
A mysterious 25,000-year-old structure built of the bones of 60 mammoths has been unearthed in Russia.
Researchers believe mammoth houses were generally iconstructed by Palaeolithic people to serve as houses, providing refuge during harsh winters.
However, they could not figure out the reason behind the construction of this circularIce age structure.
''Clearly, a lot of time and effort went into building this structure so it was obviously important to the people that made it for some reason'' said Alexander Pryor, the lead archaeologist of the excavation.
In 2014, researchers found evidence of this structure at the site and began excavation in 2015, which took three years.
A study detailing their findings published this week in the journal Antiquity.
This isn't the first "mammoth house" to be found in Russia, but it is the oldest and largest, measuring 41 feet across.
Till date, the oldest ice age structure was dated 22,000 years old.
In the 1960s and 1970s, researchers found similar, smaller buildings at the site, which they namedKostenki 11. It's 310 miles south of Moscow and is now a museum called the State Archaeological Museum-Reserve Kostenki.