The medieval mammoth: Biomolecular identification of mammoth remains from a Dutch medieval context

As part of a research project on medieval whaling activities in the Netherlands and Flanders, Belgium, Zooarchaeology by Mass-Spectrometry (ZooMS) was performed on 40 medieval archaeological “cetacean” specimens from those regions in order to find out what species the specimens represented. Interestingly, a specimen from the early medieval site of Leiderdorp-Plantage was identified as belonging to a member of the Elephantidae family. Upon closer morphological analysis of the specimen, it turned out to be the proximocaudal fragment of a right tibia of a woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius). The specimen contained a hole, indicating that it probably had been used as a tool or artefact by the medieval people who found the bone.