PREHISTORIC HUNTING PITS

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• Mexican archaeologists say they have made the first ever discovery of pits built around 15,000 years ago to trap mammoths. The two pits contained about 824 bones from at least 14 mammoths.
  
  
• Hunters may have used torches to scare the mammals into the area with the traps, which are about 6ft (1.70m) deep and 25 yards in diameter, but one of the skulls found also had marks of a spear wound on the front.
  
  
• The find in the neighbourhood of Tultepec, just north of Mexico City, marks a watershed in the study of the relationship between prehistoric hunting and gathering communities and the huge herbivores.