Democracy Dies in Darkness

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.”

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May 23, 2024 at 9:46 a.m. EDT
An archaeologist uncovers the mammoth bones that were found in a small village in northeastern Austria. (Hannah Parow-Souchon/Austrian Archaeological Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences)
2 min

When winemaker Andreas Pernerstorfer was renovating his cellar, he stumbled across an unusual treasure, far rarer than the finest wine: He found huge bones, which turned out to be mammoth bones dating back to the Stone Age.

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