Hunter-gatherers who weathered the coldest phase of the last Ice Age on the treeless plains of central Ukraine built their shelters from the one material the steppe offered in abundance, the bones and tusks of woolly mammoths. That is according to a revised radiocarbon chronology led by Leiden University archaeologist Wei Chu, which dates the largest surviving structure at Mezhyrich to between 18,248 and 17,764 years ago.
“The structure appears to have been used for up to 429 years,” Chu said, describing an occupation that may have spanned four centuries at a single site. The finding lends weight to the long-contested reading of these bone rings as homes rather than food caches, burial grounds or ritual monuments.
Timber was scarce to non-existent across the mammoth steppe at the height of the glaciation, which pushed builders towards a structural system improvised entirely from what the landscape left behind. Excavators recorded mammoth skulls and long bones set upright as a foundation, with tusks and flat bones weighting a roof that a light timber frame and hide covering would have completed.
“Mammoth skulls and large long bones, set vertically into the ground,” formed the plinth, co-author Pavlo Shydlovskyi told The Brighter Side of News. Above it, people added a wooden framework where they could, then covered the shell with hides or possibly birch bark.
Hearth inside the mammoth bone shelters held burnt bone in quantity but almost no wood charcoal, the signature of a settlement that fell back on bone for fuel wherever usable timber could not be found. Wood on that steppe was too valuable to burn; it was reserved instead for the frame that held the shelter together.
The Mezhyrich result sharpens a debate that has been running since the 1960s, when a farmer expanding his cellar struck a mammoth jaw and excavators uncovered four bone structures measuring between 12 and 24 square metres. It joins a widening record of early building that runs from the oldest known wooden structure, two interlocking Zambian logs dated to 476,000 years ago, to Neolithic timber halls raised long before Stonehenge.
Wood Central understands that reconstructed dwellings from Mezhyrich are now on display at the National Museum of Natural History in Kyiv and the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The site itself sits on a promontory above the Ros and Rosava rivers, 110 kilometres south of Kyiv, in Cherkasy oblast.
For all the ingenuity on display, the researchers read the shelters as pragmatic responses to an extreme climate rather than permanent villages, with the site occupied for anywhere from a single visit to 429 years. Chu dates the structure and its surrounding workshops to within a few centuries of 18,000 years ago, the coldest window of the last glaciation.
For more information, the study is published in Open Research Europe: Chu W, Shydlovskyi P, Maier A et al. “A revised radiocarbon chronology for the mammoth bone structures and associated features at Mezhyrich, Ukraine.” Open Research Europe, 25 July 2025. DOI: 10.12688/openreseurope.20112.1
