Mammoth Bones Found During Wine Cellar Renovation

A set of mammoth bones have been discovered in a wine cellar in Austria during renovation works.

The remains, which could represent at least three individual animals, are thought to be between 30,000 and 40,000 years old.

A local winegrower, Andreas Pernerstorfer, made the finds in his wine cellar, which is located in Gobelsburg, in the district of Krems, west of Vienna.

After spotting the bones, Pernerstorfer, reported the finds to the Austrian Federal Monuments Office, which then referred the winegrower to the Archaeological Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW).

"Andreas was working to level the floor of his cellar when his spade hit something he initially thought was wood," Hannah Parow-Souchon with the OeAW, who is leading the excavation at the wine cellar site, told Newsweek.

"He looked more closely and saw that it was bone. Then he remembered the tales of his grandfather who had found mammoth teeth while working in the cellar in the 1960s."

A statement issued by the OeAW described the discovery as the most significant of its kind in the country for more than 100 years.

Archaeologists have uncovered several layers of mammoth bones in the wine cellar, with three different individuals represented.

"Such a dense bone layer of mammoths is rare. It's the first time we've been able to investigate something like this in Austria using modern methods," Parow-Souchon said in a press release.

Around 150 years ago, a similar discovery was made in Gobelsburg. Then, researchers uncovered a thick layer of bones, alongside flint artifacts, decorative fossils and charcoal, in an adjacent cellar in Gobelsburg.

The latest discovery from Gobelsburg could help shed light on how prehistoric humans hunted mammoths.

"We know that humans hunted mammoths, but we still know very little about how they did it," Parow-Souchon said.

Archaeologists suggest that the location where the mammoth bones were found in Pernerstorfer's cellar could be the place where the animals died. It is possible that people chased the creatures into this spot and set some kind of trap for them.

Researchers are currently examining the mammoth remains in an attempt to uncover new insights. The remains—which include a "really rare" mammoth tongue bone—will subsequently be transferred to the Natural History Museum Vienna, where they will be restored.

"We hope to gain new information about human-mammoth interactions in the last Ice Age," Parow-Souchon told Newsweek. "If we are really lucky we might find an indication of how they were hunted, which animals of the herd were selected and how the hunting took place, as well as which parts of the animals were chosen for consumption/use."

"Also, the mammoth bones and especially the teeth will be able to tell us something about their environment, the season of death and so on. The whole range of options we will only know when the bones are restored and prepared by the conservators.

Earlier this year, researchers discovered hundreds of prehistoric animal bones—including the remains of a cave lion and a mammoth—at a cave in Poland.

The so-called Paradise Cave (Jaskinia Raj), located in the country's Świętokrzyskie region, is considered one of the most significant archaeological sites in the country.

"Paradise Cave is one of the most famous and important archaeological sites in Poland, and we actually know very little about it," Małgorzata Kot of the Faculty of Archeology at the University of Warsaw, who is supervising the current research, told the Polish Press Agency (PAP).

Do you have a tip on a science story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about archaeology? Let us know via science@newsweek.com.

Update 05/30/24, 2:03 p.m. ET: This article was updated with comment from Hannah Parow-Souchon.