Six years ago, during construction work in Taimering near Regensburg (Bavaria, Germany), employees of the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Historical Monuments (BLfD) discovered a nearly 2.5-meter-long, spirally twisted tusk that belonged to a woolly mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius. Nearby, the archaeologists also found over 70 additional bones and bone fragments, primarily from the ribcage as well as hand and foot bones. Most of the long bones of the large mammal are missing. "The mammoth's tusk and bones were exceptionally well-preserved due to their millennia-long conservation in the wet soil environment," says Dr. Christoph Steinmann, deputy head of the Department of Archaeological Heritage Preservation for Lower Bavaria/Upper Palatinate at the BLfD. After its recovery, the find was prepared at the Bavarian State Collections of Natural History (SNSB), and further scientific investigations were coordinated from there.
The palaeontological assessment revealed that all the bones, as well as the tusk, belong to a single, very large but not yet fully grown individual with a shoulder height of about three meters. The Taimering woolly mammoth likely died directly at or at least near its discovery site. The bone surfaces, which have been preserved intact down to the finest detail, rule out both prolonged transport by water and disarticulation by predators. According to the researchers, the animal was buried in the sediments of a pond or a slow-flowing tributary of the prehistoric Danube River during the Ice Age. Radiocarbon dating indicates a geological age of the bones between 27,000 and 25,000 years ago.
Unusual markings on the surface turned out to be cut marks and provide clear evidence of human activity. Numerous such indentations are found exclusively on the ribs—made by Palaeolithic hunters and gatherers who butchered the animal. One of the broad rib bones was even used as a cutting board. Whether the mammoth was killed by humans or had already been dead when people processed the carcass remains unclear, according to lead author Kerstin Pasda from the Institute of Prehistory and Early History at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), who conducted the osteoarchaeological analyses of the anthropogenic modifications.
Pollen analyses conducted by Dr. Philipp Stojakowits at the University of Augsburg reveal a great deal to the researchers about the habitat in which the mammoth lived and died. They indicate a herbaceous, tundra-like steppe vegetation with scattered dwarf shrubs. The so-called Mammoth Steppe was a vast treeless ecosystem in Eurasia that, during the peak of the last glacial period from 30,000 to 20,000 years ago, stretched across Europe between the Scandinavian ice sheet and the southern glaciers of the Alps. Its nutrient-rich grasses and dwarf shrubs provided food for a variety of large mammals, including the Taimering mammoth.
The discovery is exceptional in many respects. "First of all, mammoth skeletal remains are extremely rare in our latitudes. We are familiar with finds mainly from regions of Eurasia further to the east," says PD Dr. Gertrud Rößner, a palaeontologist at the Bavarian State Collections of Natural History. "On the other hand, there is virtually no evidence of human activity in this region from that peak period of the Ice Age. Due to climate change, hunter-gatherer communities in Europe retreated southward and eastward," add archaeology professors Andreas Maier of the University of Cologne and Thorsten Uthmeier of FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg.
Participating Institutions
Overall, 14 scientists from various disciplines participated in the mammoth study, including researchers from the Bavarian State Collections of Natural History, the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Historical Monuments, the Reiss-Engelhorn Museums and the Curt Engelhorn Center for Archaeometry in Mannheim and the University of Augsburg, LMU Munich, and the Universities of Cologne and Bremen, as well as the Museum of Prehistory and Local History in Bottrop.
