Mammoths lived in Europe starting about 500,000 years ago and started dying out about 15,000 years ago. The new find shows, without a doubt, that a spear was used against the beast, Lister said. Or, if the mammoths did appear to be hunted, it remained a mystery what weapons were used against them, such as spears or traps. 'But you can never be absolutely sure that such animals were actually hunted rather than scavenged,' Lister said. For instance, the Polish site of KrakГіw Spadzista Street contains burnt bones involved in supporting the tongue, indicating that ancient people feasted on roasted mammoth tongue, Lister said. Until now, there was only circumstantial evidence that ice age people in Europe hunted mammoths. 'It is important because it proves beyond reasonable doubt that mammoths were hunted,' Lister told Live Science.

Over the past 20 years, researchers have found mammoth remains containing human-made weapons at two sites in Siberia, but 'I believe this is the first find of a weapon embedded in a mammoth bone in Europe,' said Adrian Lister, a professor of vertebrates and anthropology at the Natural History Museum in London, who wasn't involved with the finding. (Image credit: Shutterstock) Ice age hunters? 'It turned out that a fragment of a flint arrowhead was stuck in it.' 'Among tens of thousands of bones, during a detailed analysis of the remains, I came across a damaged mammoth rib,' Wojtal told Science in Poland. Researchers initially found the mammoth rib in 2002, at a mammoth hotspot in KrakГіw, where scientists, over the years, have discovered the remains of at least 110 mammoths that lived between 30,000 and 25,000 years ago, the researchers said.

Or, perhaps ice age hunters targeted weak or sick mammoths that were easy to finish off.Д«ut now, 'we finally have a smoking gun, the first direct evidence of how these animals were hunted,' Piotr Wojtal, an archaeozoologist at the Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals at the Poland Academy of Sciences in KrakГіw, told Science in Poland, a site run by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education. Previously, researchers wondered whether our ancestors had killed mammoths by trickery, for instance, by chasing them into pits or off cliffs.

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