The weight of this discovery is matched only by that which these thousand-year-old pachyderms must have done during their lifetime.
Several hundred fossilized remains belonging to at least five mammoths who died around 220,000 - 210,000 years ago have been unearthed in recent months near a quarry in the west of England, the British operator announced on Sunday. DigVentures.
Already extraordinary in itself, the discovery is all the more remarkable given that the bones, unearthed in 2019 and then 2021, were part of a site occupied by Neanderthals, which is said to be one of the largest ever studied in the United Kingdom. for the start of the last ice age.
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"This is one of the most important ice age finds in Britain in recent years,"
said Duncan Wilson, chairman of Historic England, the most important conservation organization, in a statement. heritage in the UK.
Located in the Cotswolds, on the outskirts of the town of Swindon, about fifty kilometers east of Bristol, the site contained the remains of at least two adult mammoths, two children and a baby mammoth.
The whole is, according to archaeologists, very well preserved.
Neanderthal site littered with hundreds of mammoth bones discovered in England
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Several Neanderthal bifaces used as scrapers have been found scattered around the remains of mammoth tusks, vertebrae, shins and ribs. The five individuals all belonged to the genus
Mammuthus trogontherii
, that is to say to steppe mammoths, ancestors of woolly mammoths. Bear and bison bones have also been identified.
"Many bones have been examined by experts at the Natural History Museum in London,"
said the DigVentures statement, adding that
"a few pieces are subject to further analysis to try to determine whether traces of cuts, characteristic of a butchery activity, have been highlighted ”.
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The last centuries before the glaciation
According to the researchers involved in the excavation, the site is significant because it offers a very rare testimony of interaction between Neanderthals and mammoths in this part of Europe, at a time when what was to become the last ice age.
No trace of human occupation of the current British Isles would indeed be attested for most of this period, between 180,000 and 60,000 years, at a time when most of the region was covered with glaciers.
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“Archaeological sites from this period are rare and crucial to understanding the behavior of Neanderthals in Britain and Europe
,” said archaeologist and DigVentures co-founder Lisa Westcott Wilkins for British weekly
The Observer
. Why have so many mammoths died here? Was it the Neanderthals who killed them? And what can they teach us about life in Britain during the Ice Age? The abundance of remains on this site gives us a unique chance to answer these questions. ”
The presence of significant prehistoric remains on the site was identified in 2017, during a survey carried out by a couple of fossil hunters, with the permission of the owners.
The history of the excavation of the site and the exhumation of the animal remains will be the subject of a documentary produced by the BBC.
Presented by David Attenborough, UK star host
Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard
(
"Attenborough
and the Mammoth Graveyard "
), the program airs this December 30th.