New study dates 18,000-year-old mammoth bone dwelling in Ukraine

Ice age hunter-gatherers built shelters entirely from the bones of woolly mammoths on a bluff above the Ros and Rosava rivers in what is now central Ukraine, at a site known as Mezhyrich, first excavated between 1966 and 1974 near a village about seventy miles southeast of Kyiv.

Archaeologists uncovered four separate circular structures at the site, each built from hundreds of mammoth bones and tusks, surrounded by pits, workshops and debris zones. Earlier dating attempts had produced a broad range of possible ages, from roughly 19,000 to 12,000 years ago, leaving researchers uncertain about when the structures were actually used.

A team led by Wei Chu of Leiden University resolved the uncertainty by dating the remains of about a dozen small animals recovered from layers in and around the dwellings, rather than the mammoth bones themselves. According to the study published on the Open Research Europe platform, this placed the largest structure, known as MBS4, at between roughly 18,248 and 17,764 years old — squarely within the harshest phase of the last Ice Age, just after the Last Glacial Maximum.

The radiocarbon evidence from in and around MBS4 overlapped closely enough to suggest the structure saw only brief use, possibly a handful of separate visits over centuries, rather than continuous habitation.