An ancient hunters’ camp found in Lviv

The sensational discovery was made by the Lviv Wave radio station’s reporter Dmytro Kumar. While covering the city’s mayor Andrii Sadovy briefing on the repairs conducted along Pekarska Street, the journalist decided to explore the mountains of earth excavated by repair workers.

“While all were listening to the mayor, I felt an urge to have a closer look of the repair site,” Kumar said. “I saw something sticking out from an earth pile. After I pulled it out, I realized it was a horn, and started to look closer at the pile, finding two more horns and a lot of various bones there. In addition, there were also pottery shards and flint chips.”

The young man approached scientists with his finds. They confirmed that these remains belonged to a bison and an aurochs. Moreover, these species never shared habitat under natural conditions, so their carcasses had to be brought together by ancient hunters, most probably in the Neolithic period. However, even if the researchers review and perhaps lower the find’s age, it will still remain historically valuable, as Lviv region’s last aurochs went extinct in the early 17th century, with the bison preceding them.

“A working assumption is that this site once hosted a settlement or a hunters’ camp,” the custodian of the Lviv Zoological Museum Andrii Zatushevsky said. “The site is very interesting, rich in bone material, but unfortunately, it seems it will all be lost soon.”

Archeologists immediately sounded the alarm, as the repairs along Pekarska Street were conducted without their supervision. City councilors promised to correct the situation by giving the researchers two days for exploration. However, as this article was being written, the repairs continued unabated.

“Destruction of Lviv’s history with heavy machinery is the norm here,” researcher of the Archeological Rescue Service Ostap Lazurko said. “When planning repairs or construction work, they ignore archeologists. This should be unacceptable for a city listed among UNESCO World Heritage Sites.”

There were bone finds during construction in Lviv before, but usually, they were human remains. These are most ancient animal remains ever found so close to the city center.