By Valerie Gillett
Shortly before the peak of the last ice age, herds of woolly mammoths roamed across central Europe, following seasonal routes through a vast, frozen landscape of grasslands and tundra. Throughout the region, archaeologists have uncovered fascinating deposits of mammoth bones, sometimes numbering in the thousands.
These sites have puzzled researchers since the 19th century. Was this vast bed of bones the result of predation, natural death, or both? And what do they reveal about the people living alongside these giant creatures?
An EU-funded European research team is taking a fresh look at three of the most important sites: Kraków Spadzista in Poland, Dolny Vestonis in the Czech Republic and Langmannersdorf in Austria. Their work is part of a five-year initiative called MAMBA, funded by the European Research Council, which will run until June 2027.
The work is led by Dr. Jaroslaw Wilczynski, a paleontologist and associate professor at the Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Krakow.
He coordinates an international team working to piece together what these bone deposits can tell us about life between 35 000 and 25 000 years ago.
bone fracture
To answer these questions, the team combined traditional archeology with a wide range of scientific techniques. Excavations are combined with laboratory analysis with expertise in genetics, isotope chemistry, geoarchaeology, and paleoclimatology.
“We’re combining fieldwork and laboratory work,” Wilczynski said. “We collect new material, but we also reexamine museum collections using methods that weren’t available before.”
We collect new material, but we also re-examine museum collections using methods that were not previously available.
By studying the stable isotopes of bone, scientists can tell what mammoths ate, where they lived, and even when they died. Ancient DNA (aDNA) from mammoth remains is helping researchers build a picture of these extinct mammoth populations—how big they were, how they were related, and how they changed over time.
To go further, the team is also using strontium and oxygen isotope analysis, led by Alex Prior of the University of Exeter. These isotope ratios in teeth and bones act like natural geographic markers, allowing researchers to trace where individual mammoths lived and moved during their lifetime.
High-precision radiocarbon dating is refining the timeline of each site, while a better understanding of past environments is helping to reveal the landscape and climate of the time.
Wilczyński and his team are also careful to balance analysis with preservation. “Excavation and analysis techniques have improved over the years,” he said. “We can preserve specimens more carefully and, where possible, excavate new material rather than risk damaging historic collections.”
Tracing Ancient DNA
The MAMBA team’s aDNA work is led by David DJ del Molino, a researcher at the Paleogenetics Center in Stockholm, a joint institute of Stockholm University and the Swedish Museum of Natural History.
He specializes in aDNA analysis, and uses aDNA and computational methods to study the evolution of extinct species and past ecosystems. MAMBA’s work has created some challenges for sample preservation.
“Most of the aDNA we study comes from well-preserved mammoth samples from permafrost deposits. But all the mammoth material from MAMBA comes from non-permafrost contexts, which is much more challenging,” says Diez del Molino.
By developing advanced DNA extraction methods tailored to decaying samples, the team is unlocking genetic information from samples that are considered unsuitable for analysis, opening up museum collections to a new type of research.
“We hope to analyze more than 400 samples by the end of the project,” says Diez del Molino. “Given our success rate, we are potentially unlocking thousands of historically neglected samples for DNA research.”
What the hunters knew
The emerging picture challenges previous assumptions about human behavior.
Rather than opportunistic scavengers, the people living alongside mammoths appear to have been efficient and organized hunters. They were capable of planning and coordinating complex hunting operations and processing large kills such as mammoths and other animals.
“They understood animals and their environments very well,” said Dorothy Dorker, a research fellow at the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment at the University of Tübingen in Germany. Drucker is an expert on ancient diets and ecosystems.
The woolly mammoth is an iconic species that has played a major ecological role.
Ice Age hunter-gatherers appear to have had a detailed understanding of massive migration routes, seasonal movements, and gathering areas. They likely used this knowledge to position themselves strategically, increasing their chances of success.
Such activities will require cooperation, communication and social organization. The bone deposits we find today are, in a sense, trace elements of that skill.
The woolly mammoth was not only a source of meat. It was a keystone species in its environment, shaping the landscape around it.
“The woolly mammoth is an iconic species that played a major ecological role: a large animal that chewed up trees and shrubs, changing its environment, fertilizing the soil with its dung,” Drucker said.
For humans, it provided a wide range of resources, including meat, fat, ivory, and bone for tools and ornaments.
Learning from a changing world
The period between 35,000 and 25,000 years ago at the end of the Ice Age (known to archaeologists as the Upper Paleolithic) was one of rapid environmental change. As the climate cooled and the ice sheets expanded, ecosystems shifted across Europe, affecting both animal populations and human communities.
“What we see is that humans were highly adaptive,” Duker said. “They were able to respond to changing circumstances and still utilize available resources.”
At the same time, researchers are investigating how human activity may affect mammoth population declines.
“Mammoths show unusually high levels of an isotopic marker called nitrogen-15, which is associated with diet,” explained Drucker. “People who ate a lot of mammoth meat also showed higher levels of this marker. This suggests that mammoths were an important food source.”
Researchers are now using these isotopic signals, alongside genetic data, to explore how strongly human hunting may have contributed to mammoth population declines, in combination with climate change.
The decline and eventual extinction of mammoths likely resulted from multiple interacting pressures, including climate change, habitat modification, and human activity. Untangling these factors remains a key challenge.
Findings from these sites provide insights that go beyond archaeology By reconstructing how early humans adapted to extreme and rapidly changing conditions, researchers are gaining a clearer understanding of human resilience over time—how societies respond to environmental stressors, organize themselves, and survive.
What is becoming increasingly clear, however, is that Ice Age humans were not passive observers of their environment. They actively shaped it and were in turn shaped by it.
The mammoths are long gone. But in the bones they left behind, the people next to them started talking.
The research in this article was funded by the European Research Council (ERC). The views of the interviewees do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Commission. If you liked this article, please consider sharing it on social media.
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This article was originally published by Horizon, EU Research and Innovation Magazine with Creative Commons Attribution
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