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The mammoth bone hut in Mezhyrich took 150 bones to build and I think that's the real story nobody talks about
Everyone argues about which cave painting is oldest but the actual mind blower is the mammoth bone dwellings they found in Ukraine, some going back about 20,000 years. A dig at Mezhyrich turned up 4 of them, and the biggest one took around 150 bones to build, with a skull over the doorway and jaws stacked into the walls. That means people were hauling and fitting bones from dozens of animals, not just killing one and calling it a day. I posted about this on a history page 3 years ago and got told the paintings matter more, so where do you all land on this?
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thea6928d ago
Whoa, and it gets better when you think about what those bones actually mean. Building one of those huts wasn't a weekend project, it was basically a full time job, and you can't just kill 150 mammoths in your spare time. Some researchers think groups were collecting old bones from natural die offs and scavenging sites, which means they had to remember where carcasses were, maybe for years, and plan trips back to them. That takes a kind of long term memory and group planning that we usually hand to the cave painters, but hauling a mammoth skull across the tundra to stick over your door is a whole different level of commitment. So yeah, the paintings get the postcards, but the huts show the boring stuff that actually kept people alive, like logistics and teamwork and knowing where your stash of jaws is.
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