Andreas Pernerstorfer thought he had stumbled upon a piece of wood his grandfather had left buried. This Austrian winemaker was remodeling his winery in Gobelsburg, a small town in the Krems district (Lower Austria) that has some of the oldest vineyards in the Danube region.
It wasn’t long until Pernerstorfer remembered a story his grandfather told him about finding teeth in the basement during an old renovation of the site decades ago. It was then that he decided to continue digging deeper and came across an authentic “archaeological sensation”, as experts describe it.
Huge bones appeared in front of him that turned out to be part of the skeleton of three different mammoths that lived between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago. “This is the most important find of its kind in more than 100 years,” say researchers from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) who are now studying the find.
The place where they were found could be the same place where the animals died. Hence, this discovery made in Gobelsburg raises many interesting questions, such as how Stone Age people could hunt these enormous animals.
“We know that people hunted mammoths, but we still know little about how they did it,” says Hannah Parow-Souchon, who directs an excavation that has only studied a space of 12 square meters (they hope to return in August to expand the study). ).
The specialists’ hypothesis is that our human ancestors could have set a trap for them right where the Pernerstorfer winery is located today or that they took advantage of the natural topography to capture them.
Mammoths, including woolly ones, are the extinct ancestors of modern elephants. These huge, fanged mammals roamed the Earth during the Pleistocene and early Holocene, before disappearing about 4,000 years ago.
Since the beginning of May, archaeologists at the ÖAW have discovered at least 300 overlapping mammoth bones. “Such a dense layer is rare,” notes Parow-Souchon. “This is the first time we can examine something like this in Austria with modern means – a unique opportunity for research,” she adds.
Even so, this is not the first time a similar discovery has been made in the area. Another layer of bones, flint artifacts, decorative fossils and charcoal were found 150 years ago in a neighboring cellar. The finds from that time indicate an age of between 30,000 and 40,000 years and probably belong to the same prehistoric site.
Hannah Parow-Souchon and her team assume that there is a “major bone cluster” that offers a unique opportunity. “Other similar sites in Austria and neighboring countries were excavated at least 100 years ago and have largely been lost to modern research,” notes the Austrian researcher.
Archaeologists are finishing examining the unearthed remains and will later transfer them to the Natural History Museum in Vienna, where they will be restored. Earlier this year, another group of experts discovered hundreds of prehistoric animal bones, including the remains of a cave lion and a mammoth, in the so-called Paradise Cave (Jaskinia Raj) in Poland.
