CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY archaeologists are joining Czech colleagues to study the world’s oldest-known houses, some of them built from mammoth bones, Norman Hammond writes. The houses lie beneath the vineyards of southern Moravia, along with early evidence of such craft activities as modelling in clay and weaving, all carried out around a central hearth.

Between 25,000 and 30,000 years ago, Moravia was a more hostile place than now, its climate dipping to very low temperatures. Archaeological evidence suggests that its inhabitants sheltered themselves and gathered around the hearth to share food, make small models of themselves and their animal prey, and probably tell stories about it all. Their descendants followed the mammoth and reindeer north into yet more hostile worlds, eventually into Siberia and across the Bering Strait to become the first Americans, the investigators believe.

The project is being led by Martin Jones, Professor of Archaeological Science at Cambridge, and Professor Jiri Svoboda, Director of the Palaeolithic and Palaeoethnology Research Centre at Dolni-Vestonice.

Using the full range of modern archaeological science techniques, studying biological remains and molecular traces, and using the latest methods of sedimentary analysis and dating, the team aims to build a detailed picture of life around those early hearths, thereby casting light on one key aspect of our own species’ ecology.

Although humans originated in Africa, they somehow spread north to the most “un-African” ecosystems on earth: these early Moravian hearths beneath the vineyard soils of southern Moravia are one key to understanding how that came about.