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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
As the last Ice Age tightened its hold on Europe, a group of people living near the Don River piled dozens of mammoth bones into a 12.5m (30ft) wide circle. They may have lived in the shelter of the mammoth bones for a while, huddling around fragrant fires of conifer wood and mammoth bone and making stone tools. But the traces they left are so light that it seems they didn’t stay long—or maybe they only visited occasionally.
Archaeologists found the bone circle in 2015. It’s one of about 70 mammoth-bone circles scattered around eastern Europe and western Russia, and it’s one of three within a few hundred square meters of each other near the modern village of Kostenki, about 500km (310 miles) south of Moscow. Excavations unearthed the first bone circle at Kostenki during the 1960s. A second structure nearby now lies buried under construction on private land. The third bone circle at Kostenki, discovered in 2015, is the largest and the oldest structure of the sort ever found.
Fragments of charcoal from inside the circle, along with samples of mammoth bone and ivory, radiocarbon-dated to around 20,000 years ago, during the coldest stage of the Last Glacial Maximum. Ice sheets several kilometers thick stretched southward across most of northern and western Europe. But people somehow made a living on the cold, inhospitable steppes just southeast of the glaciers. They also built huge circles out of mammoth bones—archaeologists just aren’t sure why.
“Most other places at similar latitudes in Europe had been abandoned by this time,” said Pryor, “but these groups had managed to adapt to find food, shelter, and water.”
Most researchers assume the rings of bone are the remains of ancient dwellings, which would once have been covered with roofs to keep out the -20⁰C cold of Ice Age winters. But University of Exeter archaeologist Alexander Pryor and his colleagues say the newly discovered circle at Kostenki contains hints that instead of a permanent home, the site could have been a seasonal base-camp, a ceremonial site, or even a food storage depot.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2020, @06:42PM (4 children)
through a reliable source that there may be an Internet & Cell blackout in USA tonight.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2020, @06:53PM
New Windows 10 Update?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday March 30 2020, @07:37PM
Nah:
US government officials using mobile ad location data to study coronavirus spread - The CDC could use the info to track compliance with stay-at-home orders [theverge.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2020, @07:40PM
Why is this modded "Offtopic"? It's clear that the Russians plan to shut off the Internet, and when we're all behind our computers trying to reconnect it they'll ride in on their mammoths and encircle the USA.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday March 31 2020, @01:50AM
I heard a rumour that they're shutting down the Internet to prevent the spread of false rumours on the Internet.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday March 30 2020, @07:28PM
The only possible explanation for this would be that the mammoth bones were piled around a flying saucer, which later left.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Monday March 30 2020, @11:05PM
Ever since reading about Göbleki Tepe [wikipedia.org] I have wondered if humans have a deep need for religion or what it is that drives primitive rituals which appear, at least to our modern eyes, quite expensive in time and labour.
Is our conciousnes the root? Or our intelligence? Are we concious of fear and therefore act searching protection from imagined powers? Or is that being intelligent we imagine those powers as existing and needing worship?
Of course, scientists say that Göbleki Tepe, Stonehenge and maybe these circles are examples of religious sites, but we don't really know if religion really extends that far back. If not for religion, for what purpose were those circles of bone or stone built? They appear not be housing or storage.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday March 31 2020, @12:43AM (1 child)
Nobody wanted to live here, with the wind rushing down off the glaciers, but the hunting was good. Stick some big rib bones into the ground, and cover them with hides, and you've got a place to spend a night or two, preparing your kill to be packed back home. American Neanderthals still maintain hunting lodges in less inviting locales today.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Tuesday March 31 2020, @01:16AM
As far as we know, there never were Neanderthals [wikipedia.org]
in the American continent.
But wherever your ancestors came from, except never-left-Africa-before ones, you got Neanderthal genes on you. So you see, the joke is on you!