William wrote:

> At least some bones would have been taken, useful for various purposes,
> including building.

At lease most should be left over. E.g. spine bones.

> Maybe they filled it later with the same dirt? Possibly to use a good
> location next year. If they left a hole, the next wooly mammoth would make
> a new trail.

They used to say at university: nothing keeps as good as a hole.
 From most settlements what you find at last are the holes.
If you dig, you disorder the stratigraphy. It's not normal to have
meters of "earth". Soil builds up very gradually, it has a lot of
layers. When you dig, you disorder them.

> Wooden or horn picks easily made. How about neolithic miners?

These are neolithic, as you say.
Neolithicum shows a tremendous advance in quality of stone tools.
If you go back more than 50k or 100k years (2 mio years of hominids to
look at) stone tools are much simpler.
 From flint you have sort of blades, good to cut, good for arrowheads.
(Neanderthals and erectines didn't even have arrows and no nets, no
fishhooks).

Tools to cut trees before Cro Magnon - are very inefficient (and
probably unnecessary).

There's a time when technology was advanced and still paleolithicum.
At the very end of paleolithicum.
These are the times (many of) you probably think of when thinking about
"stone age" hunting.
But these are only a few 10,000 years out of millions of years.

I'm sure you wouldn't want to dig a hole to burry a mammoth with a moose
horn. Or a sharp stick or the like.
If they used traps, probably they used natural ones - if they could find
such places.

Amadeus