Stone Age relics found in west Russia

Archeological excavations have yielded rare Stone Age artifacts at the historical site of Zaraysk, located 150km southeast of Moscow.

Archeologists have found figurines and carvings on mammoth tusks dating back to the Upper Paleolithic era, the latter part of the Stone Age.

The Upper Paleolithic era was the transitional phase when humans shifted from functional tool making to art and adornment.

Discovered by Hizri Amirkhanov and Sergey Lev of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the finds include an inscribed mammoth rib bearing the image of three mammoths, a small bone engraved with a crosshatch pattern, and two female figurines similar to Venus statuettes.

The dig also yielded a densely ornamented cone-shaped object carved from mammoth tusk with a hole running through its centre.

"The function of this decorated object remains a puzzle," the authors report in the Journal Antiquity.

"The finds enrich the inventory of Upper Paleolithic [portable] art and broaden the known distribution of specific types of art objects in the East European Upper Paleolithic," Dr Lev told BBC News.

The two figurines were found carefully buried in storage pits with a round deposit of fine sand laid underneath them toward the south. Facing the north, there was a deposit of red ochre.

Each of the figurines had been covered with a mammoth shoulder blade.

"This collection of artifacts is spectacular in a number of ways, not only for the range of representations of both humanistic and animal but also for the range of materials that is used," said California University anthropologist, Jeffrey Brantingham.

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