Upper Pleistocene hominins and wooly mammoths in the East European Plain

Abstract

In Europe, the Last Glacial period was mostly characterized by a dry and cold steppe environ- ment that supported well-adapted animal taxa, notably woolly mammoth, which coexisted with Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans. This paper provides a synthesis of mammoth and human interactions in Eastern Europe, using the results of zooarcheological analyses of faunal as- semblages from the valleys of the Dnieper and Dniester Rivers in Ukraine, Republic of Moldo- va and Russia. We identify the burial conditions of the skeletal remains, and the human strategies of resource acquisition and utilization. We high- light the different ways mammoth resources were acquired, either by hunting or dry bone gather- ing, and the different uses of soft and hard ma- terials: food, fuel, wedging and building materi- al, and raw material for tools and mobiliary art. The mammoth was an important influence in territorial human settlements and probably had major status among the dominant species in the assemblages, which included also reindeer, horse, canids, lagomorphs, rodents and bison. The trio reindeer-horse-mammoth was important for hu- man groups in each techno-cultural complex of the East European Plain.