A so-called ‘mammoth graveyard’ in Arctic Siberia has a lot to teach us about how humans and elephants’ furry cousins interacted in the last days of their existence. Unfortunately, some of the best evidence has been stolen by ivory hunters.
It’s amazing that humans could have lived in Siberia, above the Arctic Circle, at the end of the last ice age, but the evidence is clear that this somehow happened. One of the driving forces was the presence of mammoths, which would have provided enormous quantities of food, clothing, bones for tools and ivory. A location on the Berelekh River suggests that the last two were the real priorities.
On the left bank of the river, at latitude 70° 30′ north and longitude 144° 02′ east, is a site rich in the bones of at least 156 mammoths. When scientists first investigated in 1970, the concentration of mammoth remains near the river was believed to be natural. The story of “elephant graveyards” where their worn-toothed cousins come to feed on the softest grass lacks evidence, so the favorite guess was that the river had deposited bones from far and wide in that one spot.
However, further research shows that this is very unlikely. While it was thought that humans arrived 50 to 80 years after the accumulation of the mammoth bones, research led by Dr. Vladimir Pitulko of the Russian Academy of Sciences shows that they coincided instead. The ages of the bones are too far apart for a mass extinction, and the river current is too weak to have washed away the bodies of those who died upstream.
So it seems that man was responsible. However, unlike some other locations, mammoth meat consumption has not been confirmed; there is more evidence of hare in the diet. Pitulko and co-authors conclude that what made the mammoths valuable were mainly their tusks. Then, as now, all that ivory was the bane of the Proboscidea.
The authors cannot be sure whether humans killed the mammoths, or merely wiped out those that died nearby, but either way they conclude that the site was some sort of factory for processing ivory and bones. The tusks and bones considered the best tools were transported there for carving.
Three-quarters of the mammoths at Berelekh were females, possibly because they were smaller prey, but more likely because their straight tusks were more prized than the curved tusks of the males.
The bones span a period of 13,700 to 11,800 years, but the vast majority date from the later part of that. Large bones are in one location, while nearby appears to be the area where humans lived, complete with ivory flakes produced by human modification.
The period from 12,400 to 11,800 years ago fell into what is known as the Bølling-Allerød warming, during which time pollen indicates that the region would have been more inviting to humans – or perhaps we should say, less uninhabitable. However, new research shows that the location was not permanently occupied. Instead, people spent time there repeatedly.
As important as this site is, it could have been much more revealing. There is a report that 50 Berelekh tusks were sold in 1947 alone. Who knows what valuable insights about humans, mammoths and their interactions have been lost?
Today, robbing these mammoths would require a major effort, as the nearest (small) town is 60 kilometers (40 miles) away. However, at one point there was a village just 2 kilometers downstream where the ivory was sold.
Many questions remain unanswered. For example, what is the source of the handful of mammoth bones deposited at the site over a thousand years before activity increased? Did humans use the site a few times a century before activity increased, or did the earliest mammoths die there naturally before humans decided to make the same spot their ivory workshop?
Although Berelekh was thought to be unique when it was found, it is now known to be just one of many giant burial sites in northern Eurasia. If other locations had similar origins, it would indicate that mammoth hunting was widespread at the time. Similar conclusions, with a slightly lower rate of mammoth mortality per year, have been reached about the Paleolithic site of Yana, also in northern Siberia.
The research has been published open access in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews.
[H/T Phys.org]