While cleaning, Simone Grundmann from the city of Soest in western Germany came across a cardboard box with four bones that her father had once dug up. At first she wanted to throw the find into the trash. In the end, the bones were handed over to archaeologists. It turned out that the bones of mammoths are at least 15,000 years old, – writes the weekly “Spiegel” portal on Saturdays.
Last fall, Simone Grundmann from Soest (North Rhine-Westphalia) wanted to insulate the attic of her family’s home, so she did some cleaning. In the process, I came across a chest of bones. “My father told me about it at one point, but I didn’t think about it anymore,” Grundmann told the dpa news agency.
Her father, Franz Josef, was running a tree nursery in North Soest in the 1980s and came across the bones while digging. Grundmann states that he may have tried to investigate the find. But in the end it didn’t happen.
What do you do with wet cardboard? “Throw it away,” friends advised. Grundmann even put a bin next to the trash cans. The fact that she didn’t kick him out after all, “is a happy coincidence for the history of the city of Soest,” writes the weekly portal “Spiegel”.
Experts from the city’s Department of Antiquities, where Grundmann handed her find, soon realized that the bones must have come from an even larger animal—or even from three: a mammoth, a woolly rhinoceros, and a bison. Another animal also left traces. Bite marks on a bone that scientists can attribute to a cave hyena.
“These are indeed the oldest bones ever found in Soest. The bones are at least 15,000 years old,” Julia Ricken, the city’s head of antiquities, explains in a press release. Finds may also be older. At the moment they are not precisely dated because of the expensive analyzes that would be necessary for this.
According to Ricken, the bones will be displayed in the Berghof City Museum as soon as possible.
Berenika Lemańczyk in Berlin
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