Did prehistoric humans kill mammoths to recover their ivory and make tools from it, more than 10,000 years ago? This is what a study suggests, which remains cautious, however, because evidence stolen by modern ivory hunters is lacking.
Humans coexisted with mammoths in prehistoric times. This is what the study of a mammoth cemetery found in Siberia, dating from 13,700 to 11,800 years ago. Where historians thought that humans had only collected the ivory of these gigantic pachyderms to transform them into tools years after their death, researchers suggest that there was indeed a cohabitation between the two species. Unfortunately, the best evidence of these relationships has been stolen by ivory hunters.
Mammoth “cemetery” or ivory “factory”?
The Berelekh cemetery, lost in the middle of the tundra of the far north, 60 km from the nearest village, was discovered in the 1970s. Archaeologists found there the bones of at least 156 mammoths. But for a long time they asked themselves the question of why they were all dead in the same place. Mass extinction? Consequences of a flood? Cemetery where they go to die? Ultimately, none of these hypotheses is correct, according to the work of researcher Vladimir Pitulko of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
The study, published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews, suggests that humans are responsible. During this period, in fact, global warming occurred which would have allowed us to rub shoulders with these enormous beasts, which can live in a much more icy and inhospitable climate. Our ancestors, who lived near these colossi, would not necessarily have killed them, or collected their carcasses, for their meat (in any case, no trace of a feast was found at Berelekh). But they certainly did at least to recover the ivory from their tusks. The curse that elephants experience today, persecuted by poachers for this white gold, therefore dates back to prehistory, even if at the time, the attraction was surely more practical than monetary.
Organized mammoth hunting
According to Dr. Pitulko, three quarters bones belonged to females, which would mean that they were preferred by humans, either because they were easier targets, or because their straighter tusks were more appreciated than those, curved, of males. His team noted that the bones, accumulated in a certain place in the cemetery, were close to the place which seems to have been inhabited by human activity, where ivory flakes were found, a sign that it had been worked, carved, transformed into a tool.
This site, write the specialists, could have been much more revealing if dozens of tusks from the Berelekh site had not been stolen and sold, particularly at the end of the 1940s. Other mammoth “cemeteries” were also discovered elsewhere in Siberia, and in particular on the site of Yana, which can also testify to a real organized mammoth hunt.
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