Mammoth tusks under kindergarten

In 2017, during the waterproofing works, a small but very important discovery was made. A congestion of bones was found on the territory of the Berdyansk kindergarten “Sun”.

An unusual find turned out to be fragments of a tusk of a prehistoric mammoth. The workers showed the remains to the director of the educational institution, who in turn sent them to the specialists of the Berdyansk Museum of Local Lore.

According to the assumption, the head of the archaeological laboratory of the Berdyansk Pedagogical University, candidate of historical sciences, Valentina Papanova, the remains could belong to a woolly, steppe or southern mammoth. The age of a find varies between 10,000 and 2.5 million years.

“It is difficult to say whether it is a mammoth or a southern elephant. I am an archeologist, not a paleontologist, ”said Valentina Anatolyevna. “One thing is for sure, the remains are not petrified in water.”

One can only guess how the remains of the prehistoric giant appeared under the wall of the building in the center of Berdyansk. But experts on this have several assumptions.

The first version is more mundane. The kindergarten is located in a house that was long owned by representatives of the dynasty of Greek merchants Antonio, Horatio and Gerasim Kupp. And the bones, most likely, were brought to the ground when the building was built more than a century ago.

“There are many such finds in the Azov region,” local historians report. - Directly open-air museum of paleontology. So the tusk could well be in the ground."

The second version is more like a legend. Earlier, before the construction of the building they sacrificed. Simply put, bones were placed under the foundation. The metropolitan archaeologists who studied the environs of Berdyansk in the 1930s were very surprised by the fossil animal bone fences in the Berdyansk district of Liski. So there is some truth here.

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