Mon, Oct 16th 2023
Employees of the Wynau gravel works in the Upper Aargau region of Bern have found the tusk of a mammoth using an excavator. The tooth, about half a metre long, comes from a mammoth that lived in the Ice Age more than 25,000 years ago.
The employees of the gravel plant had discovered strange objects during gravel extraction in the summer and called in the Archaeological Service of the Canton of Bern as a precaution, as the Education and Culture Directorate of the Canton of Bern announced on Monday. The archaeological service then confirmed that the objects were fragments of a mammoth tusk.
The tusk probably came from an adult mammoth bull that had died in the steppe landscape of the Central Plateau in the run-up to the Rhone glacier, it said. Glaciologists from the University of Bern have examined the site and suspect that a river once ran through what is now a gravel pit. They came to this conclusion based on the sequence and composition of the sand and gravel layers.
The river had washed the tooth to the site. Covered by sand and gravel, the fragments remained well protected in the soil for thousands of years, according to the Department of Education and Culture.
It was not easy to determine exactly from which phase of the Ice Age the find originated. With the help of radiocarbon measurements, the University of Bern was able to narrow down the period from 24,800 to 24,100 BC. The mammoth became extinct in “our regions” at the end of the last ice age.
Finds from the Ice Age are rare
The find is a unique specimen. Further examinations of the gravel layers had not revealed any other discoveries. The Archaeological Service and the Natural History Museum of the Burgergemeinde Bern will now decide how the find should be preserved and where it should be stored.
Finds from the Ice Age are rare, according to Bern’s Department of Education and Culture. However, a mammoth tusk was already discovered in 1979 in the Wynau gravel pit, about 400 metres from the current find site.
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