A ring of mammoths

A snippet lifted from reference 1, via a recent number of the EAORC bulletin.

'Ancient people took on a mammoth project, in more ways than one. Excavations at Russia’s Kostenki 11 site have uncovered one of the oldest and largest Ice Age structures made of mammoth bones. Hunter-gatherers assembled bones from at least 60 mammoths into an imposing ring around 25,000 years ago, say archaeologist Alexander Pryor of the University of Exeter in England and colleagues. Building this structure, which measures about 12.5 meters across, required a huge investment of time and energy, the scientists report in the April Antiquity. Bones may have come from hunted mammoths or from carcasses of animals that died of natural causes. Sieving of soil samples identified charred wood from fires set inside the ring, but it’s unclear how its makers used the structure, Pryor’s team says'.

With Kostenki being south of Voronezh and quite near the Don, maybe a mile or so away. The river made famous by the book at reference 3, a book which I used to know well. A book which some literary types claim was not written by Sholokhov, too much of a stooge of Stalin to have written such a good book. While according to Wikipedia: 'statistical analysis of sentence lengths in 'And Quiet Flows the Don' gives full support to Sholokhov ... The novel won the Stalin Prize in 1941 and its author won the Nobel Prize in 1965' - and I have a lot of faith in this sort of statistical analysis. For a rather different recipient of a Stalin prize see reference 4.

Maybe Lévi-Strauss was right about the human urge to make structure out of nothing, to have structure, to extract meaning from the void, being very basic. In this case a 25,000 year old urge to make what was probably a more or less pointless torus. Or more prosaically, a doughnut.

Maybe it is time to turn the book up again. A book which I believe to have survived the various culls over the years.

Reference 1: https://www.sciencenews.org/. See Bruce Bower, 16th March 2020.

Reference 2: http://kostenki-museum.ru/. The museum of the bones.

Reference 3: And quiet flows the Don - Sholokhov - 1932.

Reference 4: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-great-patriotic-war.html.