A woolly mammoth lay for thousands of years in wet ground near the Danube, its ribs, foot bones, and a nearly 2.5-meter tusk sealed in place until construction crews in Bavaria uncovered them by chance. What looked at first like a remarkable Ice Age fossil soon turned into something rarer. It became direct evidence that people handled the carcass during one of the coldest and harshest chapters of the last glacial period. The partial skeleton was found at Taimering, near Regensburg in southern Germany, during excavations that had originally been aimed at medieval remains. Instead, workers and archaeologists recovered a large mammoth tusk and more than 70 bones and fragments. Most of them were ribs and bones from the hands and feet. The surfaces were preserved with unusual clarity because they had spent millennia in waterlogged sediments. “The mammoth’s tusk and bones were exceptionally well-preserved due to their millennia-long conservation in the wet soil environment,” says Dr. Christoph Steinmann, deputy head of the Department of Archaeological Heritage Preservation for Lower Bavaria/Upper Palatinate at the BLfD. …