Shelters of Bone: Rethinking Ice Age Ingenuity at Mezhyrich

The mammoth-bone mystery revisited

On a low bluff near the Ros River in central Ukraine, the remains of four circular structures quietly persist. They are made not of timber or stone but of the massive bones of Mammuthus primigenius. Jawbones form the walls; tusks arch overhead like frozen waves. Archaeologists have studied these structures at Mezhyrich since the 1960s, yet their purpose and chronology have never been entirely settled.

Credit: Leiden University

A new study in Open Research Europe¹ by Wei Chu and colleagues returns to this famous Upper Paleolithic site with more precise radiocarbon dating, not by targeting the bones themselves, but by analyzing microscopic traces left by much smaller creatures: rodents and other small mammals that burrowed into the deposits long after humans had gone. Those intrusions, as it turns out, may hold the key to understanding just how briefly Mezhyrich’s bone houses were occupied.

“The revised dates support the view that these structures were built as episodic shelters rather than stable settlements,” says Dr. Helena Voronin, a Paleolithic archaeologist at the University of Warsaw. “Their construction signals remarkable adaptability, but not the rooted permanence once imagined.”