Man finds huge 30,000-year-old mammoth bones in his wine cellar

May 23, 2024 11:10 PM

Man finds huge 30,000-year-old mammoth bones in his wine cellar. The Austrian Academy of Sciences described the remains of at least three Stone Age mammoths in Gobelsburg as "the most significant find ... in more than 100 years."
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries (10 comments total)

Mammoth bones, freed
posted by chavenet at 11:46 PM on May 23 [3 favorites]

link out to the announcement about Pleistocene Park is also freed. thanks! there's a healthy debate at the end of a Stewart Brand documentary about the park. in a clip, one sees optimism/reasoning about tundra/permafrost (becoming temporary frost) "This is a refrigerated time capsule... of vast scale. So you're going down deep in the earth, but you're also going down deep in temperature and time, in both senses. This is a deep time excursion."
posted by HearHere at 12:05 AM on May 24

28,000 BCE.
An excellent vintage.
posted by MtDewd at 5:13 AM on May 24 [3 favorites]

Terrific nose on that one
posted by Phanx at 6:57 AM on May 24 [11 favorites]

Even more remarkably, experts say, the site contains the bones of at least three mammoths, as they have uncovered a layer of bones on top of each other in the cellar . . .

Obviously they stumbled into the wine cellar, got drunk, and passed out on top of each other. Duh.
posted by The Bellman at 7:00 AM on May 24 [5 favorites]

Earlier this year, a Dallas-based biotechnology company announced it had come a step closer to realizing its controversial plans of reviving the woolly mammoth, or at least a mammoth-like elephant that can thrive in the cold.

Seems kinda pointless when the world is warming...
posted by keep_evolving at 7:45 AM on May 24

I have no idea how these people got their mammoths wedged into their wine cellars, or why.
posted by some chick at 8:08 AM on May 24 [5 favorites]

The house is a fixer-upper, but it has




GOOD BONES

(runs cackling into the distance)
posted by FatherDagon at 8:30 AM on May 24 [13 favorites]

What is modestly called a wine cellar in all the english language reporting, is in fact a huge storage cellar such as Austrian vintners have used since the Romans brought wine plants to the area that is now lower Austria.
They are often not just dug into the ground but also hills and cavernous (Link to Facebook Video of local TV Station). The floor is soil.
posted by 15L06 at 10:58 AM on May 24 [1 favorite]

I implore people to watch Fortitude before exhuming any more mammoth components, because I am NOT tidying up after you all.
posted by BCMagee at 11:29 AM on May 24