The remains of five individuals, including an infant, two juvenile and two adults, have been found in a graveyard in a quarry in southwest England.
Neanderthals used stone tools, including a hand ax and small flint tools, to clean animal hides, which were discovered alongside the mammoth remains. The team hasn't analyzed the mammoth bones to see if they have Neanderthal tool marks.
Lisa Westcott Wilkins, the co-founder of DigVentures, said that finding mammoth bones that are so old and well preserved is exceptional.
The Ancient Faces of a Man-Bun Wearing Bloke and a Neanderthal woman are related.
The graveyard and Neanderthal tools were discovered by two amateur fossil hunters. In the next two years, two field seasons were organized to dig the site. The work uncovered more ice age remnants, including delicate beetle wings, fragile freshwater snail shells and mammoth remains, such as tusks, leg bones, ribs and vertebrae belonging to a species of Steppe mammoth, a group whose descendants include the woolly mammoth. The five mammoths at the graveyard were small, an indication that the species might have shrunk during an especially cold spell during the ice age.
The site was dated to between 220,000 and 210,000 years ago, when Neanderthals were still living in Britain. The Neanderthals moved further south once the temperatures dropped.
There are 8 images, the first is image 2 of 8 and the next is image 3 of 8.
A mammoth tusk is excavated. The image is from DigVentures.
A mammoth tusk is being cared for. The image is from DigVentures.
A tooth from the site. The image is from DigVentures.
A picture of a tusk. The image is from DigVentures.
A mammoth tibia is a leg bone. The image is from DigVentures.
There is a bone at the site. The image is from DigVentures.
The graveyard had at least five people. The image is from DigVentures.
A Neanderthal hand ax was found. Sally Hollingworth and her company, DigVentures.
The team plans to figure out why so many mammoths died at one place and whether Neanderthals hunted or took their remains. Neanderthals are thought to have hunted mammoths and other large pachyderms. Neanderthal footprints were found at a 100,000-year-old "nursery" for elephants in southern Spain.
The new graveyard findings are described in the new documentary "Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard," with Sir David Attenborough and Ben Garrod, an evolutionary biologist at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. The show is on at 8 p.m. On December 30th, it was on the radio.
Duncan Wilson, the chief executive of Historic England, said in a statement that the findings have enormous value for understanding the human occupation of Britain, and the delicate environmental evidence recovered will also help us understand it in the context of past climate change. We are looking forward to more light being shed on life in Britain 200,000 years ago.
The work was funded by Historic England and supported by a team from several U.K. research institutions.
Live Science published the original article.
