Cold case: A mammoth skeleton discovered near Regensburg has turned out to be an important evidence of early human history. Cut marks on the ribs of this mammoth fossil, which is around 25,000 years old, show that the animal was once worked on by humans and perhaps even slaughtered. This means that people must have ventured into this region north of the Alps even during the coldest phase of the last ice age. It is the latest evidence of human presence before the Ice Age made Central Europe almost uninhabitable.
When the last ice age reached its cold maximum around 23,000 years ago, it wasn’t just the glaciers that advanced far into Central Europe. The entire region north of the Alps became so cold and inhospitable that people could no longer survive there. The Stone Age hunters and gatherers of this period therefore withdrew to areas south of the Alps and southeastern Europe at the beginning of the Ice Age peak.
“So far, archaeological findings seemed to indicate that there was no longer any human presence in southern Germany north of the Alps between 25,000 and 23,500 years ago,” report Kerstin Pasda from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and her colleagues.
A mammoth find near Regensburg
But now paleontologists may have found traces of possibly the last Stone Age people who ventured into Central Europe before the cold maximum. Evidence for this was provided by a mammoth skeleton discovered in 2020 during construction work in the town of Taimering near Regensburg. The 72 well-preserved bones and an almost 2.50 meter long tusk come from a woolly mammoth that was not yet fully grown, but was already three meters high at the shoulder.
“The tusk and bones of the mammoth were exceptionally well preserved due to their thousands of years of preservation in the moist soil environment,” says co-author Christoph Steinmann from the Bavarian State Office for Monument Preservation (BLfD). After its recovery, the approximately 25,000-year-old find was prepared at the Bavarian State Natural Science Collections (SNSB). Already during the first examination, scratch marks and indentations were noticeable on some of the bones. To check where these notches come from, Pasda and her colleagues subjected the mammoth bones to a more detailed analysis.
Mammoth rib as a cutting board
It turned out that these grooves and notches in the mammoth bones were not created during the excavation or by natural causes. Instead, the shape and positions of the notches indicate human influence. “The sharp edges and more or less parallel cuts on the bones resemble man-made cut marks,” the team reports. The slight differences in the cutting angle with parallel notches also speak for this. “This suggests that a tool was placed several times close to each other,” say the researchers.
Also striking: the cut marks did not appear on all of the mammoth’s bones, but only on its rib bones. “The cuts are only in the body of the bones, not at their ends,” report Pasda and her colleagues. Such a pattern can occur when skin and muscle flesh are separated from the ribs. One of the ribs even seems to have served as a cutting surface, as suggested by the unusually large number of cut marks located close together.
According to paleontologists, these traces of processing clearly prove that Stone Age people tampered with the mammoth’s carcass around 25,000 years ago. However, it is unclear whether these people also hunted and killed the mammoth themselves or whether they only used its remains – also because no tools of these Stone Age hunters and gatherers have yet been found on site.
“A small sensation in many ways”
“Our find is a small sensation in many ways,” says co-author Gertrude Rößner from the Bavarian State Natural Science Collections. “On the one hand, skeletal finds of mammoths are extremely rare in our latitudes. We mainly know of finds from regions of Eurasia further east.”
On the other hand, the cut marks come from a time when southern Germany was actually already considered deserted. “There is almost no evidence of human activity in this region from this peak phase of the cold period,” explain the researchers. “The discovery of the approximately 27,000 to 25,000 year old mammoth with traces of anthropogenic processing is significant because it represents the youngest evidence to date of a settlement in Bavaria in the late Gravettian period.”
Source: Kerstin Pasda (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg) et al., Journal of Archaeological Science: Report, 2026; doi: 10.1016/j.jasrep.2026.105839