It wasn’t a vintage red or white, but it was vintage. A man renovating his wine cellar in Austria discovered mammoth remains from prehistoric era.
The discovery was considered “sensational” by the team from the Austrian Archaeological Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, tasked with unearthing the remains found in the village of Gobelsburg, west of the country’s capital. Vienna.
“Our older, more experienced team members had never seen anything like this before and they saw a lot,” team member Hannah Parow-Souchon told NBC News on Thursday.
Stone and charcoal artifacts at the site indicate the bones are between 30,000 and 40,000 years old, she added.
Winemaker Andreas Pernerstorfer told the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation that he discovered them in March while renovating his cellar.
“I thought it was just a piece of wood left by my grandfather,” he said. “But then I dug it up a little and remembered that in the past my grandfather said he had found teeth. And then I immediately thought it was a mammoth.”
After the discovery was reported to the institute, Parow-Souchon said he worked with his colleagues to meticulously uncover each bone, adding that they gradually discovered multiple interconnected skeletal structures.
Although other comparable sites have been discovered in Austria and neighboring countries, most of them were excavated at least 100 years ago and have largely been lost to modern investigation, the Austrian Archaeological Institute said in a statement. Press release.
At that time, important details about the environment in which the remains were found and under what conditions were rarely recorded, and “some of them were even sold to soap factories,” Parow-Souchon said.
By using modern 3D mapping technology, she added, the team can find out more about how these mammoths died and what happened to their bones in the years that followed.
This could also shed light on how people were able to hunt these massive animals, if that were the case here, Parow-Souchon said.
“We have strong evidence that they hunted them, but we have no idea how,” she added. “We know that elephants have problems with slopes, so perhaps they were hunted on a slope and therefore vulnerable.”
Once all the bones have been excavated, they will go to the Vienna Natural History Museum for restoration and further research, the institute said in a press release.
This article was originally published in NBCNews. with
