photo: Ayaal CHERNOGRADSKY / specially for NEFU editorial board of corporate media

On December 7, the staff of NEFU Museum of Mammoth held a press conference, which showed fragments of spears found during excavations of mammoths. Besides the spear tip, which was transferred to NEFU scientists recently, two discoveries were also presented.

The chief science associate of NEFU Mammoth Museum, Semyon Grigoriev, noted that since the spear was received recently, the necessary tests have not been conducted yet. In particular, it is necessary to determine the age of the artifact and whether it was a spear used as the murder weapon for the mammoth whose bones it was found in the Ust-Yansky region of Yakutia.

However, even now scientists confidently say that the spear with a length of 36.5 centimeters became curved as time passed, but was initially absolutely straight. People who lived that time, as scientists explained, owned the technique of straightening mammoth tusks. According to the deputy director of NEFU Museum of Archeology, Ethnography and Higher School Aleksandr Stepanov, the spear was carefully polished, most likely, with a stone. Specially crafted, razor-sharp stone plates of a small size were inserted into it through the entire length of the tip.

Besides this spear, the journalists saw two other exhibits of NEFU Mammoth Museum: found in 2013 on the island of Bolshoy Lyakhovsky, spear from the tusk of rhinoceros of 13.390-13.245 years old and 83.2 centimeters long and fragments of a spear that was discovered last year on the so-called Yansky cemetery of mammoths. The length of the second discovery is 36.5 centimeters.