workers discover mammoth bones on the Brussels metro construction site

Workers were surprised to discover the bones of a mammoth more than 11,000 years old, eight meters deep, on the metro site in the Belgian capital.

A major surprise on a construction site in the Belgian capital: mammoth bones dating from more than 11,000 years ago were found on the construction site of the future metro which will connect the north and south of Brussels. “A fact rare and exceptional!”greeted by the Belgian Secretary of State, Ans Persoons, on February 16, 2024.

The discovery of prehistoric fauna is quite rare in the Brussels region and allows us to better understand the past of the capital. “These animals lived in a very cold steppe, together with man – who at that time was the Neanderthal – in a very cold environment,” says Ann Degraeve, chief archaeologist at urban.brussels, the urban planning and heritage preservation service for the Brussels region.

Find all the missing bones

In detail, these are two femurs measuring almost a meter and a tusk fragment, immense and well preserved. Although the construction site of the future tribute station to the harmonica player Toots Thielemans was monitored by teams of archaeologists, it was construction workers who found the first one at a depth of more than eight meters. Because when we dig deep for the metro, we hit the sedimentary layers of the last ice age, when woolly mammoths roamed what would become Brussels. “It is only with earthworks at such a depth that we have this chance to get a little closer to these layers and not only recover the fragments of megafauna, but also take samples and learn a little more about this period”deciphers the specialist.

The construction site has not stopped yet, but the workers will be more attentive: “It’s just as incredible and exciting for them as it is for the archaeologists. And so they’re much more attentive. They’re allies actually.” In a construction cabin, they pinned up a drawing of a mammoth and set themselves the challenge, she says, of finding all the missing bones.