An upper incisor belonging to a woolly mammoth contemporary with the populations of homo sapiens, the first modern humans, has been discovered in a ravine in the small town of Sapoca, Buzau County, a unique piece by size that entered the collections of the Buzau County Museum.
According to the Buzau County Museum, the ivory comes from a species of woolly mammoth from the late Pleistocene period. On January 15, it was notified about the discovery of the fragment and on Wednesday, January 29, the incisor was dug out from the ground with support from the local administration of Sapoca and handed over for conservation to the Buzau County Museum.
"It is an incisor, an ivory that comes from a woolly mammoth specimen; it represents so far the largest piece of paleofauna in our collection. The piece was recovered from Sapoca. It arrived on Wednesday at the Buzau County Museum, primary conservation measures are to be applied to it, and in order to exhibit it - taking into account its size- we will have to make a customised piece of exhibition furniture for it. It has an unfolding size of 120 cm. Such items are extremely rare in the southern and south-eastern part of Romania. We thank the mayor of Sapoca for giving us the necessary support to harvest the piece, it was found in a ravine by a citizen," Buzau County Museum Director Daniel Costache told AGERPRES.
Specialists say that the fragment comes from a species of woolly mammoth at the peak of evolution, contemporary with modern humans.
"In late Pleistocene, there were already human populations in Europe, the Neanderthal man until about 40,000 years ago, after which the modern man, homo sapiens, came and spread along. In Romania, there are traces of interactions between humans and mammoths, both to obtain food and to make different objects out of ivory bones. There is a fragment of mammoth ivory with traces of processing in the Palaeolithic site of Lespezi, Bacau County. The discovery in Buzau is important, because there are very few pieces of this type in southern Romania. In general, the woolly mammoth is one of the smaller species of mammoth, because it lived in a colder climate and then the larger surface area of the body would have led to a more intense loss of heat. It was covered in fairly thick hair; from the whole skeletons discovered we can conclude that it was somewhere around 3 m high and could reach up to 8 tonnes in weight. We do not have direct elements yet, it could have lived in this interval, between 125,000 and 11,000 years," according to lecturer Stefan Vasile of the Faculty of Geology and Geophysics of the University of Bucharest.
The Sapoca ivory can provide clues about the climate and environment in which the mammoth lived at the time.
"When we find traces of animal species, we can also talk about the environment and the existing conditions in which they lived... In the last 2.6 million years, there have been several glaciations and warmer intervals. In the late Pleistocene, the woolly mammoth appears in cold intervals. Now we should not picture that everything was covered by ice. The Scandinavian ice sheet completely covered the Scandinavian Peninsula and part of northern Germany and Poland, part of northern Britain and the Netherlands. Further south, in our area, there were alpine glaciers. The climate was colder, probably about 5-6 degrees Celsius less than today. The landscape looked a little different. The woolly mammoth has a characteristic type of vegetation, it lived in the so-called mammoth steppe, there were not many trees, shrubs, instead there was quite a lot of snow, a climate that allowed the existence of life and man."
The collections of the Buzau County Museum also include several osteological fragments from different types of mammoths, with the first ones dating back to 1972.