Mammoth Bones Discovered in Man’s Wine Cellar

It wasn’t vintage red or white, but it was vintage. A man renovating his wine cellar in Austria discovered the remains of a prehistoric mammoth.

A team from the Austrian Institute of Archeology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, which is tasked with excavating the ruins found in the village of Gobelsburg, just west of the capital Vienna, called the discovery “sensational.”

“Some of our team members, the older, more experienced ones, had never seen anything like it before, but they’ve seen a lot,” team member Hannah Parrow-Souchon told NBC News on Thursday.

Stone artefacts and charcoal at the site indicate the bones are between 30,000 and 40,000 years old, she added.

Winemaker Andreas Pernerstorfer told the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation that he discovered the wine while renovating his wine cellar in March.

“I thought it was a piece of wood my grandfather had left behind,” he says, “but then I dug around a bit and remembered he’d mentioned he’d found a tooth there long ago, and I immediately knew it was a mammoth.”

After the discovery was reported to the lab, Palou-Souchon said he and his colleagues worked together to painstakingly excavate each bone, gradually uncovering multiple intertwined skeletal structures.

The Austrian Archaeological Institute said similar sites have been found in Austria and neighbouring countries, but most were excavated at least 100 years ago and have largely been lost to modern research. news release.

Few important details about the circumstances or conditions in which the bodies were found were recorded at the time, and “some of the bodies were even sold to a soap factory,” Palou-Souchon said.

Using the latest 3D mapping technology, the research team will be able to learn more about how these mammoths died and what happened to their bones in the years that followed, she added.

And if that were to happen here, it could shed more light on how people were able to hunt these giant animals, Parrot-Souchon said.

“There is strong evidence that elephants were hunting, but we don’t know how,” she added. “We know that elephants don’t like slopes, so they may have been at risk because they were being hunted on slopes.”

Once all bones are exhumed, they will be sent to the Natural History Museum in Vienna for restoration and further study, the institute said in a news release.