A hare jaw that was found this summer at the Sand Motor near Ter Heijde turns out to be more than 35,000 years old. The animal must therefore have roamed the steppe during the last ice age, among mammoths, rhinoceroses and bison.
Whoever thinks of a mammoth steppe probably already envisions the long-haired giant elephants, perhaps surrounded by woolly rhinoceroses and reindeer. You might even think of a squirrel if you're a fan of the animated films Ice Age . But a hare? You just have to come up with it.
Yet this summer, a jaw of a prehistoric hare was found near the Zandmotor, off the coast between Ter Heijde and Kijkduin. The hare jaw turned out to be more than 35 thousand years old. "That means that this hare walked among the mammoths on the current North Sea floor during the last ice age," said researcher Dick Mol of the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam, who identified the beast. It is the first time that fossil parts of a hare from the last ice age have been found on the bottom of the North Sea.
The North Sea bed as a mammoth steppe
In the last ice age (the Weichselian), which lasted from 100,000 to about 12,000 years ago, a large part of the southern North Sea was dry, and the area formed a large steppe. During the coldest phases of the last ice age, the average sea level was more than 100 meters lower than today – most of the water was frozen as glaciers on the continents. At that time, the steppe covered almost the entire northern hemisphere.
Remains of many mammals from this period have been brought up from the North Sea in recent years, mainly as by-catch from fishermen. This mainly concerns the bones of large animals such as mammoths, wisents, horses and rhinoceroses. Smaller animals must also have been there, but large bones are better preserved and are, above all, easier to fish from the seabed.
Since the construction of the Zandmotor, an artificial sandbank off the coast of South Holland, the collection of ice age fossils from the North Sea has expanded considerably. Bones, teeth and molars of smaller grits, such as mice, voles and moles, are also found here. And now, for the first time, also a hare's jaw. The find was made by fossil collector Barbara Marsman of the Hague Geological Society.
New?
And now? Will paleontological science be shaken to its foundations by this find? Not that, says Mol. “We already knew from other sites on the continent of Europe and Asia (Siberia) that hares belong in the mammoth fauna. Nothing new in that regard. However, it was not known that they were also part of mammoth fauna that inhabited the North Sea floor during the last ice age.” Mol sees the find as an extra puzzle piece that falls into place when reconstructing this primeval landscape and its inhabitants.
Bert Boekschoten, emeritus professor of paleontology at the Free University in Amsterdam, speaks of a special find. “The bones of small animals like mice are sometimes well preserved,” he explains, “for example, if they end up in owl balls. And skeletal parts of mammoths can often be found in old stream valley fills, because they are so large. But hares are tricky, they are just in between in terms of size.”
Remains of hares are therefore scarce – although that says nothing about the number of hares that hopped around the steppe at the time.
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