
> Where such walls were present, bones were present. Where they were absent,
> bones were rare along the cave walls.

These and other deliberate-looking accumulations of bones (including apparent
crude “chests” of limestone slabs enclosing more bones) led Bachler to suggest
the idea of a prehistoric cave bear worshipping cult. But a counterargument
suggests this explanation is unnecessary. It might just be bears being bears,
no cult required.

> When cave bears entered a cave to hibernate, they began by scratching nests
> into the cave fill. In the process, bones and small rocks were pushed aside,
> often falling into crevices among the fallen blocks. This had two effects.
> First, it helped to build up accumulations of bones in natural cavities
> among rocks or among piles of rocks. Second, it protected the bones that did
> enter such interstices from further trampling and, if they were buried
> there, from weathering and decay. It is perfectly natural, therefore, that
> modern excavators should find concentrations of bones in cavities surrounded
> by rock. Moreover, because further weathering of the cave roof naturally
> produced subsequent roof fall, it is perfectly normal that such cavities
> would be covered by slabs of greater or lesser size.

I wonder if something similar happened here. Obviously, the lack of a cave is
an issue. But it’s a funny connection to something I read randomly a few
months ago.

Cave bear stuff from [https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/the-cult-of-
the-cav...](https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/the-cult-of-the-cave-
bear/) which is also a fun read if you like archaeologists sniping at each
other.

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z3t4
When building houses you build with what you can find. If you buy an old house
in an area without much trees, like an island, expect it to be built with a
little bit of everything.

~~~
munk-a
That was one specific interesting point in the article though - the other
structures were built out of everything, bones from mammoths, foxes and other
small game. This particular structure was entirely built out of mammoth bone
and is insanely large.

~~~
samstave
Given the fact that a single mammoth could feed many for a long time, I would
suspect that a building made from 60 mammoths was either a mass death, or a
mass ritual killing - it certainly wasnt subsistence killing of the mammoths
for food from which the bones would come from...

~~~
kadoban
Couldn't it have been built out of bones from a long period of subsistence
hunting and killing?

~~~
projektfu
Indeed, some things had been built over thousands of years.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Eagle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Eagle)

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GavinMcG
How is it identified that food scraps "remain" at the site?

~~~
catalogia
I'm guessing it's tool marks on bones. Maybe they can tell if somebody was
chewing on a mammoth rib or something.

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thekevan
While it did have unique qualities which could indicate ritualistic or
cultural significance, I can still see one possibility could be it coming from
exactly what I imagine one of my friends doing.

I could imagine their linguist equivalent of "Bro, I'm going to build this one
just from Mammoth bones, it'll be freakin' huge. C'mon, it'll be awesome!"

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lowdose
There is discussion in this article about why people would have moved these
animals over vast distances. But as the Mammoth is in the same family as
elephants and I remember elephants choose to die at a location that is revised
by their family over time.

Couldn't it be this has been a similar behavior, people coming to a this site
and just found 60 remains and build something with it?

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DiffEq
Elephants don't do this...it is a myth.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephants%27_graveyard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephants%27_graveyard)

[https://animals.howstuffworks.com/animal-facts/are-there-
rea...](https://animals.howstuffworks.com/animal-facts/are-there-really-
elephant-graveyards.htm)

~~~
singularity2001
Maybe the myth comes from sites like these.

And maybe sites like these were used to run down mammoth herds down a cliff:

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2d/Ko...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2d/Kostenky_model.jpg/440px-
Kostenky_model.jpg)

~~~
DiffEq
Perhaps. I grew up in Montana where they have cliffs like those that the
Indians drove bison off of. 10's of thousands at a time...

~~~
jacobush
I wonder if it's true that the herds of Bison were a result of a an ecosystem
in rapid change - supposedly when the natives in North America died and cities
and farms went to waste because of disease from the South, introduced by the
Europeans.

That would have allowed the Bison population to explode.

~~~
sethammons
That doesn't jive with my understanding. The US government went about
systematic elimination of indigenous people. Part of that was the elimination
of bison as a food source. The population of bison declined from the millions
to around a thousand in under a decade arout the 1860s.

~~~
readarticle
European states in America went about systematic elimination of the
_survivors_ , the pre contact population absolutely dwarfed these remnants and
in their time, kept flora and fauna in check across the continent.

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Romanulus
This reminds me of an old PS1 game I have serious nostalgia for:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tail_of_the_Sun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tail_of_the_Sun)

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AndyMcConachie
"A jaw-dropping example .."

I'm glad people at the Smithsonian get to have fun writing intro sentences
like that.

~~~
cletus
On the contrary, I find these predictable puns in journalism to be lazy and
annoying. If I have to read about another oil tanker spill that’s “fueling”
speculation...

~~~
Stratoscope
If that bothers you, you will _love_ this whale of a tale about Oregon's 1970
exploding whale:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD5sPgV61bw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD5sPgV61bw)

"The sand dunes there were covered with spectators and landlubber newsmen,
shortly to become land- _blubber_ newsmen. For the blast blasted blubber
beyond all believable bounds."

