From the Vault: The Bone Palace, Part 1

The people of Teneraff take death too seriously. There's no room for the bailful arts here, and truth be told, they do not deserve our necromatic skills. I concur and agree wholeheartedly. If the people here insist on taking such a sacred stance on expiration, then fine. Good luck talking to the dead and raising skeletons from the grave without us around. Indeed, I wish them luck too in the completion of the canal project, with our splendid bone columns

to do the heavy lifting. Yes, they lack vision, I shall not miss them. Yes, good bones, though strong dairy industry here, I will miss the calcium well, yes, but but but our destination will first of all be free of their hyper religious nonsense, and it is filled with the remains as well, for sinsor is populated exclusively by the bones and mummies of a people ten centuries dead. No, Matte Moore, we shall build such an empire of necromancy.

Oh yes, Flying buttresses made from actual ixia and coxyges, a vast amphitheater of gladiators, reanimated mummies serving us delicacies on silver trays, skull goblets of wine and all to the music of piping bone flutes. Or a public bathwork made entirely of Maxillayan mandibles, twin thrones crafted of coiling vertebrae. Hell to our powers of bones. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind? Production of My Heart Radio. Hey, are you welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind? My name

is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick and Robert. I. I know today's episode got you in a necromantic adventure mood. So you dove into the old Clark Ashton Smith, didn't you. Yeah. When I saw that we were going to be doing an episode titled The Bone Palace about novel uses, for bones throughout human and to a certain extent, animal history.

My mind instantly went to necromancers, and so I instantly thought of Clark Ashton Smith's excellent little short story, The Empire of the Necromancers, and so the cold Open we began with that little skit. It was basically a on on that particular tale and the characters in it, in which we find a couple of necromancer's packing up shop, leaving the city in the world of the living in order to set up like a decadent necromantic playground in

the desert. You know, you think that they would need to stay at least around some of the living to do business, right, Like you can't just like be a necromancer inside a pyramid, Like there's a lot to work with, but nobody to work for, right I mean? And yeah, and then when you actually get into necromancy as it's treated in a lot of fantasy, you know, it's about not only death but life. It's about the cross between the two. And so I don't know, it's it's one

of these tales. A lot of Clark Ashton Smith's tales are at once very you know, very deep and exotic feeling. You know they have this this dark other worldliness to them, and yet there's often a little cheekiness as well. There's a sort of strange humor to them. And I think that's that's evident in his original story, which, by the way, if you want to read it out there, you can find it online for free at Eldric Dark dot com. I believe they have all of Clark Ashton Smith's writings

assembled there well. So obviously a a palace made out of bones, a bone building, would be a necromancer's dream. But it's hard to imagine such a place existing in reality, or at least it would have been for me a few days ago. But now maybe, um, and maybe that should not be so hard to imagine, because I want to start off today by going on a voyage of the mind's eye to to venture into the prehistoric past. Will you come with me, Robert, I shall let us

go to a place that is almost a necromantic kingdom. Uh. It's a place that is today in southwestern Russia. This would be about five hundred kilometers south of Moscow, UH, close to the banks of the Don River, near the modern day city of Vornesh And today this area is is basically kind of a fertile region, prairie type ecosystems, relatively moderate continental climate. It's a major center of agriculture

in modern Russia. Actually, I think they grow staple crops like sugar beets and potatoes, and they do animal agriculture as well there. But twenty thousand years ago there was still an ice age ruling the planet, and especially these northern realms of the planet. The most recent ice age known scientifically is the Last Glacial Period or l g P, lasted from more than a hundred thousand years ago. I think maybe roughly like a hundred and twenty thousand years

ago or so to roughly twelve thousand years ago. And this was the last great glaciation of the broader Pleistocene Age, which began more like two and a half million years ago.

So the Pleistocene Age has featured this back and forth pattern over over geological time, this pattern of repeated glaciation events where for thousands of years at a time, the world will grow old and the polar ice caps will creep down over the map towards the equator, like this sort of slow paint drip of frozen death, and then these glacial periods will be followed by warmer interglacial periods, sort of like with the one we think we're in

right now, where the ice sheets retreat back toward the polls and complex life pours back into these ice paved landscapes that are left behind. Now, of course this sounds very apocalyptic, but again, remember that these changes happen over like many thousands of years, so you know, generally humans and animals have have time to sort of adapt in migrate back and forth to adjust their lives to the

changing climates. The interglacial period that we're in right now is known as the Holocene epoch, and since it began more than ten thousand years ago, this relatively warm Holocene includes all of recorded human history. I think about that. We have no surviving literature at all with firsthand account of what these little ice ages were like, but there absolutely were humans around at the time. There were humans, humans like us crawling the earth during these frozen periods.

Homo sapiens actually came to exist during the place to see I'll be at first in warmer equatorial regions, but they soon began to spread all over the planet. We've we've talked about the spread of humans in recent episodes, even too far reaches in the north, where the wind would be ever howling. In this this menace of ice loomed. Yeah. I believe we've also talked about how the Neanderthal is u is perhaps more ideally suited for this sort of

cold weather environment. Yeah, and the Neanderthal will will come up a bit in this episode. But so Homo sapiens and Neanderthals both actually eventually spread to this general region, the Russian Plain, this area in like southwest Russia and Ukraine, uh, and more specifically this area I mentioned earlier that's you know, a few hundred kilometers south of modern day Moscow, along

the banks of the Dawn. So the last glacial period would have reached its most bitter cold in this place between about twenty three thousand and eighteen thousand years ago. The summers then would have been very short and very cool. Winters would be long and freezing. And at that time, winter in this place would have averaged about negative twenty degrees celsius or about negative four degrees fahrenheit. And that's before wind chill is taken into account, and it would

have been windy. So if you try to picture it. This region of the Russian plane at the time would have been a freezing step landscape, just a bit south of the ice sheets that reached down from the polar regions and covered much of North America, Europe and Asia at times. These glaciers, it's kind of hard to imagine this, but they were sometimes between three and four kilometers sick,

or more than two miles. So just imagine a mountain sheet of ice reaching down from the top of the world down into the continents, into totally inhabited regions today, and there were people who lived here at this time.

The archaeological record indicates that most humans left this region of southwest Russia during the harshest climate period of this ice Age, you know, the like between twenty three thousand and eighteen thousand years ago, And of course that's probably because first of all, it's so cold, but as a response to the cold, it's also because you know, most

food and fuel sources would have disappeared. Uh. In the words of a study that we're going to cite in a minute, this was quote a period of intense cold when similar latitudes in Europe were already abandoned, but here

some people stayed and survived. I find myself wanting to hear a Bruce Springsteen song about living in this environment, you know, after after other folks have have gone on and left for warmer climates, and you're you're just digging in and trying to make life work in this harsh environment on the winds hellan in this cold town, and I can hear you uh. And in fact it will it'll get even more really relevant because this town also

rips the bones from your back. Um. So I'm trying to imagine the people who lived in the shadow of this gigantic glacier. And I'm reminded, of course of that great line from literature that we come back to on the show from time to time. It's John Gardner's description of the monster Grendel in his reimagining of the Beowulf legend, when he calls him, uh, a shadow shooter, an earth

rim roamer, walker of the world's weird wall uh. And that's so lovely because it's it's first of all, just great imagery, but it also actually uses poetic devices that appear in the original Beowulf epic. Uh, the devices of a literation, which is there in Beowulf. You know, repeating sounds of the beginning of words, and this weird way of forming metaphors known as kinning, where you you sort

of like combine words into into a new compound. One example, often in translation in Beowulf would be calling the seas the whale roads. But for me, the Beowulf comparison doesn't stop there, because when I think of people trying to survive in this world, I get this kind of similar feeling of horror and mystery that's invoked by the story of Beowulf. More generally, like this small band of humans gathering around a fire set against the backdrop of this vast,

frosty wilderness full of darkness and monsters. Uh. And in reality, of course, this wouldn't have been monster monsters, but maybe desperate predators and scavengers that are also trying to eke out a survival alongside you at the edge of the world. And this in these utterly unforgiving elements, I mean truly a time when you would you wouldn't have to create Grendel,

because Grindel like organisms uh still roamed this region. I mean, of course, one of the most astonishing creatures to roam this region at the time would have been the great, the powerful, the wooly mammoth. But also to compare it

to Beowolf again, uh, the wooly mammoth is interesting. But because as great, as powerful, as terrifying an animal as this is, if you were to you know, come in come into combat with one, it ultimately did form the prey diet of many of the humans who or maybe all of the humans who lived in this place at the time. So you know, they became the Baowolf. They went out to kill the monster. Yeah, I mean, when you had the tools and the skills, uh to actually

bring these creatures down. They were such such such a wealth of resources exactly. And that's really getting us to the heart of the issue here. So there's another way this historical situation gives these real life flashes of grin daily and horror. And this is the real reason I

brought up these Ice Age hunter gatherers. Archaeologists have uncovered evidence in about seventy different places so far that the prehistoric peoples of this region of Ice Age Russia and Ukraine and the Russian Plane, they built buildings out of bones, especially out of the skulls, skeletons, and tusks of the wooly mammoth. Now, most often these structures take the form of large bone circles, and if you're trying to picture this, you can look it up with some terms I'll give

you in a minute. Um. But it's as if the builders were stacking up ring shaped walls around a central chamber, except the walls are made out of wooly mammoth skeletons. There are no detectable roofs left or you know that would cover up these walls if there were ever any roofs. There are just the circular or oval shaped wall of bone.

Dating methods reveal that humans were building these bone rings maybe from like twenty five thousand years ago up until about twelve thousand years ago in the region and uh and the wooly mammoth went extinct in this region about ten thousand years ago, so the numbers could have been dwindling at the time that these buildings went out of fashion.

And the amazing mystery is that so these ancient hunter gatherer humans were building these ring shaped structures out of mammoth bones, and archaeologists are not in agreement about what these bones circles were for. Yeah, because if you try and picture one in your mind, I mean, for for me anyway, it sounds it sounds regal, it sounds a bit sacred, right, I mean, it's made from the bones of this uh, this this organism that you've grown to

depend on. But but then again, you could also wonder, is it just is it just a material resources issue? Is it like if I started building uh like like little houses and forts out of the leftover Amazon on boxes that I have accumulating in my house. Well, I mean, I think you might have more options overall than we're available to the people of the Russian Plane at this time. But I think you are absolutely on the right track there, Robert,

I mean, as best we can guess. So maybe we should take a break, and then when we come back we can talk about a new study just from the past month about the oldest and largest of these structures

built by modern humans. Thank thank thank Alright, we're back, Okay, So we've been talking about the idea that all throughout this place known as the Russian Plane, in this area of eastern Europe, in like Southwest Russia and Ukraine, there are at least like seventy locations that archaeologists have found where Ice Age hunter gatherers built buildings out of bones. Now, I want to be fair, we called this episode the

bone Palace. These are not gigantic, elaborate buildings, they're not castles, But it is pretty amazing to see people, especially people who we did not believe had any kind of settled existence, building structures out of wooly mammoth bones. Yeah. I mean for the time period, I think this is like a cathedral. I mean, you know, in terms of like what else could we possibly compare it to that that humans, especially in that region were constructing. Uh, that we're building in

one place, Yeah, exactly. Um, So I want to go back to a more specific place within this region. I mentioned it earlier on remember that specific place about five hundred kilometers south of Moscow, near the modern day city of Voronesh. This site is known to archaeologists as Kostenky eleven, and since the mid twentieth century, archaeologists have known about a couple of smaller structures built out of mammoth bones

at this location. But just a few years back, around fourteen, I've seen both years sited excavation began on a newly discovered owned circle there, and this new bone circle at Costinky eleven dates back more than twenty thousand years. Radio carbon dating of some of the elements here it pushes its construction possibly back to about twenty five thousand years before the present. Uh So twenty five thousand years is the number that a lot of news reports have cited.

This bone circle is more than twelve point five meters in diameter, which is about forty one feet wide. Uh And in the present. The structure when it was found was buried about a foot beneath the surface before being unearthed. But the researchers think that this ring wall of bones was probably about twenty inches or about fifty centimeters high before it collapsed many thousands of years ago, so the bone wall would have come up, you know, more than a foot and a half off the ground or so.

Now here's where things start getting really weird. How many mammoths do you think went into the construction of this building? You might think, oh, well, you know, a mammoth's big. You could probably build a building with one or two man mouths, right, Well, I mean it is a big, big animal. But then when then you start thinking about okay, which of the bones are actually useful. Uh you know, which ones are going to be actually large enough for

long enough to be supportive? Like, there's still the creature is only going to have so many ribs, right, Or which bones have you not used for other purposes? Another possibility? That's right, because this is going to be a very utilitarian culture, Right, You're gonna have to if that bone is better used for scraping hides or you know, aiding in the the actual mission of acquiring and processing other

mammoths for your survival. Uh, it doesn't make as much sense at least without like really significant religious uh um underpinnings to use it in the construction of this mysterious structure. Or I mean so well, actually I'm not gonna spoil it. There's another possible use for the bones here that that I want to get to in just a little bit. I'll leave that tantalizing mystery for now. But so, how

many wooly mammoth's here? This structure was built out of the bones of more than sixty wooly mammoths, and this is indicated by the by the fact that there were sixty four individual mammoth skulls used in construction, as well as many other types of bones, including lower jaws, longbones, vertebrae, and tusks uh And while mammoth bones made up the bulk of the building materials, there were also a small number of bones from reindeer, horses, bears, and foxes like

the red fox and the Arctic fox uh and the circle today it sits on an east facing slope, sort of an incline, a slight incline about six degrees, and curiously, the bones make up a continuous wall with no apparent door or entry way. Well, that indemics me think that it's either it's either less of a building and more of just a sheer structure, almost like a piece of public art, or it's it's something that you're not supposed to come out of. In that case, it makes me

think it might be a tomb. Well, we find no evidence that it's a human tomb because there are no human remains inside it, so so we could mark that one off, though that might not be totally off the mark. In terms of the possibilities for ritual significance, we we don't know, and but we'll discuss those possibilities as we go on. Um So This find was described in a

paper published in the journal Antiquity. It was out just this past month by Alexander J. E. Prior, David G. Barrasford Jones, Alexander E. Doodon, E. Katerina M. Kona Cova, John F. Hoffiker, and Clive Gamble, and it was called the Chronology and Function of a new circular mammoth bone structure at Kostenky eleven. And so this new circle they found, the one we've been talking about, is now believed to be both the oldest and the largest bone structure yet

discovered that was built by Homo sapiens. It's at least a thousand years older than the other mammoth bone structures of Eastern Europe. Uh does a side note when I had to qualify built by Homo sapiens, that's because I was actually reading reports of a single possibly older bones structure, uh maybe more than forty thousand years old at a site called Malativa one in Ukraine. But this one is believed to have been built by Neanderthals and not Homo sapiens,

which either way is very interesting. Interesting to see Homo sapiens and Neanderthals participating in extremely similar cultures of proto construction out of bones, like before long before a settled agricultural life evolved, which is when we normally think of people, you know, building buildings and stuff like that. So it makes me wonder where the Homo sapiens copying the Neanderthals? Yeah? Yeah, or or are we just talking about two intelligent species, uh,

coming to the same conclusions based on the materials available. Yeah, and that that could be something there too, because we might not be when we're trying to understand what the heck was going on here? Why would you build a little these circular buildings out of bones. Maybe we're just not imagining how what their material limitations in life were. So the excavation of this new site, it took about

three years. It included experts from University of Exeter, from Cambridge, from the Costinky State Museum Preserve, and from the University of Colorado Boulder in the University of Southampton. And it was done using a technique called flotation, And that's where you apply water to the dig site in order to kind of sieve out archaeologically significant material to remove it from the sediment. So as we go on to discuss a little bit more about this finding and what makes

it so interesting. I want to keep a couple of main questions in mind. First of all, again, remember the utterly harsh, you know, reality of of surviving in this place during the last glacial maximum, especially the worst part of it, from like you know, twenty three thousand years ago or so to about eighteen thousand years ago. Uh, you know, would have been so cold, old and so unforgiving, and resources would have been pretty scarce. Why would people

come to or stay in this place at all? And then yeah, like if it's a place of seasonal return, then like it would there would have to be some some advantage there. Like he's often been brought up before that the nomadic people's would have regularly returned to say a hot spring at geothermal spring, which has an obvious advantage for your survival. But in this case, we can we find anything that obvious? Yeah? And then the other thing, of course, would be Okay, we know people were coming here,

what on earth was this little bone palace for? Why would you go to the trouble of making this thing? Uh? So, first I want to focus on what the research on this this new bone circle found, and then we can move to the what was it for? Question? Okay, so first of all, what do the research find? So usually these mammoth bone buildings made by these Stone Age humans are surrounded by a number of big pits, and this new find at Costinky eleven is no exception. Um, there

were several large pits around it. But again we don't know what these pits were for. It could be storage, it could be places to dumper berry trash, it could be a type of quarry that maybe mud or other building material was sourced from. I read about the possibility. We don't know, but maybe mud was used to patch the places in between the bones in the structure. Possibly, we don't know. Um, that would make sense. Next thing,

mammoth meat was cooked here. That's not very surprising, but okay, yeah, we have some evidence that they were cooking mammoth at this bone structure. Here things start getting weird. They also found burned mammoth bones and you might think, well, okay, you know, that's that's evidence of cooking, but no, we don't mean burned like that. These burned mammoth bones were actually used as fuel for the fire itself, and that this is not the only site like this by any means.

Evidence of this is found at other paleol at the bone ring sites throughout Eastern Europe. The people here burned bones to have fire, and you absolutely can do that. You can burn mammoth bones as fuel due to pockets of fat inside the bones that render and catch flame as the bone heats up. Huh. You know, I'd never thought of that. I mean, obviously, the mammoth is going to produce dung, which you know, once collected, could be used as fuel for five but I didn't even think

about their bones being used as fuel. Now, one thing we should definitely acknowledge here is that bones burn differently than wood does. There's a different quality to the fire. The bones are are greasy, and the fire they produce would be sort of inconsistent and it would generally put

out more light and less heat than a wood fire. Uh. One of the authors on this paper, David Barrissford Jones, who's an environmental archaeologist at the University of Cambridge, was speaking to I think it was the New York Times. It was being to some publication. He said that a fire that was powered by the fuel of mammoth bones quote, won't produce a nice good fire for roasting your mammoth meat on. So the bone based fire is not going to be very good for cooking more light than and

less heat. So what was the fire for, Well, we can come back to that later. Now. They also found about four hundred pieces of charcoal from wood fires, and this was charcoal from the would have conifer trees like

spruce and pine and larch. And here's another one where you might at first say, huh, well, that doesn't seem very unusual, but this actually is very interesting and even maybe revolutionary here because the previous widely held assumption was that this place and time would have been an utterly barren, nearly completely treeless step and consequently it was thought that the burning of bones by the humans of this area

was out of total necessity. There was no wood to burn at all, so they had to burn bones as the only possible fuel. But the charcoal at this new side at costinky eleven shows would was burned, meaning there were at least some trees. Now this does not at all mean you should imagine the landscape at this time full of thriving forests. Uh. The the authors suggest maybe more like it would be a place where, uh, there are a few trees here and there, barely surviving against

the ice. Uh. Speaking to the to the newspaper Harretts, the lead author, Alexander Pryor said, quote, the growth ring widths in the charcoal we recovered are mostly very narrow, suggesting that trees were clinging on at the edge of their tolerance limits. Summers would have been cool and relatively short, while winters were long and bitterly cold. The climate was also very arid, so trees would have clung on in sheltered parts of the landscape, perhaps in river valleys, away

from the wind and where moisture was available. Huh. And of course, in all of this we have to we have to weigh the fact that if you were to come across some some trees, some would um, there would be other potential uses for it that would compete with your, you know, necessity to burn it. I don't know in the case that these might be uh, some very pitiful trees, perhaps they really didn't have any other purpose but to

be burned. But again, coming down to just sort of the utalitarian reality of their harsh lives, you could well imagine them coming across a small tree and realize that, you know this, this would make a much better spear or or some other kind of tool as opposed to being just thrown into the fire. But then again, the fire is survival as well. So I don't know if it sounds like it becomes kind of a difficult balancing actor to figure out exactly how your fuel economy is

going to work. Oh, I think there is a lot to indicate actually that when they make you know, the these these hunter gatherers make the utilitarian calculus, they very much do probably prioritize the burning of wood over the use of wood for tools, at least in many cases. Um because again, you know, the wood really creates a high quality fire, and the mammoth bones you can get fire out of them, but it's not a good fire. It's not like a wood fire, right, But then those mammoths,

you're not just giving those bones away. You gotta get him yourselves, and you're gonna need tools to do it. That's true. So one other interesting thing about the findings about you know that there actually were some trees here at the time, against previous assumptions, the fact that there was some small number of scrawny trees surviving here could be the very reason that this place remained inhabited when other sites at the same latitude were abandoned by humans

during the Ice Age. Remember that question we're asking, like, why would people be here at all? To quote from the study quote, the presence of conifer trees near Kostinky, perhaps located in low lying, moist and sheltered areas in the ravines near to the site, would have been an important resource that attracted hunter gatherers to the area during the glacial period. So it's entirely possible that this latitude of northerly waste land has mostly just been completely abandoned

by humans. But here's a place where the human hunter gatherers can get a foothold this far north because there are a few trees that they can harvest and make fires with. Wow, I mean I remember, like fire, it's our secret weapon. It's like the thing that that is. It changes the game in terms of what types of climates are habitable and what types of of prey we

can hunt and stuff like that. Yeah, we've discussed that on the on the show in the past when we talked about a world before fire and then on invention we discussed fire technologies and just how truly game changing they were. Now a couple of other findings about it before we moved to the what was this for question? Along the same lines as the charcoal, they found a few vegetables interesting. Good for them, Yeah, because we might have assumed that mammoth hunters roaming the furthest reaches of

habitable land during the last glacial maximum. We're pretty much limited to a diet of mammoth meat, but there are remains of plant based foods at this new bone circle. And these plant based foods include plant matter associated with edible roots and tubers, which which I've seen compared to modern crops like parsnips, carrots, and potatoes. So along with your mammoth meat, maybe you're getting a few carrots in there. Maybe you're having some mashed taters or something probably not

mashed taters, at least some kind of tat thing. Well, this is excellent. I'm gonna pass this on to our new potential sponsors, Mammoth Meals. What they're offering is a is an authentic ice age diet of cloned that grown Willie mammoth meat and thrown in there with some parsnips, carrots and a few you know, random scavenged tubers and you just you you heat those up in your house.

You don't have to cook them on mammoth bones, but it is recommended if you want to just the proper uh you know, the proper texture and the proper uh you know, flavoring to the meat, use our promo code bone Palace. Uh. Yeah, And I want to be clear, just so I'm not confusing anybody, Uh, the parsnips, carrots and potatoes thing, that's like a point of comparison of

what these roots would be like. Like we know that potatoes were not grown in this place at this time, so you know, like they wouldn't have been actually potatoes, but similar types of foods, right, I mean, if they had anything like a carrot. I've often seen it pointed out that you know, in in in this age and other ages of human gathering, like a carrot would be the equivalent of us finding like a cheesecake, you know, or or or or a giant bag of skittles. Yeah,

just like the maximum sweet. Next time you're eating a carrot, think about that. Think about what it would be to live in a world where this was maximum sweetness, our in our mouths just ruined. Now we eat a Karen, it's like, oh yeah, I mean our mouths are ruined on more than one count because of this, uh, this

unbalanced sugar economy. Yes, yeah, um. But also so in addition to the signs of there being some kind of roots and tuber based foods, there were also remains of charred seeds, though it's not clear if these seeds were brought here by humans. Um. One more thing this ties into a previous episode. There were some light signs of napping, not napping like sleeping, but napping with a k This is what we talked about with Dietrich Stout on our

episode about stone age technology. It is a method of constructing stone tools by striking stones together to shear a target stone off and form a sharp edge. And the evidence included here would be like stone flakes and chips that would be a byproduct of the manufacturer of stone tools. We find stuff like this at the places where stone

age people lived. They were they were manufacturing tools a lot, and they needed these tools to survive, so you'd find all these signs the waste products of the the the you know, sharp flake manufacturing process. But then again, people were building stone tools here, but it looks like there was also much less manufacture of stone tools here then there would usually be at at other sites where people

lived more or less permanently during this period. This has been taken as evidence this site was not occupied for very long, or maybe it was only occupied a very contained times throughout the year, because if people had been living here on a more permanent basis, you would expect to find way more signs of them making tools. So we can basically see this as the kind of like stonework to try this that would have been left in

the wake of of these people. And uh, and therefore we can indicate just how long they were staying in the area. All right, let's take one more break, but when we come back, we will continue to discuss the mystery of this ice age boom palace. Alright, we're back, all right, So we're asking the question what was this ice age bone palace for Remember, it's the circle of bones.

It's more than forty feet in diameter. It would have been you know, at least like one and a half feet tall off the ground at the time it was built, made entirely out of mammoth bones, made out of more than sixty mammoth bones. We should stop to stress again how weird this is. Why would hunter gatherers living in the northernmost habitable reaches of eastern Europe during the Pleistocene build a structure like this or you know, not just

this structure, build these many structures like this? Uh. First of all, evidence tells us that they usually lived nomadic lifestyles. They would travel to follow available food resources like herds of prey animals, or follow other resources. They didn't generally build permanent structures to live in. So if you were just assuming, well there's probably some kind of house, I mean,

that is possible, and we'll discuss that possibility. But that from first glance, that is kind of counterintuitive because you you wouldn't be living here year round. This would be a place of seasonal return at best. But beyond that, think about the quality and quantity of effort required to build a structure like this. The bones in this building came from again more than sixty different mammoths. Think about how this literally had to be put together. Mammoth bones

are huge. They are extremely heavy, especially when they're fresh right like when they're you know, they still got all the moisture and fat in them before they decay and become more porous. These bones would have been like heavy stones to move around. The people either had to scavenge these bones from dead mammoths that they found, or they would have to kill the mammoths themselves, and then they would have to carry them back to this prehistoric construction site.

So to quote the lead author, Alexander Pryor, and if I didn't mention this earlier, he's an archaeologist at the University of Exeter in England. He was speaking to Nicholas St. Fleur of The New York Times. Quote. The sheer number of bones that are Paleolithic ancestors had sourced from somewhere and brought to this particular location to build this monument

is really quite staggering. It does boggle the mind. I've seen some articles sort of in a cheeky way, calling this site bone hinge, and I think the comparison it has a few merits. Right. This would be a massive project of sourcing tons of dead mammoths and getting their

crushingly heavy remains to this very spot. Plus one imagines, okay, First of all, certainly for their mammoth kills, they are processing the carcass in order to get the meat, you know, other materials from the body that it might be using for various uh um you know, tools, clothing, etcetera. But you're probably going to have to do additional processing of the bones. I mean, unless you're just putting you know, meaty half rotten uh you know, flesh clad bones up

there on the structure. I'm imagining they're they're going to further um uh you know, put the bones in order before adding them to the construction. So just a lot of work, Robert, You've got some surprises coming to you before we move Oh boy, this is gonna be fun. Before we move on. I just realized came into my head. Did you watch I think you should leave the Tim Robinson Show? Yes? I did. Could you stop while we were preparing for this episode with singing the bones are

their houses and so are the worms? I forgot about that one. Oh man, it's one of the best. We sing that song a lot in our house. I would sing it here, but I don't know if that's the kind of thing that you get bone cheese over. I don't know. That that's a that's a very very weird and entertaining show. I really like the one about the two plumbers. Oh I like that too. Yeah, not part

of the turbo team. And okay, okay. So it's coming back to the question of like archaeologists now trying to figure out what the heck was were these bone circles for, especially this big one. Um So the most obvious answer, one that we already hinted at, is well, maybe it's a dwelling. This is this is a bone house with two cats in the yard, etcetera. This one, it's difficult to totally rule it out, and many other smaller bone circles found throughout Eastern Europe have been assumed to be

shelters or dwellings of some kind for humans. I was reading an article about the study and harets and it pointed out that of the about seventy mammoth bone structures found in Eastern Europe, some are all on their own, but others are grouped and arrangements of up to like

six in the same place. Remember at this site there were two other ones already known about smaller ones, so this would be three and roughly the same area and this suggests maybe these are some kind of proto village, right uh, that we don't know yet if they were occupied at the same time as each other, but usually they were close to rivers, which would make sense for an actual settlement. So it's hard to completely rule out the possibility that this was some type of shelter structure

for humans to get inside and live in. But Prior, the lead author on the study we've been talking about, and the other authors really do not seem to think that this place was a dwelling, certainly not a permanent dwelling, maybe a seasonal dwelling of some kind. But there there are a few reasons that they think argue against the idea that this was a house for people to live in. So, first of all, Prior just argues that it's hard to imagine how an area the size of this circle the

most recent find would have been roofed. Think about it. This is a forty one foot wide circular wall, not very tall, made out of bones, with no signs of interior support structures. What would the roof be made out of and how would it stay up? And why is there no sign of any roofing left? Now, Yeah, that is a great question that I didn't I didn't initially think to ask if if it's going to be a proper dwelling, it has to have a roof and it's

and what are you gonna make it out of? I mean, it can't really depend on these heavy bones so much. Uh you know, maybe hide comes to mind. Uh, yeah, that wood materials, but we already touched on how scarce those were likely to be. Yeah, I mean, hides were the thing that was kind of coming to my mind. But still it would be hard to imagine exactly how that worked on a structure this big, like um, how

the remains lie today. I've seen this pointed out. It doesn't necessarily tell us what they looked like when they were in use, because it's possible that maybe these structures were more sort of conical with spaces between the bones patched in with mud um and you know, perhaps they were somehow kind of like tps, maybe like they could have had hides up on the top somehow, but we we just don't know. But also here's another reason to think that it's kind of unlikely that this was a dwelling. Uh,

this one in particular. This is prior speaking to George Davorski of Gizmoto quote some of the bones that make up the ring were found inarticulation, for example, groups of vertebrae, indicating that at least some of the bones still had cartilage and fat attached when they were added to the pile. This would have been smelly and would have attracted scavengers, including wolves and foxes, which is not great if this was a dwelling. Yeah, that does sound It's an understatement,

not great. Yeah, do not mistake like this is a stone age building made out of mammoth bones. But not just clean, dry bones. These were bones with soft tissue still clinging to them, not just like individual vertebrae, but like parts of a wooly mammoth's intact spinal cord, etcetera. Now maybe they were just living foul. I have to consider that possibility. But yeah, try to imagine living there, like in the warmer months, when the thaw came, this

bone castle would reek of death. It would attract carnivores, it would attract scavengers. Uh, you know, it's kind of like why not build an outhouse out of cotton candy and maple syrup? Just yeah, this is the one that I can't stop thinking about. So it's not just a palace made out of bones, but a palace of of bones with a good bit of meat and cartilage and stuff still stuck on there. Now here's the next argument

against it being a dwelling. Remember how I mentioned that the evidence of stone tool manufacturer the site was relatively light. This is also taken as evidence against it being a permanent or long inhabited dwelling. If anybody lived here, they were either not making stone tools at a normal rate,

or they did not live here very long or very frequently. Uh. It seems the authors here think more likely that if it was used as a shelter for humans, it was only used seasonally or temporarily for a short time, which would be kind of hard to understand for a structure that so much intense work would have gone into making sixty dead mammoth's bones transported from wherever they got them to this place. I don't know. I mean, you can perhaps imagine it was some kind of shelter against the cold,

maybe used in the worst parts of winter. Um. But if so, I mean, a good question to counter that is, why would it be built out of mammoth bones. Again, maybe this is just an issue of pure necessity. Like again, you imagine the landscape, the mammoth bones might have literally

been the only thing available aside from scarce. Would supplies from a few clumps of scrawny trees clinging on for dear life, and the wood from those trees would have been more valuable for starting fires than for building with. So the bones are all you've got, the only thing

you can build with. And I should mention that despite the authors here not seeming to favor the dwelling hypothesis, I was looking at a New York Times article that cites Paul Pettit, and archaeologist from Durham University in England, and Pettit does not rule out the idea that this structure was a dwelling of some kind, probably some kind of shelter to protect against the cold in the in the winter. So uh, not all archaeologists would would disfavor

the dwelling hypothesis. And I guess in all of this too, like we keep coming back to very utilitarian, uh explanations for what was being done here, and I think that's ultimately the direction to lean into. But but we we have. We have very little idea what additional say, religious significance, uh, these sites might have had, right, I mean, I mean

just just spitball in here. But like if if you're building a shelter, uh to age you in the winter, if there is an additional idea that somehow say this, you know, the spirits of these of these great creatures was somehow in the bones, you know, if there was some like added you know, not enough to really make a difference obviously in survival, but just some added idea of why this place would be a good shelter. Uh, it could conceivably have had some sort of impact on it.

I'm guessing, well, yeah, that's another possibility, is that maybe it just had some kind of religious or ritual significance. Maybe it's some kind of shrine to the gods or or shrine to the kill. I mean, that wouldn't be unique. It's you know, a shrine made out of wooly mammoth's

in honor of wooly mammoth's. That's possible. Um. And since one of the ideas raised in that Harrett's article I mentioned earlier was that since there were traces of food found there, not just mammoth meat, but like vegetables and other things and traces of fire, you can't rule out the idea that this could have been something like a feast site, a place where special ritual cooking and eating took place, but not a place that people lived permanently.

And again it's hard to roll that out. Maybe, but I often find that in archaeology it seems like ritual or religious significance tends to be the explanation given when you see ancient people expending a lot of effort on something and you can't figure out what else it's for. You know, the logic goes something like big investment plus

no apparent utilitarian purpose equals religion. And like the Pyramids zone basically, when we get into something like that which clearly has no practical real world um use but has a tremendous importance within a like a spiritual supernatural view of the world, then again I think sometimes maybe that under cells uh, it's it's under imaginative about what practical real world uses could be. Because take the example of

the Pyramids. Okay, you look at that, you say, there is you know, obviously these were built for religious reasons, because you couldn't possibly imagine a practical reason for making structures of the size, spending this amount of money and all that. On one hand, you would say, well, yeah, the pyramids clearly do have religious implications. They have stuff to do with the idea of, uh, you know, the royal deity of of the pharaohs and the afterlife in

in the Egyptian religion and all that. But I can also come up with a list of what I think are probably practical considerations that went into the construction of the pyramids. For example, uh, the the pharaoh protecting his own power by demonstrating his greatness, you know that, Like the pyramids could be a essentially a warning sign to potential rebels or invaders, you know, like, look how great

I am. You don't want to challenge me? And and in that way, like it's it can be kind of hard to imagine what the cultural signaling could have been for ancient projects because we just don't know what the culture was like, right, Like you could imagine, and again we don't have any direct evidence of this, but you could imagine maybe something like that is going on with mammoth bone structures. Maybe the people who built them, it

could have had some religious significance. It could have been just people sending some kind of signal to other people or something. Yeah, And I mean, plus, it's you know, it's difficult to imagine like the the ins and outs of a of the society that would have depended so much upon the regular acquisition and then processing of these large high It's like they would have been working who had been working with the with mammoth bodies, you know, so much would be so much significance placed on them.

You know, you wonder like what sort of ideas would grow out of that, Like how would you view the bones of these creatures? Uh? Yeah, it's it's it's fascinating to try to imagine. Um. But but yeah, certainly to your point, even something that has that is essentially a religious structure is going to it's it's not going to exist outside of our world. It's still going to uh

you know service say something like make work project. It's going to serve as a as a as a symbol of power, a symbol of of royal or even divine um, uh you know association. Yeah, there's there are a number of ways that could factor into into the maintenance of once power structure. Yeah, yeah, my imagination is actually running wild now that we're talking about this. I hadn't really thought about this aspect before we started recording today. Um,

what if these bones structures? Again, I want to be very clear, there's no direct evidence of this, and we're just imagining. What if these these bone circles were something more like you know, the Arc de Trium for the Pyramids or something. They were made to like impress somebody to show off. Look at all these mammoths I killed. Look what a glorious hunter king I am. Yeah, yeah, look how favored we are by uh, the hunt or

whatever supernatural powers might lie beyond the hunt. What if it was a signaling thing for this area where there was some pretty unique resource of as far as these northern latitudes go. Maybe you wanted to scare other potential hunter gatherers who could be coming in the area to try to get your scraggly trees or access to your water source or something like that. Yeah. Maybe it's like saying, hey, are there wandering humans. You're venturing into a zone where

people are capable of bringing down this many mammoths. Maybe you don't want to mess with us. Yeah, So again just speculation, but it I do think it's it's important to recognize that, like, our imagination is limited in understanding why ancient people's did things, especially when like we don't know much about their culture and what kinds of social and what kinds of broader social relationships and pressures they had.

But I want to come back to one final hypothesis about the role of this place, of this bone structure, and this one is more directly utilitarian. This one is more directly about how to survive in the landscape. And this this hypothesis is that it's basically a type of storehouse for food. And this seems to be the the idea that the researchers themselves, including prior that I get the feeling that they kind of favor and the team is looking into evidence of this possibility in their ongoing work.

But basically, the idea is that this bone circle and perhaps others too, would have been used as a place to store meat and other foods. Now, normally we associate food storage with the advent of agriculture, right, but there's some hints that perhaps some nomadic pre agricultural hunter gatherers found ways to store excess food and uh, you can imagine a need for this, right, Like a dead mammoth generates a lot of meat I dare say, more than

it's possible to eat before it starts to spoil. And people at this time didn't have all the options that we do for food preservation. But it's possible that these people figured out that after a mammoth kill, they could butcher the animal and store its meat in a structure like this, maybe buried down in the herma frost, to save it for meager times later when food was scarce. All right, now you're talking. So if it's if it's in the you bury in the earth, You keep it cool.

You just need you need to make sure that nothing else digs it up. You might you need to cap that, and of course we know from various funeral traditions throughout the world, like one way to do that is cap it off with a big stone. But if you don't have a big stone, what what are you gonna do? Right? Oh, yeah, that's a possibility. Maybe the bones are a barrier to protect these buried stores of food that are down in

the permafrost. So if this really was a storehouse for food, that would show that these hunter gatherers didn't just follow animal herds for their immediate food needs, but instead actually planned for the future by storing resources and known locations so that they could find an access later. Uh. And again remember all the evidence of bones burned as fuel

within this bone building. Well that that sort of fits as well, at least maybe you remember burning bones do not put out very even heat, but they do put

out a lot of light. And uh and I've seen sighted in several sources that the authors here kind of speculate what if the fires from the burned bones here were to produce light to work by, so that hunters after a mammoth gille could work long into the dark night to quickly process and strip the meat from the mammoth bones before wolves and other scavengers arrived in order to get it stored away. Yeah. Yeah, I like that idea. Yeah, because you only you only have to have so much time.

It's just gonna draw attention. One last idea about how and why these structures were put together that the lead author prior suggests quote one possibility is that the mammoths and humans could have come to the area on mass because it had a natural spring that would have provided unfrozen liquid water throughout the winter, rare in this period of extreme cold. So that that gets back to your idea of like, you know, people, you know, why would people go to a region that's just frozen and very

barren and resources are scarce. What if you can access water here and in the surrounding landscape it's all going to be frozen. We don't know this, but this is another possibility to imagine. Anyway, it looks like due to time, I think we're gonna have to cap the first part of our exploration of of bone palaces and bone construction right here. But man, this subject really gets my blood pump, and I get so excited about these mysteries, like what

were these people doing? What was this for? I don't know that. This is the kind of thing I love thinking about. Yeah, I mean it forces you to sort of strip down the human condition and human culture to its uh, to its bare bones, and imagine what something like this would would would would what purpose it would serve? Uh. Yeah, So we're gonna we're gonna cap it here. We're gonna cap this episode off with a nice construction of mammoth remains.

But then we're going and we're gonna leave, but then we're gonna come back and we're going to record a second episode where we'll discuss more about the use of bone technology and human history and also how some of you know, various animals engage with the remains of other creatures. In the meantime, if you would like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you can find the show wherever you find your podcasts and wherever that happens to be. Make sure that you rate, review,

and subscribe. That really helps us out in the long run. If you go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, that will shoot you over to the I heart listing for our show. Oh another thing you might have noticed or heard us mentioned this already, but we've been regularly

putting out playlists every week. It's like a playlist of ten past episodes and uh, we're you know, this is something that the company wrote, rolled out and we decided to have some fun with it, try and pick out some some topics that would be engaging and you know, maybe even distracting in these challenging times. So we hope you enjoyed them, and if if you're not enjoying it, well, I hope it's not too much of an inconvenience. I

hope it's both an inconvenience and you're enjoying them. That's true. It can be both things. A lot of aspects of life can be both things in these challenging times. Okay, so huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson, who is going to great links to keep the show sounding great for you out there, even despite our you know, changing recording situations. So y'all please

show your appreciation for Seth. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hi, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio was the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows. I think a T four F four far far f