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DNA and radiocarbon research supply new insights into prehistoric mammoth bone advanced

DNA and radiocarbon research supply new insights into prehistoric mammoth bone advanced
January 28, 2025


DNA and radiocarbon research supply new insights into prehistoric mammoth bone advanced

The 3rd mammoth bone advanced at Kostenki 11-Ia. Credit score: Quaternary Environments and People (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.qeh.2024.100049

Dr. Alba Rey-Iglesia and her colleagues performed a biomolecular research of the mammoth bone stays at Kostenki 11-Ia, offering interesting insights into the enigmatic mammoth bone complexes constructed right through the Ice Age. The learn about, printed in Quaternary Environments and People, was hoping to supply new insights into the website’s intercourse, age distribution, and paleoenvironment.

Round mammoth bone buildings were recovered throughout western Russia and the Ukraine. Maximum were dated to round ~26,000–14,000 cal BP (calibrated years earlier than provide) and are typically discovered alongside the Desna/Dnpr river programs.
“The round mammoth bone buildings are from the peak of the final Ice Age, a duration of intense chilly, and are broadly thought to be to were dwellings for refuge right through lengthy, complete glacial wintry weather seasons or most likely year-round,” explains Dr. Lorenzen, one of the vital learn about’s researchers.
“They might also were used for ceremonial functions. The buildings are nearly all the time surrounded by way of a chain of enormous pits that had been most likely used for garage of meals or bone gas or most likely garbage disposal.”
On the other hand, exactly what they gave the look of is but unknown. “The bizarre factor is that while you see the website and the hundreds of bones, it isn’t simple to image how they could were erected whatsoever, as they’re heavy,” says Dr. Lorenzen. “The best way I have observed them depicted (on the Herbal Historical past Museum in Vienna) is as a tent-like construction. However as most effective the bones are left, no person is aware of.”
Kostenki 11 (Anasovka 2) is an Higher Paleolithic (~35,000–10,000 ya) website close to the Kostenki and Borshchevo villages in Russia. The website is composed of 5 layers, that have been radiocarbon dated to between ~40,000 and ~24,000 years BP.
Kostenki 11 used to be first found out in 1951. Since then, 3 mammoth bone complexes were found out, and the primary development of the Kostenki Museum-Maintain has been erected across the first advanced.

The 3rd advanced, known as Kostenki 11-Ia, is the most important of the complexes, measuring in at ~ 12 x 10m, and is constituted of a minimum of 3 peripheral pits. Throughout the advanced are ~2,982 person mammoth bones, jointly making up a minimum of 64 people.
Earlier radiocarbon dates point out the website used to be most likely constructed round 24,000–25,000 ya. Making Kostenki 11-Ia one of the vital oldest round mammoth-bone buildings within the jap Eu Undeniable.
All of Kostenki’s mammoth bones belong to some of the well known mammoth species, the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius). Because of their wealthy fossil document and the preservation of a number of specimens in permafrost, they are a number of the well-studied Eurasian mammoth species.

DNA and Radiocarbon Analysis Provide New Insights into Prehistoric Mammoth Bone Complex

Web page plan of the 3rd mammoth-bone construction (2015); blue = crania/skulls and yellow = fires. Credit score: Rey-Iglesia et al. 2024

It’s been hypothesized that those mammals most likely had a matriarchal social construction by which an grownup feminine would lead a bunch of alternative women folk and their younger. In the meantime, grownup men would go away those teams upon maturing and reside by myself or shape transient bachelor teams.
The biomolecular paintings at Kostenki-Ia concerned examining 39 specimens from the bone advanced, combining each morphological and genetic learn how to resolve intercourse ratios and familial relationships.
The effects point out that almost all of mammoths (57% had been feminine, whilst men made up the opposite 43%. The over-representation of women folk, in comparison to different mammoth bone assemblages, and the inclusion of stripling stays led the researchers to consider that Ice Age people had been essentially focused on mammoth herds or a minimum of scavenging from herd bone-beds somewhat than trapping solitary male people.

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The mitochondrial DNA equipped further insights. “The truth that we discover a couple of mitochondrial lineages provide within the people—mitochondria are handed on from mom to kid, and they would proportion the similar collection/lineage—presentations that the mammoths are from a number of herds, and now not only one.
“We’d be expecting the similar mitochondrial DNA collection to be provide inside a herd, as herds include moms and offspring from inside the similar circle of relatives.”
In the end, one of the vital extra sudden reveals got here from the radiocarbon dates. “A number of findings had been unexpected. One used to be the inclusion of the 2 older bones,” explains Dr. Lorenzen.
Of the 9 radiocarbon dates taken, two had been a number of hundred years older. Those dates got here from a feminine and a male mammoth and had been dated to round 25,662–24,802 and 25,798–25,140 cal BP, respectively.
“The fossil scavenging conduct that we infer from the 2 a lot older dates has, to our wisdom, now not been reported any place else.” Lorenzen elaborates at the importance of the discovering, announcing, “Our findings seem to turn the bones had been harvested from in different places—as within the mammoths didn’t die on website—and most likely older (as in long-dead) mammoths had been harvested along with newly-dead mammoths.
“We do not have proof to mention whether or not the people at once hunted the mammoths, and we infer they had been most likely present in herbal bone beds and transported to the website. However most likely mammoths can have died throughout many masses of years within the bone beds, and thus each previous and new had been used.”
The findings at Kostenki 11-Ia spotlight the adaptability and resourcefulness of Higher Paleolithic people and supply new insights into the intercourse distributions and age vary of mammoth bone used to build those enigmatic bone complexes.

Additional information:
Alba Rey-Iglesia et al, Historic biomolecular research of 39 mammoth people from Kostenki 11-Ia elucidates Higher Palaeolithic human useful resource use, Quaternary Environments and People (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.qeh.2024.100049

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