Hundreds of ancient mammoth bones have been discovered beneath a wine cellar in Austria, in what experts have called an “archaeological sensation”.
Andreas Pernerstorfer from Gobelsburg discovered the giant bone while renovating his wine cellar in March. Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW) It was announced on Wednesday.
Archaeologists who took over work at the site in May said they had found around 300 bones from at least three mammoths and that the ancient remains were thought to date back 30,000 to 40,000 years.
“Such a dense layer of bone is rare,” excavation leader Hanna Palou Suchon said in a statement. “This is the first time we’ve been able to examine something like this in Austria with modern tools, which represents a unique research opportunity.”
Pernerstorfer said he unearthed some mammoth bones while simply trying to level the floor of his wine cellar, but at first he didn’t know what he’d found.
“I thought it was a piece of wood my grandfather had left behind,” he told the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation, “but after I dug around a bit I remembered that he had said he’d found a tooth before, and I immediately thought it was a mammoth.”
Pernerstoffer reported his find to the Federal Monuments Office, which in turn notified OeAW, which launched a full-scale investigation earlier this month.
The discovery will allow researchers to learn more about the extinct giant beasts and may shed light on how humans were able to dominate such giant creatures.
“We have strong evidence that they were hunting them, but we don’t know how they hunted them,” Palou-Souchon said of early humans.
The researchers hope that the wine cellar may actually have been a hunting ground that could answer this question, and Palou-Souchon suggests that the site may have housed traps set to capture mammoths.
Once archaeologists have unearthed all the bones and finished their work, the remains will be sent to Vienna’s Natural History Museum for restoration and further study, officials said.
According to the British Museum of Natural History, mammoths inhabited the Northern Hemisphere for at least 500,000 years, but their populations began to decline significantly around 10,000 years ago.
The last mammoths to roam the Earth became extinct about 4,000 years ago.
