Camping for Mammoths in the Ice Age (ca. 13,000 BC)

By: The Scribe on November, 2007

This place in Russia was an Ice Age camp site 15,000 years ago, where hunters spent their time on excursions to hunt mammoth. Near Lake Evoron in the Far East of Russia, an ancient camping site has been discovered which was the temporary home of hunters during the Ice Age for their hunting excursions.

The camp dates to approximately 13,000 BC, which is an incredible find – primarily because so little is known about the Ice Age which occurred in that time period. It is a point in history that is poorly studied, primarily because of how little archaeological evidence remains from that era.

The site was found in 2007 while researchers were on an archaeological expedition to Lake Evoron, and it is situated next to the Amur River. It appears to be the largest of four Stone Age sites from the area, and it was the discovery of several artifacts that pointed toward the site’s use as a mammoth hunting camp.

Several stone arrowheads, flint pikes, and a stone scraper were found here, and if the site is excavated, those few pieces could multiply into hundreds of stone tools, likely buried at a moderate depth below the surface.

The discovery of ancient sites in this area of Russia isn’t unusual – in 2006, an Iron Age burial mound was found with a piece of iron dagger, though it dated only to around 500 BC. This Paleolithic campsite is obviously much, much older, and may point toward a better understanding of this little-known time when the world was covered in ice.

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