From the Vault: The Bone Palace, Part 1

From an imagined palace constructed out of bone to the curious ways in which animals and humans use bone for tools and construction materials, take a stroll through halls of bone with Robert and Joe in this pair of episodes from Stuff to Blow Your Mind. (Originally published 4/7/2020)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. Time to go
into the vault for a classic episode of the show.
This one originally aired on April seven, and it's the
first of our two part series on the Bone Palace,
the the huts and houses built of bones. All right, well,
let's go ahead, Yeah, throw those vault doors open and

(00:25):
see what comes assailant out. I cannot wait to begin
our exodus from this gray country, said Osma. Yes, my matamor.
The people of Teneraff take death too seriously. There's no
room for the bailful arts here, and truth be told,
they do not deserve our necromatic skills. I concur and
agree wholeheartedly. If the people here insist on taking such

(00:48):
a sacred stance on expiration, then fine. Good luck talking
to the dead and raising skeletons from the grave without
us around. Indeed, I wish them luck too in the
completion of the canal project, with our splendid bone columns
to do the heavy lifting. Yes, they lack vision, I
shall not miss them. Yes, good bones, though strong dairy

(01:09):
industry here, I will miss the calcium well, yes, but
but but our destination will first of all be free
of their hyper religious nonsense, and it is filled with
the remains as well, for sinsor is populated exclusively by
the bones and mummies of a people ten centuries dead. No,
Matte Moore, we shall build such an empire of necromancy.

(01:31):
Oh yes, Flying buttresses made from actual ixia and coxyges,
a vast amphitheater of gladiators, reanimated mummies serving us delicacies
on silver trays, skull goblets of wine and all to
the music of piping bone flutes. Or a public bathwork
made entirely of Maxillayan mandibles, twin thrones crafted of coiling vertebrae.

(01:56):
Hell to our powers of bones. Welcome to Stuff to
Blow your Mind? Production of My Heart Radio. Hey, are

(02:20):
you welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind? My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick and Robert. I.
I know today's episode got you in a necromantic adventure mood.
So you dove into the old Clark Ashton Smith, didn't you. Yeah.
When I saw that we were going to be doing
an episode titled The Bone Palace about novel uses, for
bones throughout human and to a certain extent, animal history.

(02:45):
My mind instantly went to necromancers, and so I instantly
thought of Clark Ashton Smith's excellent little short story, The
Empire of the Necromancers, and so the cold Open we
began with that little skit. It was basically a on
on that particular tale and the characters in it, in
which we find a couple of necromancer's packing up shop,

(03:08):
leaving the city in the world of the living in
order to set up like a decadent necromantic playground in
the desert. You know, you think that they would need
to stay at least around some of the living to
do business, right, Like you can't just like be a
necromancer inside a pyramid, Like there's a lot to work with,
but nobody to work for, right I mean? And yeah,

(03:29):
and then when you actually get into necromancy as it's
treated in a lot of fantasy, you know, it's about
not only death but life. It's about the cross between
the two. And so I don't know, it's it's one
of these tales. A lot of Clark Ashton Smith's tales
are at once very you know, very deep and exotic feeling.
You know they have this this dark other worldliness to them,

(03:51):
and yet there's often a little cheekiness as well. There's
a sort of strange humor to them. And I think
that's that's evident in his original story, which, by the way,
if you want to read it out there, you can
find it online for free at Eldric Dark dot com.
I believe they have all of Clark Ashton Smith's writings
assembled there well. So obviously a a palace made out

(04:14):
of bones, a bone building, would be a necromancer's dream.
But it's hard to imagine such a place existing in reality,
or at least it would have been for me a
few days ago. But now maybe, um, and maybe that
should not be so hard to imagine, because I want
to start off today by going on a voyage of
the mind's eye to to venture into the prehistoric past.

(04:36):
Will you come with me, Robert, I shall let us
go to a place that is almost a necromantic kingdom. Uh.
It's a place that is today in southwestern Russia. This
would be about five hundred kilometers south of Moscow, UH,
close to the banks of the Don River, near the
modern day city of Vornesh And today this area is

(04:58):
is basically kind of a fertile region, prairie type ecosystems,
relatively moderate continental climate. It's a major center of agriculture
in modern Russia. Actually, I think they grow staple crops
like sugar beets and potatoes, and they do animal agriculture
as well there. But twenty thousand years ago there was
still an ice age ruling the planet, and especially these

(05:20):
northern realms of the planet. The most recent ice age
known scientifically is the Last Glacial Period or l g P,
lasted from more than a hundred thousand years ago. I
think maybe roughly like a hundred and twenty thousand years
ago or so to roughly twelve thousand years ago. And
this was the last great glaciation of the broader Pleistocene Age,

(05:44):
which began more like two and a half million years ago.
So the Pleistocene Age has featured this back and forth
pattern over over geological time, this pattern of repeated glaciation
events where for thousands of years at a time, the
world will grow old and the polar ice caps will
creep down over the map towards the equator, like this

(06:05):
sort of slow paint drip of frozen death, and then
these glacial periods will be followed by warmer interglacial periods,
sort of like with the one we think we're in
right now, where the ice sheets retreat back toward the
polls and complex life pours back into these ice paved
landscapes that are left behind. Now, of course this sounds

(06:26):
very apocalyptic, but again, remember that these changes happen over
like many thousands of years, so you know, generally humans
and animals have have time to sort of adapt in
migrate back and forth to adjust their lives to the
changing climates. The interglacial period that we're in right now
is known as the Holocene epoch, and since it began

(06:46):
more than ten thousand years ago, this relatively warm Holocene
includes all of recorded human history. I think about that.
We have no surviving literature at all with firsthand account
of what these little ice ages were like, but there
absolutely were humans around at the time. There were humans,

(07:07):
humans like us crawling the earth during these frozen periods.
Homo sapiens actually came to exist during the place to
see I'll be at first in warmer equatorial regions, but
they soon began to spread all over the planet. We've
we've talked about the spread of humans in recent episodes,
even too far reaches in the north, where the wind

(07:28):
would be ever howling. In this this menace of ice loomed. Yeah.
I believe we've also talked about how the Neanderthal is
u is perhaps more ideally suited for this sort of
cold weather environment. Yeah, and the Neanderthal will will come
up a bit in this episode. But so Homo sapiens
and Neanderthals both actually eventually spread to this general region,

(07:51):
the Russian Plain, this area in like southwest Russia and Ukraine, uh,
and more specifically this area I mentioned earlier that's you know,
a few hundred kilometers south of modern day Moscow, along
the banks of the Dawn. So the last glacial period
would have reached its most bitter cold in this place

(08:11):
between about twenty three thousand and eighteen thousand years ago.
The summers then would have been very short and very cool.
Winters would be long and freezing. And at that time,
winter in this place would have averaged about negative twenty
degrees celsius or about negative four degrees fahrenheit. And that's

(08:32):
before wind chill is taken into account, and it would
have been windy. So if you try to picture it.
This region of the Russian plane at the time would
have been a freezing step landscape, just a bit south
of the ice sheets that reached down from the polar
regions and covered much of North America, Europe and Asia

(08:52):
at times. These glaciers, it's kind of hard to imagine this,
but they were sometimes between three and four kilometers sick,
or more than two miles. So just imagine a mountain
sheet of ice reaching down from the top of the
world down into the continents, into totally inhabited regions today,

(09:13):
and there were people who lived here at this time.
The archaeological record indicates that most humans left this region
of southwest Russia during the harshest climate period of this
ice Age, you know, the like between twenty three thousand
and eighteen thousand years ago, And of course that's probably
because first of all, it's so cold, but as a
response to the cold, it's also because you know, most

(09:36):
food and fuel sources would have disappeared. Uh. In the
words of a study that we're going to cite in
a minute, this was quote a period of intense cold
when similar latitudes in Europe were already abandoned, but here
some people stayed and survived. I find myself wanting to
hear a Bruce Springsteen song about living in this environment,

(09:59):
you know, after after other folks have have gone on
and left for warmer climates, and you're you're just digging
in and trying to make life work in this harsh
environment on the winds hellan in this cold town, and
I can hear you uh. And in fact it will
it'll get even more really relevant because this town also
rips the bones from your back. Um. So I'm trying

(10:22):
to imagine the people who lived in the shadow of
this gigantic glacier. And I'm reminded, of course of that
great line from literature that we come back to on
the show from time to time. It's John Gardner's description
of the monster Grendel in his reimagining of the Beowulf legend,
when he calls him, uh, a shadow shooter, an earth
rim roamer, walker of the world's weird wall uh. And

(10:46):
that's so lovely because it's it's first of all, just
great imagery, but it also actually uses poetic devices that
appear in the original Beowulf epic. Uh, the devices of
a literation, which is there in Beowulf. You know, repeating
sounds of the beginning of words, and this weird way
of forming metaphors known as kinning, where you you sort
of like combine words into into a new compound. One example,

(11:11):
often in translation in Beowulf would be calling the seas
the whale roads. But for me, the Beowulf comparison doesn't
stop there, because when I think of people trying to
survive in this world, I get this kind of similar
feeling of horror and mystery that's invoked by the story
of Beowulf. More generally, like this small band of humans

(11:32):
gathering around a fire set against the backdrop of this vast,
frosty wilderness full of darkness and monsters. Uh. And in reality,
of course, this wouldn't have been monster monsters, but maybe
desperate predators and scavengers that are also trying to eke
out a survival alongside you at the edge of the world.
And this in these utterly unforgiving elements, I mean truly

(11:55):
a time when you would you wouldn't have to create Grendel,
because Grindel like organisms uh still roamed this region. I mean,
of course, one of the most astonishing creatures to roam
this region at the time would have been the great,
the powerful, the wooly mammoth. But also to compare it
to Beowolf again, uh, the wooly mammoth is interesting. But

(12:17):
because as great, as powerful, as terrifying an animal as
this is, if you were to you know, come in
come into combat with one, it ultimately did form the
prey diet of many of the humans who or maybe
all of the humans who lived in this place at
the time. So you know, they became the Baowolf. They
went out to kill the monster. Yeah, I mean, when

(12:38):
you had the tools and the skills, uh to actually
bring these creatures down. They were such such such a
wealth of resources exactly. And that's really getting us to
the heart of the issue here. So there's another way
this historical situation gives these real life flashes of grin
daily and horror. And this is the real reason I

(12:59):
brought up these Ice Age hunter gatherers. Archaeologists have uncovered
evidence in about seventy different places so far that the
prehistoric peoples of this region of Ice Age Russia and
Ukraine and the Russian Plane, they built buildings out of bones,
especially out of the skulls, skeletons, and tusks of the

(13:23):
wooly mammoth. Now, most often these structures take the form
of large bone circles, and if you're trying to picture this,
you can look it up with some terms I'll give
you in a minute. Um. But it's as if the
builders were stacking up ring shaped walls around a central chamber,

(13:44):
except the walls are made out of wooly mammoth skeletons.
There are no detectable roofs left or you know that
would cover up these walls if there were ever any roofs.
There are just the circular or oval shaped wall of bone.
Dating methods reveal that humans were building these bone rings

(14:05):
maybe from like twenty five thousand years ago up until
about twelve thousand years ago in the region and uh
and the wooly mammoth went extinct in this region about
ten thousand years ago, so the numbers could have been
dwindling at the time that these buildings went out of fashion.
And the amazing mystery is that so these ancient hunter
gatherer humans were building these ring shaped structures out of

(14:29):
mammoth bones, and archaeologists are not in agreement about what
these bones circles were for. Yeah, because if you try
and picture one in your mind, I mean, for for
me anyway, it sounds it sounds regal, it sounds a
bit sacred, right, I mean, it's made from the bones
of this uh, this this organism that you've grown to
depend on. But but then again, you could also wonder,

(14:51):
is it just is it just a material resources issue?
Is it like if I started building uh like like
little houses and forts out of the leftover Amazon on
boxes that I have accumulating in my house. Well, I mean,
I think you might have more options overall than we're
available to the people of the Russian Plane at this time.
But I think you are absolutely on the right track there, Robert,

(15:13):
I mean, as best we can guess. So maybe we
should take a break, and then when we come back
we can talk about a new study just from the
past month about the oldest and largest of these structures
built by modern humans. Thank thank thank Alright, we're back, Okay,
So we've been talking about the idea that all throughout

(15:34):
this place known as the Russian Plane, in this area
of eastern Europe, in like Southwest Russia and Ukraine, there
are at least like seventy locations that archaeologists have found
where Ice Age hunter gatherers built buildings out of bones. Now,
I want to be fair, we called this episode the
bone Palace. These are not gigantic, elaborate buildings, they're not castles,

(15:58):
But it is pretty amazing to see people, especially people
who we did not believe had any kind of settled existence,
building structures out of wooly mammoth bones. Yeah. I mean
for the time period, I think this is like a cathedral.
I mean, you know, in terms of like what else
could we possibly compare it to that that humans, especially

(16:20):
in that region were constructing. Uh, that we're building in
one place, Yeah, exactly. Um, So I want to go
back to a more specific place within this region. I
mentioned it earlier on remember that specific place about five
hundred kilometers south of Moscow, near the modern day city
of Voronesh. This site is known to archaeologists as Kostenky eleven,

(16:43):
and since the mid twentieth century, archaeologists have known about
a couple of smaller structures built out of mammoth bones
at this location. But just a few years back, around fourteen,
I've seen both years sited excavation began on a newly
discovered owned circle there, and this new bone circle at
Costinky eleven dates back more than twenty thousand years. Radio

(17:07):
carbon dating of some of the elements here it pushes
its construction possibly back to about twenty five thousand years
before the present. Uh So twenty five thousand years is
the number that a lot of news reports have cited.
This bone circle is more than twelve point five meters
in diameter, which is about forty one feet wide. Uh
And in the present. The structure when it was found

(17:29):
was buried about a foot beneath the surface before being unearthed.
But the researchers think that this ring wall of bones
was probably about twenty inches or about fifty centimeters high
before it collapsed many thousands of years ago, so the
bone wall would have come up, you know, more than
a foot and a half off the ground or so.
Now here's where things start getting really weird. How many

(17:51):
mammoths do you think went into the construction of this building?
You might think, oh, well, you know, a mammoth's big.
You could probably build a building with one or two
man mouths, right, Well, I mean it is a big,
big animal. But then when then you start thinking about okay,
which of the bones are actually useful. Uh you know,
which ones are going to be actually large enough for

(18:11):
long enough to be supportive? Like, there's still the creature
is only going to have so many ribs, right, Or
which bones have you not used for other purposes? Another possibility?
That's right, because this is going to be a very
utilitarian culture, Right, You're gonna have to if that bone
is better used for scraping hides or you know, aiding
in the the actual mission of acquiring and processing other

(18:35):
mammoths for your survival. Uh, it doesn't make as much
sense at least without like really significant religious uh um
underpinnings to use it in the construction of this mysterious structure.
Or I mean so well, actually I'm not gonna spoil it.
There's another possible use for the bones here that that
I want to get to in just a little bit.

(18:56):
I'll leave that tantalizing mystery for now. But so, how
many wooly mammoth's here? This structure was built out of
the bones of more than sixty wooly mammoths, and this
is indicated by the by the fact that there were
sixty four individual mammoth skulls used in construction, as well
as many other types of bones, including lower jaws, longbones, vertebrae,

(19:19):
and tusks uh And while mammoth bones made up the
bulk of the building materials, there were also a small
number of bones from reindeer, horses, bears, and foxes like
the red fox and the Arctic fox uh and the
circle today it sits on an east facing slope, sort
of an incline, a slight incline about six degrees, and curiously,

(19:41):
the bones make up a continuous wall with no apparent
door or entry way. Well, that indemics me think that
it's either it's either less of a building and more
of just a sheer structure, almost like a piece of
public art, or it's it's something that you're not supposed
to come out of. In that case, it makes me
think it might be a tomb. Well, we find no

(20:03):
evidence that it's a human tomb because there are no
human remains inside it, so so we could mark that
one off, though that might not be totally off the mark.
In terms of the possibilities for ritual significance, we we
don't know, and but we'll discuss those possibilities as we
go on. Um So This find was described in a
paper published in the journal Antiquity. It was out just

(20:24):
this past month by Alexander J. E. Prior, David G.
Barrasford Jones, Alexander E. Doodon, E. Katerina M. Kona Cova,
John F. Hoffiker, and Clive Gamble, and it was called
the Chronology and Function of a new circular mammoth bone
structure at Kostenky eleven. And so this new circle they found,

(20:45):
the one we've been talking about, is now believed to
be both the oldest and the largest bone structure yet
discovered that was built by Homo sapiens. It's at least
a thousand years older than the other mammoth bone structures
of Eastern Europe. Uh does a side note when I
had to qualify built by Homo sapiens, that's because I
was actually reading reports of a single possibly older bones structure,

(21:08):
uh maybe more than forty thousand years old at a
site called Malativa one in Ukraine. But this one is
believed to have been built by Neanderthals and not Homo sapiens,
which either way is very interesting. Interesting to see Homo
sapiens and Neanderthals participating in extremely similar cultures of proto
construction out of bones, like before long before a settled

(21:31):
agricultural life evolved, which is when we normally think of people,
you know, building buildings and stuff like that. So it
makes me wonder where the Homo sapiens copying the Neanderthals? Yeah? Yeah,
or or are we just talking about two intelligent species, uh,
coming to the same conclusions based on the materials available. Yeah,

(21:52):
and that that could be something there too, because we
might not be when we're trying to understand what the
heck was going on here? Why would you build a
little these circular buildings out of bones. Maybe we're just
not imagining how what their material limitations in life were.
So the excavation of this new site, it took about
three years. It included experts from University of Exeter, from Cambridge,

(22:15):
from the Costinky State Museum Preserve, and from the University
of Colorado Boulder in the University of Southampton. And it
was done using a technique called flotation, And that's where
you apply water to the dig site in order to
kind of sieve out archaeologically significant material to remove it
from the sediment. So as we go on to discuss

(22:36):
a little bit more about this finding and what makes
it so interesting. I want to keep a couple of
main questions in mind. First of all, again, remember the
utterly harsh, you know, reality of of surviving in this
place during the last glacial maximum, especially the worst part
of it, from like you know, twenty three thousand years
ago or so to about eighteen thousand years ago. Uh,

(22:58):
you know, would have been so cold, old and so unforgiving,
and resources would have been pretty scarce. Why would people
come to or stay in this place at all? And
then yeah, like if it's a place of seasonal return,
then like it would there would have to be some
some advantage there. Like he's often been brought up before
that the nomadic people's would have regularly returned to say

(23:19):
a hot spring at geothermal spring, which has an obvious
advantage for your survival. But in this case, we can
we find anything that obvious? Yeah? And then the other thing,
of course, would be Okay, we know people were coming here,
what on earth was this little bone palace for? Why
would you go to the trouble of making this thing? Uh? So,

(23:40):
first I want to focus on what the research on
this this new bone circle found, and then we can
move to the what was it for? Question? Okay, so
first of all, what do the research find? So usually
these mammoth bone buildings made by these Stone Age humans
are surrounded by a number of big pits, and this
new find at Costinky eleven is no exception. Um, there
were several large pits around it. But again we don't

(24:03):
know what these pits were for. It could be storage,
it could be places to dumper berry trash, it could
be a type of quarry that maybe mud or other
building material was sourced from. I read about the possibility.
We don't know, but maybe mud was used to patch
the places in between the bones in the structure. Possibly,

(24:24):
we don't know. Um, that would make sense. Next thing,
mammoth meat was cooked here. That's not very surprising, but okay, yeah,
we have some evidence that they were cooking mammoth at
this bone structure. Here things start getting weird. They also
found burned mammoth bones and you might think, well, okay,
you know, that's that's evidence of cooking, but no, we

(24:46):
don't mean burned like that. These burned mammoth bones were
actually used as fuel for the fire itself, and that
this is not the only site like this by any means.
Evidence of this is found at other paleol at the
bone ring sites throughout Eastern Europe. The people here burned
bones to have fire, and you absolutely can do that.

(25:08):
You can burn mammoth bones as fuel due to pockets
of fat inside the bones that render and catch flame
as the bone heats up. Huh. You know, I'd never
thought of that. I mean, obviously, the mammoth is going
to produce dung, which you know, once collected, could be
used as fuel for five but I didn't even think
about their bones being used as fuel. Now, one thing

(25:29):
we should definitely acknowledge here is that bones burn differently
than wood does. There's a different quality to the fire.
The bones are are greasy, and the fire they produce
would be sort of inconsistent and it would generally put
out more light and less heat than a wood fire. Uh.
One of the authors on this paper, David Barrissford Jones,

(25:52):
who's an environmental archaeologist at the University of Cambridge, was
speaking to I think it was the New York Times.
It was being to some publication. He said that a
fire that was powered by the fuel of mammoth bones quote,
won't produce a nice good fire for roasting your mammoth
meat on. So the bone based fire is not going
to be very good for cooking more light than and

(26:13):
less heat. So what was the fire for, Well, we
can come back to that later. Now. They also found
about four hundred pieces of charcoal from wood fires, and
this was charcoal from the would have conifer trees like
spruce and pine and larch. And here's another one where
you might at first say, huh, well, that doesn't seem
very unusual, but this actually is very interesting and even

(26:37):
maybe revolutionary here because the previous widely held assumption was
that this place and time would have been an utterly barren,
nearly completely treeless step and consequently it was thought that
the burning of bones by the humans of this area
was out of total necessity. There was no wood to

(26:57):
burn at all, so they had to burn bones as
the only possible fuel. But the charcoal at this new
side at costinky eleven shows would was burned, meaning there
were at least some trees. Now this does not at
all mean you should imagine the landscape at this time
full of thriving forests. Uh. The the authors suggest maybe

(27:18):
more like it would be a place where, uh, there
are a few trees here and there, barely surviving against
the ice. Uh. Speaking to the to the newspaper Harretts,
the lead author, Alexander Pryor said, quote, the growth ring
widths in the charcoal we recovered are mostly very narrow,
suggesting that trees were clinging on at the edge of

(27:41):
their tolerance limits. Summers would have been cool and relatively short,
while winters were long and bitterly cold. The climate was
also very arid, so trees would have clung on in
sheltered parts of the landscape, perhaps in river valleys, away
from the wind and where moisture was available. Huh. And
of course, in all of this we have to we

(28:03):
have to weigh the fact that if you were to
come across some some trees, some would um, there would
be other potential uses for it that would compete with your,
you know, necessity to burn it. I don't know in
the case that these might be uh, some very pitiful trees,
perhaps they really didn't have any other purpose but to
be burned. But again, coming down to just sort of

(28:25):
the utalitarian reality of their harsh lives, you could well
imagine them coming across a small tree and realize that,
you know this, this would make a much better spear
or or some other kind of tool as opposed to
being just thrown into the fire. But then again, the
fire is survival as well. So I don't know if
it sounds like it becomes kind of a difficult balancing

(28:46):
actor to figure out exactly how your fuel economy is
going to work. Oh, I think there is a lot
to indicate actually that when they make you know, the
these these hunter gatherers make the utilitarian calculus, they very
much do probably prioritize the burning of wood over the
use of wood for tools, at least in many cases.

(29:06):
Um because again, you know, the wood really creates a
high quality fire, and the mammoth bones you can get
fire out of them, but it's not a good fire.
It's not like a wood fire, right, But then those mammoths,
you're not just giving those bones away. You gotta get
him yourselves, and you're gonna need tools to do it.
That's true. So one other interesting thing about the findings
about you know that there actually were some trees here

(29:28):
at the time, against previous assumptions, the fact that there
was some small number of scrawny trees surviving here could
be the very reason that this place remained inhabited when
other sites at the same latitude were abandoned by humans
during the Ice Age. Remember that question we're asking, like,
why would people be here at all? To quote from

(29:49):
the study quote, the presence of conifer trees near Kostinky,
perhaps located in low lying, moist and sheltered areas in
the ravines near to the site, would have been an
important resource that attracted hunter gatherers to the area during
the glacial period. So it's entirely possible that this latitude
of northerly waste land has mostly just been completely abandoned

(30:14):
by humans. But here's a place where the human hunter
gatherers can get a foothold this far north because there
are a few trees that they can harvest and make
fires with. Wow, I mean I remember, like fire, it's
our secret weapon. It's like the thing that that is.
It changes the game in terms of what types of
climates are habitable and what types of of prey we

(30:37):
can hunt and stuff like that. Yeah, we've discussed that
on the on the show in the past when we
talked about a world before fire and then on invention
we discussed fire technologies and just how truly game changing
they were. Now a couple of other findings about it
before we moved to the what was this for question?
Along the same lines as the charcoal, they found a
few vegetables interesting. Good for them, Yeah, because we might

(31:02):
have assumed that mammoth hunters roaming the furthest reaches of
habitable land during the last glacial maximum. We're pretty much
limited to a diet of mammoth meat, but there are
remains of plant based foods at this new bone circle.
And these plant based foods include plant matter associated with
edible roots and tubers, which which I've seen compared to

(31:26):
modern crops like parsnips, carrots, and potatoes. So along with
your mammoth meat, maybe you're getting a few carrots in there.
Maybe you're having some mashed taters or something probably not
mashed taters, at least some kind of tat thing. Well,
this is excellent. I'm gonna pass this on to our
new potential sponsors, Mammoth Meals. What they're offering is a
is an authentic ice age diet of cloned that grown

(31:51):
Willie mammoth meat and thrown in there with some parsnips,
carrots and a few you know, random scavenged tubers and
you just you you heat those up in your house.
You don't have to cook them on mammoth bones, but
it is recommended if you want to just the proper
uh you know, the proper texture and the proper uh
you know, flavoring to the meat, use our promo code

(32:12):
bone Palace. Uh. Yeah, And I want to be clear,
just so I'm not confusing anybody, Uh, the parsnips, carrots
and potatoes thing, that's like a point of comparison of
what these roots would be like. Like we know that
potatoes were not grown in this place at this time,
so you know, like they wouldn't have been actually potatoes,
but similar types of foods, right, I mean, if they

(32:34):
had anything like a carrot. I've often seen it pointed
out that you know, in in in this age and
other ages of human gathering, like a carrot would be
the equivalent of us finding like a cheesecake, you know,
or or or or a giant bag of skittles. Yeah,
just like the maximum sweet. Next time you're eating a carrot,
think about that. Think about what it would be to

(32:55):
live in a world where this was maximum sweetness, our
in our mouths just ruined. Now we eat a Karen,
it's like, oh yeah, I mean our mouths are ruined
on more than one count because of this, uh, this
unbalanced sugar economy. Yes, yeah, um. But also so in
addition to the signs of there being some kind of

(33:15):
roots and tuber based foods, there were also remains of
charred seeds, though it's not clear if these seeds were
brought here by humans. Um. One more thing this ties
into a previous episode. There were some light signs of napping,
not napping like sleeping, but napping with a k This
is what we talked about with Dietrich Stout on our
episode about stone age technology. It is a method of

(33:39):
constructing stone tools by striking stones together to shear a
target stone off and form a sharp edge. And the
evidence included here would be like stone flakes and chips
that would be a byproduct of the manufacturer of stone tools.
We find stuff like this at the places where stone
age people lived. They were they were manufacturing tools a lot,

(34:02):
and they needed these tools to survive, so you'd find
all these signs the waste products of the the the
you know, sharp flake manufacturing process. But then again, people
were building stone tools here, but it looks like there
was also much less manufacture of stone tools here then
there would usually be at at other sites where people

(34:23):
lived more or less permanently during this period. This has
been taken as evidence this site was not occupied for
very long, or maybe it was only occupied a very
contained times throughout the year, because if people had been
living here on a more permanent basis, you would expect
to find way more signs of them making tools. So
we can basically see this as the kind of like

(34:45):
stonework to try this that would have been left in
the wake of of these people. And uh, and therefore
we can indicate just how long they were staying in
the area. All right, let's take one more break, but
when we come back, we will continue to discuss the
mystery of this ice age boom palace. Alright, we're back,

(35:05):
all right, So we're asking the question what was this
ice age bone palace for Remember, it's the circle of bones.
It's more than forty feet in diameter. It would have
been you know, at least like one and a half
feet tall off the ground at the time it was built,
made entirely out of mammoth bones, made out of more
than sixty mammoth bones. We should stop to stress again

(35:26):
how weird this is. Why would hunter gatherers living in
the northernmost habitable reaches of eastern Europe during the Pleistocene
build a structure like this or you know, not just
this structure, build these many structures like this? Uh. First
of all, evidence tells us that they usually lived nomadic lifestyles.

(35:46):
They would travel to follow available food resources like herds
of prey animals, or follow other resources. They didn't generally
build permanent structures to live in. So if you were
just assuming, well there's probably some kind of house, I mean,
that is possible, and we'll discuss that possibility. But that
from first glance, that is kind of counterintuitive because you

(36:08):
you wouldn't be living here year round. This would be
a place of seasonal return at best. But beyond that,
think about the quality and quantity of effort required to
build a structure like this. The bones in this building
came from again more than sixty different mammoths. Think about
how this literally had to be put together. Mammoth bones

(36:29):
are huge. They are extremely heavy, especially when they're fresh
right like when they're you know, they still got all
the moisture and fat in them before they decay and
become more porous. These bones would have been like heavy
stones to move around. The people either had to scavenge
these bones from dead mammoths that they found, or they

(36:51):
would have to kill the mammoths themselves, and then they
would have to carry them back to this prehistoric construction site.
So to quote the lead author, Alexander Pryor, and if
I didn't mention this earlier, he's an archaeologist at the
University of Exeter in England. He was speaking to Nicholas St.
Fleur of The New York Times. Quote. The sheer number
of bones that are Paleolithic ancestors had sourced from somewhere

(37:15):
and brought to this particular location to build this monument
is really quite staggering. It does boggle the mind. I've
seen some articles sort of in a cheeky way, calling
this site bone hinge, and I think the comparison it
has a few merits. Right. This would be a massive
project of sourcing tons of dead mammoths and getting their

(37:38):
crushingly heavy remains to this very spot. Plus one imagines, okay,
First of all, certainly for their mammoth kills, they are
processing the carcass in order to get the meat, you know,
other materials from the body that it might be using
for various uh um you know, tools, clothing, etcetera. But
you're probably going to have to do additional processing of

(38:00):
the bones. I mean, unless you're just putting you know,
meaty half rotten uh you know, flesh clad bones up
there on the structure. I'm imagining they're they're going to
further um uh you know, put the bones in order
before adding them to the construction. So just a lot
of work, Robert, You've got some surprises coming to you

(38:21):
before we move Oh boy, this is gonna be fun.
Before we move on. I just realized came into my head.
Did you watch I think you should leave the Tim
Robinson Show? Yes? I did. Could you stop while we
were preparing for this episode with singing the bones are
their houses and so are the worms? I forgot about
that one. Oh man, it's one of the best. We

(38:44):
sing that song a lot in our house. I would
sing it here, but I don't know if that's the
kind of thing that you get bone cheese over. I
don't know. That that's a that's a very very weird
and entertaining show. I really like the one about the
two plumbers. Oh I like that too. Yeah, not part
of the turbo team. And okay, okay. So it's coming

(39:04):
back to the question of like archaeologists now trying to
figure out what the heck was were these bone circles for,
especially this big one. Um So the most obvious answer,
one that we already hinted at, is well, maybe it's
a dwelling. This is this is a bone house with
two cats in the yard, etcetera. This one, it's difficult
to totally rule it out, and many other smaller bone

(39:26):
circles found throughout Eastern Europe have been assumed to be
shelters or dwellings of some kind for humans. I was
reading an article about the study and harets and it
pointed out that of the about seventy mammoth bone structures
found in Eastern Europe, some are all on their own,
but others are grouped and arrangements of up to like
six in the same place. Remember at this site there

(39:48):
were two other ones already known about smaller ones, so
this would be three and roughly the same area and
this suggests maybe these are some kind of proto village,
right uh, that we don't know yet if they were
occupied at the same time as each other, but usually
they were close to rivers, which would make sense for
an actual settlement. So it's hard to completely rule out

(40:09):
the possibility that this was some type of shelter structure
for humans to get inside and live in. But Prior,
the lead author on the study we've been talking about,
and the other authors really do not seem to think
that this place was a dwelling, certainly not a permanent dwelling,
maybe a seasonal dwelling of some kind. But there there
are a few reasons that they think argue against the

(40:32):
idea that this was a house for people to live in. So,
first of all, Prior just argues that it's hard to
imagine how an area the size of this circle the
most recent find would have been roofed. Think about it.
This is a forty one foot wide circular wall, not
very tall, made out of bones, with no signs of

(40:54):
interior support structures. What would the roof be made out
of and how would it stay up? And why is
there no sign of any roofing left? Now, Yeah, that
is a great question that I didn't I didn't initially
think to ask if if it's going to be a
proper dwelling, it has to have a roof and it's
and what are you gonna make it out of? I mean,
it can't really depend on these heavy bones so much.

(41:17):
Uh you know, maybe hide comes to mind. Uh, yeah,
that wood materials, but we already touched on how scarce
those were likely to be. Yeah, I mean, hides were
the thing that was kind of coming to my mind.
But still it would be hard to imagine exactly how
that worked on a structure this big, like um, how
the remains lie today. I've seen this pointed out. It

(41:37):
doesn't necessarily tell us what they looked like when they
were in use, because it's possible that maybe these structures
were more sort of conical with spaces between the bones
patched in with mud um and you know, perhaps they
were somehow kind of like tps, maybe like they could
have had hides up on the top somehow, but we

(41:58):
we just don't know. But also here's another reason to
think that it's kind of unlikely that this was a dwelling. Uh,
this one in particular. This is prior speaking to George
Davorski of Gizmoto quote some of the bones that make
up the ring were found inarticulation, for example, groups of vertebrae,

(42:19):
indicating that at least some of the bones still had
cartilage and fat attached when they were added to the pile.
This would have been smelly and would have attracted scavengers,
including wolves and foxes, which is not great if this
was a dwelling. Yeah, that does sound It's an understatement,

(42:39):
not great. Yeah, do not mistake like this is a
stone age building made out of mammoth bones. But not
just clean, dry bones. These were bones with soft tissue
still clinging to them, not just like individual vertebrae, but
like parts of a wooly mammoth's intact spinal cord, etcetera.
Now maybe they were just living foul. I have to

(43:03):
consider that possibility. But yeah, try to imagine living there,
like in the warmer months, when the thaw came, this
bone castle would reek of death. It would attract carnivores,
it would attract scavengers. Uh, you know, it's kind of
like why not build an outhouse out of cotton candy
and maple syrup? Just yeah, this is the one that

(43:23):
I can't stop thinking about. So it's not just a
palace made out of bones, but a palace of of
bones with a good bit of meat and cartilage and
stuff still stuck on there. Now here's the next argument
against it being a dwelling. Remember how I mentioned that
the evidence of stone tool manufacturer the site was relatively light.
This is also taken as evidence against it being a

(43:46):
permanent or long inhabited dwelling. If anybody lived here, they
were either not making stone tools at a normal rate,
or they did not live here very long or very frequently. Uh.
It seems the authors here think more likely that if
it was used as a shelter for humans, it was
only used seasonally or temporarily for a short time, which

(44:08):
would be kind of hard to understand for a structure
that so much intense work would have gone into making
sixty dead mammoth's bones transported from wherever they got them
to this place. I don't know. I mean, you can
perhaps imagine it was some kind of shelter against the cold,
maybe used in the worst parts of winter. Um. But

(44:28):
if so, I mean, a good question to counter that is,
why would it be built out of mammoth bones. Again,
maybe this is just an issue of pure necessity. Like again,
you imagine the landscape, the mammoth bones might have literally
been the only thing available aside from scarce. Would supplies
from a few clumps of scrawny trees clinging on for

(44:49):
dear life, and the wood from those trees would have
been more valuable for starting fires than for building with.
So the bones are all you've got, the only thing
you can build with. And I should mention that despite
the authors here not seeming to favor the dwelling hypothesis,
I was looking at a New York Times article that
cites Paul Pettit, and archaeologist from Durham University in England,

(45:13):
and Pettit does not rule out the idea that this
structure was a dwelling of some kind, probably some kind
of shelter to protect against the cold in the in
the winter. So uh, not all archaeologists would would disfavor
the dwelling hypothesis. And I guess in all of this too,
like we keep coming back to very utilitarian, uh explanations
for what was being done here, and I think that's

(45:36):
ultimately the direction to lean into. But but we we have.
We have very little idea what additional say, religious significance, uh,
these sites might have had, right, I mean, I mean
just just spitball in here. But like if if you're
building a shelter, uh to age you in the winter,
if there is an additional idea that somehow say this,

(45:58):
you know, the spirits of these of these great creatures
was somehow in the bones, you know, if there was
some like added you know, not enough to really make
a difference obviously in survival, but just some added idea
of why this place would be a good shelter. Uh,
it could conceivably have had some sort of impact on it.
I'm guessing, well, yeah, that's another possibility, is that maybe

(46:18):
it just had some kind of religious or ritual significance.
Maybe it's some kind of shrine to the gods or
or shrine to the kill. I mean, that wouldn't be unique.
It's you know, a shrine made out of wooly mammoth's
in honor of wooly mammoth's. That's possible. Um. And since
one of the ideas raised in that Harrett's article I
mentioned earlier was that since there were traces of food

(46:41):
found there, not just mammoth meat, but like vegetables and
other things and traces of fire, you can't rule out
the idea that this could have been something like a
feast site, a place where special ritual cooking and eating
took place, but not a place that people lived permanently.
And again it's hard to roll that out. Maybe, but

(47:01):
I often find that in archaeology it seems like ritual
or religious significance tends to be the explanation given when
you see ancient people expending a lot of effort on
something and you can't figure out what else it's for.
You know, the logic goes something like big investment plus

(47:21):
no apparent utilitarian purpose equals religion. And like the Pyramids
zone basically, when we get into something like that which
clearly has no practical real world um use but has
a tremendous importance within a like a spiritual supernatural view
of the world, then again I think sometimes maybe that

(47:44):
under cells uh, it's it's under imaginative about what practical
real world uses could be. Because take the example of
the Pyramids. Okay, you look at that, you say, there
is you know, obviously these were built for religious reasons,
because you couldn't possibly imagine a practical reason for making
structures of the size, spending this amount of money and

(48:06):
all that. On one hand, you would say, well, yeah,
the pyramids clearly do have religious implications. They have stuff
to do with the idea of, uh, you know, the
royal deity of of the pharaohs and the afterlife in
in the Egyptian religion and all that. But I can
also come up with a list of what I think
are probably practical considerations that went into the construction of

(48:27):
the pyramids. For example, uh, the the pharaoh protecting his
own power by demonstrating his greatness, you know that, Like
the pyramids could be a essentially a warning sign to
potential rebels or invaders, you know, like, look how great

(48:47):
I am. You don't want to challenge me? And and
in that way, like it's it can be kind of
hard to imagine what the cultural signaling could have been
for ancient projects because we just don't know what the
culture was like, right, Like you could imagine, and again
we don't have any direct evidence of this, but you
could imagine maybe something like that is going on with

(49:08):
mammoth bone structures. Maybe the people who built them, it
could have had some religious significance. It could have been
just people sending some kind of signal to other people
or something. Yeah, And I mean, plus, it's you know,
it's difficult to imagine like the the ins and outs
of a of the society that would have depended so
much upon the regular acquisition and then processing of these

(49:31):
large high It's like they would have been working who
had been working with the with mammoth bodies, you know,
so much would be so much significance placed on them.
You know, you wonder like what sort of ideas would
grow out of that, Like how would you view the
bones of these creatures? Uh? Yeah, it's it's it's fascinating
to try to imagine. Um. But but yeah, certainly to
your point, even something that has that is essentially a

(49:52):
religious structure is going to it's it's not going to
exist outside of our world. It's still going to uh
you know service say something like make work project. It's
going to serve as a as a as a symbol
of power, a symbol of of royal or even divine um,
uh you know association. Yeah, there's there are a number
of ways that could factor into into the maintenance of

(50:15):
once power structure. Yeah, yeah, my imagination is actually running
wild now that we're talking about this. I hadn't really
thought about this aspect before we started recording today. Um,
what if these bones structures? Again, I want to be
very clear, there's no direct evidence of this, and we're
just imagining. What if these these bone circles were something
more like you know, the Arc de Trium for the

(50:35):
Pyramids or something. They were made to like impress somebody
to show off. Look at all these mammoths I killed.
Look what a glorious hunter king I am. Yeah, yeah,
look how favored we are by uh, the hunt or
whatever supernatural powers might lie beyond the hunt. What if
it was a signaling thing for this area where there
was some pretty unique resource of as far as these

(50:58):
northern latitudes go. Maybe you wanted to scare other potential
hunter gatherers who could be coming in the area to
try to get your scraggly trees or access to your
water source or something like that. Yeah. Maybe it's like saying, hey,
are there wandering humans. You're venturing into a zone where
people are capable of bringing down this many mammoths. Maybe
you don't want to mess with us. Yeah, So again

(51:19):
just speculation, but it I do think it's it's important
to recognize that, like, our imagination is limited in understanding
why ancient people's did things, especially when like we don't
know much about their culture and what kinds of social
and what kinds of broader social relationships and pressures they had.

(51:40):
But I want to come back to one final hypothesis
about the role of this place, of this bone structure,
and this one is more directly utilitarian. This one is
more directly about how to survive in the landscape. And
this this hypothesis is that it's basically a type of
storehouse for food. And this seems to be the the

(52:01):
idea that the researchers themselves, including prior that I get
the feeling that they kind of favor and the team
is looking into evidence of this possibility in their ongoing work.
But basically, the idea is that this bone circle and
perhaps others too, would have been used as a place
to store meat and other foods. Now, normally we associate

(52:22):
food storage with the advent of agriculture, right, but there's
some hints that perhaps some nomadic pre agricultural hunter gatherers
found ways to store excess food and uh, you can
imagine a need for this, right, Like a dead mammoth
generates a lot of meat I dare say, more than
it's possible to eat before it starts to spoil. And

(52:45):
people at this time didn't have all the options that
we do for food preservation. But it's possible that these
people figured out that after a mammoth kill, they could
butcher the animal and store its meat in a structure
like this, maybe buried down in the herma frost, to
save it for meager times later when food was scarce.

(53:06):
All right, now you're talking. So if it's if it's
in the you bury in the earth, You keep it cool.
You just need you need to make sure that nothing
else digs it up. You might you need to cap that,
and of course we know from various funeral traditions throughout
the world, like one way to do that is cap
it off with a big stone. But if you don't
have a big stone, what what are you gonna do? Right? Oh, yeah,

(53:26):
that's a possibility. Maybe the bones are a barrier to
protect these buried stores of food that are down in
the permafrost. So if this really was a storehouse for food,
that would show that these hunter gatherers didn't just follow
animal herds for their immediate food needs, but instead actually
planned for the future by storing resources and known locations

(53:47):
so that they could find an access later. Uh. And
again remember all the evidence of bones burned as fuel
within this bone building. Well that that sort of fits
as well, at least maybe you remember burning bones do
not put out very even heat, but they do put
out a lot of light. And uh and I've seen
sighted in several sources that the authors here kind of

(54:09):
speculate what if the fires from the burned bones here
were to produce light to work by, so that hunters
after a mammoth gille could work long into the dark
night to quickly process and strip the meat from the
mammoth bones before wolves and other scavengers arrived in order
to get it stored away. Yeah. Yeah, I like that idea. Yeah,

(54:32):
because you only you only have to have so much time.
It's just gonna draw attention. One last idea about how
and why these structures were put together that the lead
author prior suggests quote one possibility is that the mammoths
and humans could have come to the area on mass
because it had a natural spring that would have provided
unfrozen liquid water throughout the winter, rare in this period

(54:56):
of extreme cold. So that that gets back to your
idea of like, you know, people, you know, why would
people go to a region that's just frozen and very
barren and resources are scarce. What if you can access
water here and in the surrounding landscape it's all going
to be frozen. We don't know this, but this is
another possibility to imagine. Anyway, it looks like due to time,

(55:17):
I think we're gonna have to cap the first part
of our exploration of of bone palaces and bone construction
right here. But man, this subject really gets my blood pump,
and I get so excited about these mysteries, like what
were these people doing? What was this for? I don't
know that. This is the kind of thing I love
thinking about. Yeah, I mean it forces you to sort

(55:39):
of strip down the human condition and human culture to
its uh, to its bare bones, and imagine what something
like this would would would would what purpose it would serve? Uh. Yeah,
So we're gonna we're gonna cap it here. We're gonna
cap this episode off with a nice construction of mammoth remains.
But then we're going and we're gonna leave, but then

(55:59):
we're gonna come back and we're going to record a
second episode where we'll discuss more about the use of
bone technology and human history and also how some of
you know, various animals engage with the remains of other creatures.
In the meantime, if you would like to check out
other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you can
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(56:44):
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(57:05):
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(57:27):
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(57:49):
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