Archaeologists Discover a Sacred Place of People Who Lived 23,000 Years Ago at a Palaeolithic Site in the Bryansk Region
Archaeologists have discovered a sacred place of people who lived 23,000 years ago at a Palaeolithic site in the Bryansk Region. It was a hearth with mammoth bones dug into it, and beneath them lay objects which, in the researchers' opinion, were used for ritual purposes. Among them were Palaeolithic Venuses, flint blades and an artefact of unknown purpose made from mammoth bone.
The narrow object, about 16 centimetres long, has an asymmetrical triangular head, and its edges were decorated with an ornament of slanting crosses, arrows and slanting parallel incisions. The artefact may have been made from a very large tubular mammoth bone. According to the researchers, such objects have not been found before, although similar artefacts, decorated "little spatulas", have turned up at other sites of the eastern Gravettian. What function the artefact served, the researchers do not yet know.
