Archaeology: remains of three mammoths unearthed in the city center of Brno

Since the 19th century, archaeologists have known that Brno, Moravia, and certain areas of the city in particular, contain artifacts dating back to the Stone Age era.

While work to reconstruct the heating network in the vicinity of Vídeňská Street is to take place soon, preventive excavations have been organized on the site: there, archaeologists first unearthed a mammoth molar and some objects in stone, before moving their center of interest a little further, to the immediate surroundings of a building where the old Brno cemetery and a church once stood. The existence of this burial site made it possible to partly preserve the places which have not been disturbed by more recent constructions.

There, two mammoth shoulder blades, a femur fragment, an incomplete reindeer antler that had clearly been worked by humans, a tibia, and several other nearby stone artifacts finally surfaced on the surface of the excavated area. This discovery is described as incredible by Lenka Sedláčková, head of the Archaia Brno company which is carrying out the excavations:

“We can say that this was a place where mammoth hunters indeed lived who butchered and processed the prey they had killed here. It’s something unique because we are right in the city center, in a residential area, but this kind of discovery is rare: most of the time such remains have been destroyed by construction sites in the past. . »

Woolly mammoths lived during the last ice age. Their existence is attested for a long period between -100,000 to -15,000 years ago, practically throughout the northern hemisphere. At the end of this period, their migratory routes probably went from the foothills of the Alps to northern Europe via the current city of Brno, then populated by hunter-gatherers.

This is not the first time that objects made by our prehistoric ancestors have been found in this same place. They date from around 15,000 years ago, from the end of the Ice Age, a time when the climate was already changing and warming. For a long time, archaeologists thought that mammoths no longer lived in this region, having started to migrate much further north before disappearing completely. These discoveries made in Brno show on the contrary that these large woolly pachyderms still lived in this region at the end of the ice age, even if they were much less numerous than before.

The presence of these tools in large numbers testifies to the presence of a settlement area nearby, but also to the fact that these animals did not die randomly. We must therefore imagine that, where there are houses and streets today, there was a privileged hunting area for these prehistoric men who then took away the parts of the animals that they needed, leaving behind the unused bones. . A game-rich hunting area, therefore rich in potential prey such as reindeer, horses, wolves, foxes and woolly rhinoceros. It is precisely in Brno that a skull fragment of this now extinct prehistoric species was found in 2021, whose closest relative is the Sumatran rhino.

The bones of the three mammoths unearthed as well as other animals were entrusted to experts from the Moravian Museum in Brno who will submit them for analysis. The public will then be able to discover them in 2026 through an exhibition in the Anthropos pavilion.