In March 2020, during preparatory construction work for a building lot in the village of Taimering in Bavaria, Germany, employees of the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Historical Monuments (BLfD) unearthed the partial skeleton of a woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), including a 2.5m-long, spirally twisted tusk.
This was a surprising find for the excavators who had originally set out to recover medieval artefacts, and it sparked an investigation that only now has started to yield some answers.
During the initial examination of the mammoth’s remains, excavators noticed conspicuous marks that they believed could potentially represent cut marks.
A study recently published in the Journal of Archaeological Science has just provided evidence to suggest these cut marks were likely made by hunter gatherers as they butchered the mammoth.
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“First of all, mammoth skeletal remains are extremely rare in our latitudes,” said Gertrud Rößner, a palaeontologist at the Bavarian State Collections of Natural History and co-author of the recent study. “We are familiar with finds mainly from regions of Eurasia further to the east.”
Andreas Maier of the University of Cologne and Thorsten Uthmeier of FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, two more co-authors, added: “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.”
During their excavation, archaeologists found more than 70 woolly mammoth bones and bone fragments. These primarily came from the mammoth’s ribcage and feet, but suspiciously most of its long bones were missing.
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A palaeontological assessment revealed that all the bones, as well as the tusk, belonged to a single, very large but not yet fully grown individual.
By closely examining the surfaces of the mammoth’s bones, the researchers were able to rule out the possibility that the marks had been made during prolonged transport in water or during disarticulation by predators. This left one other likely creator: humans.
The cut marks are found exclusively on the ribs, some of which are entirely covered in fine, parallel cuts. These marks provide clear evidence of human activity, despite the fact that further excavations of the site have failed to uncover any other lines of evidence, such as stone tools.
Some of the cut marks are so stark that researchers have been able to infer that one of the broad rib bones may have even been used as a cutting board. However, based on the cut marks alone it’s difficult to tell whether the mammoth was killed by humans or was already dead prior to being processed.
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According to the researchers involved in the study, the remains were buried in the sediments of a pond or a slow-flowing tributary of the prehistoric Danube River. Radiocarbon dating reveals the remains are between 27,000 and 25,000 years old, which coincides with the peak of the last Ice Age, or the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM).
Further pollen analyses conducted by Philipp Stojakowits from the University of Augsburg reveal that this part of southeast Germany was covered in herbaceous, tundra-like steppe vegetation during the last Ice Age. This kind of habitat would have supported a variety of iconic Ice Age mammals, including the Taimering mammoth.
Find out more about the study, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
Top image: the mammoth’s tusk at the excavation site in Taimering, Germany. Credit: BLfD
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