Kostyonki–Borshchyovo

• 1. Introduction

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  The Kostyonki-Borshchyovo archaeological complex first entered the written record through a puzzled Dutch traveler. In 1703, Cornelis de Bruijn and his party found many elephant teeth beside the Don River. He kept one out of curiosity. In his own words, "I can not understand how these teeth could get here." The Emperor, Peter I, had an explanation ready. He told the travelers that Alexander the Great had passed this way, and that a few of his elephants might have fallen here. The teeth were not from elephants at all. They came from mammoths, and the people tied to this ground lived before 40,000 years ago. Who were those people, and what did they leave in the earth? How did they live through an event that blanketed their land in ash? And what can their bones say to us about the ancestry of people alive today?

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• 2. A Village Named for Bone

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  The name Kostyonki comes from the Russian word кость, which means bone. The village sits on the western bank of the Don, in Khokholsky District of Voronezh Oblast, about 25 km south of the city of Voronezh. In 1768, Samuel Gottlieb Gmelin mentioned the place in his own account. Real digging began in 1879, when I. S. Polyakov, who lived from 1845 to 1887, excavated Kostenki-1. Excavations between 1881 and 1915 were mostly hunts for stone tools. Careful, systematic work started in the 1920s, and the most notable campaigns were led by P.P. Efimenko from 1923 to 1938. Only in the second half of the 20th century did researchers realize that the neighborhood held many more sites. Today there are 26 of them, numbered Kostenki 1 to 21 and Borshchevo 1 to 5. Two stand out as the most famous, Kostenki-12, called Volkovska, and Kostenki-14, called Markina Gora. Both would later give up human remains that geneticists could read.

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• 3. Circles of Mammoth Bone

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  The State Archaeological Museum-Reserve Kostyonki lets visitors see finds exactly where they were uncovered. The building stands directly on top of Kostenki 11, a circle made of mammoth bones. A second circle came to light much more recently. In 2020, archaeologists reported a bone structure at Kostenki that is 25,000 years old. It contains the remains of at least 60 mammoths and measures over 12.5 m across. Nobody in the source material explains exactly how such rings were used, so the bones themselves are the main evidence. Above some of the finds lies another kind of evidence, a layer of volcanic ash, and it turned out to work like a clock.

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• 4. The Ash Clock

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  A layer of Campanian volcanic ash covers some of the Kostenki finds. It was once dated to about 45,000 years ago, and it proved that people were living here before that moment. Newer work places the Campanian Ignimbrite eruption of the Phlegraean Fields volcano at about 39 kya. The blast threw out 500 km3 of ignimbrite. That makes it the largest eruption in the last 200,000 years of European history. At Kostenki 17/2, which belongs to the Spitsyn culture, ornaments from before the eruption show small round holes. They were apparently drilled by hand-operated rotary drills. Researchers suggest that such skill may have helped the population prepare for a volcanic winter. Just above the ash, sewing needles appear. Below the ash, the tools belong to a different tradition, and archaeologists have sorted these traditions into named cultures.

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• 5. Cultures in Layers

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  Kostenki-6, also called Streletskaya, belongs to what researchers call the nontransitional local Strelets culture. Kostenki-1 layers 2 and 3, Kostenki-11, and Kostenki 12/3 share that label, and all lie beneath the volcanic tephra. This culture resembles early Upper Paleolithic cultures of central and western Europe, such as the Szeletian. Its first stage might be the work of local Neanderthals. Higher layers tell a later story. Kostenki 1/1, Kostenki 4/2, Kostyonki 8/2 and Kostenki 21/3 belong to the eastern Gravettian, dated from 24 to 22 ka. Kostenki 2, Kostenki 3, Kostenki 11-1a and Kostenki-19 belong to the Zamyatino culture, from 22 to 17 ka. Kostenki 8/2, called Telmanskaya, gives its name to the Telman culture. As a whole, Kostyonki is considered part of the Aurignacian culture. As of 2016, excavators were still working at six sites, among them Kostenki-14, Markina Gora.

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• 6. Burial in Red Ochre

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  A tibia and a fibula from Kostenki are among the earliest directly dated human remains at the site, at 32,600 ± 1,100 14C years. Their traits mark them as European early modern humans. In 2009, scientists extracted DNA from a hunter-gatherer found at Kostenki-12. He was male, lived around 30,000 BP, and died at the age of 20 to 25. His people had buried him in an oval pit, curled in a crouched position and covered with red ochre. His maternal line belongs to mtDNA haplogroup U2. Later testing placed his paternal line in Y-DNA haplogroup C1, also written C-F3393. Another man, from Kostenki-14, lived roughly 38,700 to 36,200 years ago. He also carried mtDNA haplogroup U2, while his Y-DNA haplogroup was C1b, or F1370. Of the two, the older man from Markina Gora would prove the more consequential for geneticists.

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• 7. A Genetic Crossroads

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  The genome of the Kostenki-14 man is early evidence of a split between European and East Asian lineages. He was closely related to Paleolithic hunter-gatherers across a wide band of Eurasia. Among them were the Sungir specimens from western Russia and the Peștera Muierii woman of Romania, who lived 34 kya. Another relative was the Mal'ta boy of south-east Siberia, who lived 24 kya and belongs to the Ancient North Eurasian group. His genome also links to later Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of Europe, called Western Hunter-Gatherers, and of western Siberia. It connects as well to a basal population ancestral to the Early European Farmers. It does not connect to East Asians. The pattern shows that the main ancestral components of today's Europeans were already distinct and related at least 36,200 years ago. The modern European genomic structure therefore goes back to the Upper Paleolithic. One more detail sits in his DNA. Some Neanderthal admixture is present, and it has been dated to circa 54,000 BP.

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