On a windswept bluff above the Ros and Rosava rivers in what is now central Ukraine, ice age hunter-gatherers once built shelters entirely out of the bones of woolly mammoths, using the remains of the largest land animals of their time to survive some of the coldest conditions the last glacial period ever produced. The site, known as Mezhyrich, was first excavated between 1966 and 1974 near the village of Mezhyrich, about seventy miles southeast of Kyiv, and it remains one of the best-known examples anywhere in the world of prehistoric architecture built from animal bone rather than wood or stone. A new study has now pinned down exactly when these remarkable structures were actually used, and for how long.
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