Tiny bones expose the ingenuity of Ice Age hunters

Eighteen thousand years ago, on a windswept bluff in what is now central Ukraine, Ice Age hunters built a circular shelter almost entirely from mammoth bones.

For decades, archaeologists debated whether these eerie structures marked permanent settlements or something more fleeting.

A new analysis led by Wei Chu of Leiden University (LU) sharpens that picture dramatically. By dating small animal bones buried inside and around one of the Mezhyrich shelters, the team shows that this imposing bone house was occupied only briefly.

The shelter appears to have been used during one of the coldest, most volatile phases of the last Ice Age before hunters moved on.

The findings shift the story from a long-lived village to a short-stay camp, revealing how people adapted to scarce wood, stressed mammoth herds, and extreme climate swings by reusing whatever durable materials the landscape offered.

Revisiting a village of bones

Mezhyrich is an open-air Upper Paleolithic site perched above the Ros and Rosava rivers in central Ukraine. The period represents a late Stone Age era when modern humans dominated Eurasia.

Archaeologists have uncovered four circular bone structures there, each surrounded by pits, workshops, and trash zones that together record a surprisingly busy Ice Age neighborhood.

Across central and eastern Europe, archaeologists have documented circular shelters with walls of stacked mammoth bones and central hearths.

These Ice Age dwellings often stood on river terraces and are surrounded by pits filled with animal bones and stone tools.

Those bone circles have long sparked arguments about what they really were. Some researchers interpret them as homes, while others view them as storage structures, monuments, or places where hunters cleaned and rearranged bones.

Refining the timeline

At Mezhyrich, earlier work already showed that something unusual was happening in this landscape.

Microstratigraphic studies and dozens of radiocarbon measurements placed hunter activity there between about 18,300 and 17,400 years before present.

One analysis suggested this occupation occurred during a cold phase marked by sharp climate swings.

Radiocarbon dating, a method that measures how fast a radioactive form of carbon decays in once-living tissue, has been the main tool for building that timeline.

Most early dates at Mezhyrich came from mammoth bones, which might have come from carcasses that were already old when people dragged them into camp. That is where Chu and his colleagues changed the game. 

Instead of dating mammoth bones, they sampled fox, hare, and wolf bones that were clearly part of the occupation layers inside the bone house, in a nearby pit, and in the heavily trampled yard outside.

Bones from the late Ice Age

Using tiny bones from foxes and hares, a recent study pinned one Mezhyrich structure firmly in late Ice Age time. The team dated it to between about 18,248 and 17,764 years ago and suggested it was used for no more than 429 years.

“The structure appears to have been used for up to 429 years, supporting the idea that it served as a dwelling,” said Chu.

By feeding all of the new dates into statistical models, they showed that the house, the big refuse pit, and the trampled area likely fell within the same narrow window.

In deep time, the site reads as a short-lived camp, not a long-lived town. People returned only for a few generations.

Signs of regular food processing

The new chronology turns attention back to what people actually did inside and around this structure.

Inside the ring of bones, archaeologists have mapped hearths, stone tool workshops, and dense concentrations of butchered animal remains. These features stacked into several thin cultural layers rather than a single thick floor.

Mezhyrich belongs to the Epigravettian, a Stone Age cultural tradition in eastern Europe defined by small stone points and blades that likely tipped spears and darts.

Around the house, large pits held heaps of broken mammoth, hare, and fox bones, along with ash and other domestic debris. Together, these finds suggest regular food processing and toolmaking rather than purely symbolic activities.

Bone fires replace wood

Fuel use at the site adds another piece of the puzzle. Researchers examined hearth deposits at Mezhyrich in a detailed taphonomic study that focused on how bones and other remains change after death.

The experts reported that these hearths contained many burned bones but almost no visible wood charcoal in their sampled layers.

The findings suggest that people in this Ice Age camp relied heavily on bone fuel whenever usable wood was scarce. 

Environment drives human adaptation

Environmental clues from animal chemistry back up the idea that Mezhyrich sat in a stressed ecosystem. A program of stable isotope analysis examined bone chemistry to study long-term dietary patterns and climate signals in the region.

The researchers found that mammoth bones from Mezhyrich and nearby areas showed unusually low nitrogen values compared with mammoths from other regions.

Those low nitrogen values point toward a shrinking ecological niche along the southern edge of the mammoth steppe.

Taken together, the short occupation span, the fuel mix, and the stressed mammoth herds suggest a practical logic for this camp.

When conditions allowed, hunters returned to a favored lookout, built or refurbished a sturdy bone house, burned bones for fuel, and moved on again.

Recycled bones in the Ice Age

The Mezhyrich results do not stand alone. At the Kostenki 11 site in western Russia, researchers used biomolecular and radiocarbon methods to examine the ages of mammoth jawbones in a large bone circle.

The analysis revealed that several jawbones were between 200 and 1,200 years older than the rest of the structure’s components.

These results indicate that people scavenged long-dead mammoth skeletons and later reused the bones in their architectural work.

These findings make mammoth bone structures look less like mysterious monuments and more like clever, flexible responses to hard environmental limits.

In a windswept steppe with few trees, heavy bones could provide walls, fuel, and even symbolic weight, all at once.

Ingenuity of Ice Age hunters

Mezhyrich also fits neatly into the wider map of mammoth bone sites. Surveys show bone houses clustered on river bluffs near migration routes, with occupations repeated over many centuries.

The new Mezhyrich chronology sharpens that picture by showing that at least one of these settlements was not a permanent base.

Instead, it was a place that people visited, reused, and finally abandoned as mammoth populations declined and landscapes gradually changed. For modern readers, there is a clear theme running through this Ice Age camp.

Ice Age hunters faced cold, scarce wood, and changing animal populations. They drew on deep knowledge of the landscape and used whatever durable materials they could find – even the bones of the mammals that fed and warmed them.

The study is published in Open Research Europe.

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