University of Cambridge archaeologists are joining forces with Czech colleagues to study the world’s first houses, sometimes built from mammoth bones, in Southern Moravia.
University of Cambridge archaeologists are joining forces with Czech colleagues to study the world’s first houses, sometimes built from mammoth bones, in Southern Moravia.
Beneath the soils of the gently rolling vineyards of Southern Moravia lie delicate traces of the world’s first houses, sometimes constructed from mammoth bones, and very early evidence of such craft activities as modelling clay and weaving, all carried out around a central hearth.
Between 25,000 and 30,000 years ago, Moravia was a more hostile place, its changing climate dipping to some very low temperatures. Its inhabitants sheltered and gathered around central hearths to share food, tell stories, weave cords, and make small models of themselves and their animal prey. They were able to follow the mammoth and reindeer north into yet more hostile worlds, an ability that would allow humans to conquer the far north, and thereby fill the Old World and reach the New.
University of Cambridge Professor of Archaeological Science, Martin Jones, is collaborating with Professor Jiri Svoboda, Director of the Palaeolithic and Palaeoethnology Research Centre at Dolní Vestonice, one of the important sites.
They are exploring some of these ancient houses and hearths with the full range of techniques available from modern archaeological science. By studying biological remains, and molecular traces, and using the latest methods of sedimentary analysis and dating, the team aims to build an intensive picture of life around those early hearths, thereby casting light on one key aspect of our own species’ ecology.
Although humans originated in Africa, they somehow had the ability and the incentive to spread north to the most ‘un-African’ ecosystems on the planet. Those early hearths beneath the vineyard soils of southern Moravia are key to understanding how that came about.
Picture shows Professor Jiri Svoboda (far left) and Dr Tamsin O'Connell (far right) inspecting a mammoth bone.
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