Mysterious 25,000 Year Old Building Made of 60 Mammoth's Bones

Smithsonian Magazine ^ | March 2020 | Brian Handwerk

[wildbill]

jaw-dropping example of Ice Age architecture has been unearthed on Russia’s forest steppe: a huge, circular structure built with the bones of at least 60 woolly mammoths. But exactly why hunter-gatherers enduring the frigid realities of life 25,000 years ago would construct the 40-foot diameter building is a fascinating question.

“Clearly a lot of time and effort went into building this structure so it was obviously important to the people that made it for some reason,” says Alexander Pryor, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter (U.K.). He is the lead author of a new study published this week in the journal Antiquity describing the find at Kostenki, a place where many important Paleolithic sites lie clustered around the Don River.

[wildbill]

Article questions the purpose of this huge unique structure. BS. Easy Peasy. This is a neolithic McMammoth site which began the famous logo of the Golden Arches.

There are solid clues to the existence of my exclusinve McMammoth theory inside the article. See if you can find them. It will give you something to do in your isolation

[BenLurkin]

Pong

[Pearls Before Swine]

They don’t build ‘em like they used to.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Useful tip for those of us "sheltering in place":

"Moving a dead mammoth cannot have been easy"

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

I read about something like this fifty years ago from the old TIME-LIFE book series EARLY MAN.

[Flash Bazbeaux]

McMammoth’s food was crap. Al’s Brontosaurus Burgers rules!

[Jane Austen]

lol

[Coffee... Black... No Sugar]

Early Man Cave?

[2banana]

Not many trees on the steepe...

[immadashell]

Maybe this was the final resting place of Czar Ivan the Really Hungry?

[oldasrocks]

Probably an early prepper making do with the materials at hand.

[centurion316]

In Oog’s neighborhood, they did not have a Home Depot, so they had to use the building materials that were close to hand. These were common on the Tundra where trees did not live.

[fso301]

Probably didn’t have anything else to build their yurts with

[SteveH]

hummer car port

[Deaf Smith]

Let this be the best study of how Ice Age humans disposed of mammoth ribs and leg bones after a good barbeque.

10K years from now, they will be studying why humans made chandeliers and furniture from deer & elk antlers. (It must have been important to them)

[Patriot Babe]

That sounds alot like Bedrock, the Flintstones & The Rubbles neighborhood

[blam]

[lewislynn]

"Moving a dead mammoth cannot have been easy"

Probably easier than building a pyramid or Sphinx.

Drag it on the frozen ground.

[Sgt_Schultze]

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks! Mammoth told me there'd be days like this.