The mammoth trap
Cavemen dug 6ft deep pits and chased huge beasts into them
TOWERING 14ft tall and weighing up to eight tons, woolly mammoths were not the easiest animals to catch.
But scientists believe they’ve finally figured out how our cavemen ancestors snared their supper – chasing the beasts until they fell in giant pits.
The intriguing theory emerged after the bones of at least 14 mammoths were discovered in Mexico.
They were lying in two 6ft deep, 75ft wide pits that anthropologists think were dug 15,000 years ago.
The mammoths, some of which seemed to have been butchered, are thought to have been deliberately chased into the pits by Ice Age hunters. If the theory is corwas rect, they are the first mammoth traps to be discovered.
Remains of an extinct species of camel were also found at the site in Tultepec, just north of Mexico City.
Diego Prieto Hernandez, director of the National Institute of Anthropology and History, said the discovery ‘represents a watershed, a turning point in what we until now imagined to be the interaction between hunter-gatherers with these huge herbivores’.
The pits were found on land that being excavated for use as a rubbish dump. Scientists then spent ten months digging at the site. It is unclear if plans for the dump will proceed.
Woolly mammoths roamed the icy tundra of Europe and North
America for 140,000 years. They became extinct at the end of the Pleistocene period, around 10,000 years ago.
One of the best understood prehistoric animals, their remains are often frozen rather than fossilised, leaving them better preserved. Woolly mammoths and modern-day elephants are closely related, sharing 99.4 per cent of their genes.
The species took separate evolutionary paths six million years ago, at about the same time humans and chimpanzees went their own ways. Early humans hunted them for food and used their bones and tusks to make weapons and art.
But this was no mean feat as mammoths’ fearsome curved tusks measured up to 12ft.
‘Fearsome curved tusks’