who once walked the earth. The heads with their huge teeth were what gave rise to legends about dragons and sea monsters.

Remember., entire fossils were hard to dig up with tools made of flint and antler or even with copper and bronze that replaced them. All they saw were the remains that had weathered out of the surrounding sedimentary rock.

What has always puzzled me are the elaborate cave paintings, the incredible artistry that produced such detailed drawings of animals that scientists could tell their age, sex, and what time of year they'd been represented. There are no detailed drawings of the phases of the moon or of the stars in the sky. Was Ice Age Earth a place of fog and mist? There aren't drawings of the plants that comprised abut 80% of their calories, either, but I suppose cave artists were likely men; women devoted themselves to things like making beads and other trims for what everybody was wearing. Still, the lack of appreciation for what was in the night sky has always been a total mystery, considering how obsessed people were with it later on.

and it seems that even a fossil rock from a stream or a slide would have shown up somewhere. As I mentioned maybe this sort of thing is deeper in the literature. Speaking of the cave artists and the night sky aspect you point out I don't know if I have ever seen representations of weather events like rain etc. I've probably just missed that.

It's a 250,,000 year old hand axe with a fossilized shell in the middle of it, so they weren't complete Philistines.

They deleted the picture with good lighting, you can barely see it here: https://digventures.com/2020/06/amazing-artefacts-250000-year-old-hand-axe-knapped-around-a-shell/

I think they did notice fossils and most likely marveled at them. It was just rare to have them in useful rocks they'd have kept for a long time, hunter-gatherer people need to travel very light.

fossils found in excavations were intentional collections or were debris uncovered and set aside when the stone age people were digging a trench or building a mound?

I'm thinking that they probably did save a few individual fossil items as evidence of their stories about giants and monsters.

I just saw several in Ireland. Plus, here’s one article with a quick google search

https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/cave-paintings-reveal-ancient-europeans-knowledge-of-the-stars

or they wouldn't have been there. I'm talking about cave paintings, most of which have been dated to before the last glacial maximum. The drawings of animals are magnificent. There are symbols that reappear from cave to cave, but no connection to the sky has been found. Some are most likely maps of herd movements through the landscape. The meaning of others has been completely lost.

However, the megalith carvings were all done 8000 years ago and later, especially in England and Ireland.

1800 to 1600 BCE, the Nebra Sky Disk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebra_sky_disc

Yet, stone age people were creating earth mounds and stone monuments that allowed them to keep track of seasons and the sun and moon. They were creating stories about constellations. They must have been not only observing the sky for centuries or millennia to know how to create those earth and stone seasonal tracking devices, but must have also recorded the info in depictions somewhere in order to collect and pass on the information necessary for creating the monuments.

Were sky depictions painted or carved onto perishable surfaces that have not survived? Animal skins, wood, clay?

in the last century, even discovering dark companion stars and I think one exoplanet.

The Egyptians were also great astronomers. So were the early Britons, although they seem to have been more concerned with the lunar progression than the stars.

The point is that the people of the last Ice Age don't seem to have been concerned with the sky, at all, and one would think they'd need to keep an eye on the constellations to know when it was time to move south for the winter. I've just found that odd, but I suppose their timekeeper was the series of plants that ripened and then withered, plus the movement of herding animals.

As far as I am aware with my limited understanding, fossils are much more fragile and much less durable than the original article they represent. So one sees a bone or a shell equivalent and tries to dig it out or carve into it... and it breaks or crumbles. They can be very fragile/friable, and what techniques/chemistry/materials were the ancients working with... Not much compared to today.

And without the background knowledge of deep time, novel species, etc, that we have these days, at best a fossil is a curiosity but a very fussy difficult to manipulate curiosity not easily identifiable as unique (except perhaps in the case of gigantic ones). Current articles/specimens would be better fodder for art used as grave goods, because of ease of use. That may account for the lack of preserved ancient-manipulated specimens.

Maybe this is apocryphal/BS but I seem to recall hearing someone speculate that the myths about cyclops/one-eyed-giants could have originated with elephant-related fossils in Southern Europe/Eastern Med. So the ancients may have had a decent amount of contact with fossils, just without their preservation to the present nor explicitly identifying them as such at the time.

and it raised a further question about things trapped in amber. I think those would have been more durable. A quick read on Wiki about amber does indicate a long history of knowledge of it and we know various inclusions of insects etc. would be trapped in the amber sometimes. But it still seems to me that these would have been oddities enough to be kept by people here or there but as I said maybe I'm just needing to read much deeper in the literature.

Perhaps ownership of things that were strange and desirable made you a mark. It could be hard for groups or individuals to maintain possessions without having to defend them. (holy grail, dragons teeth etc..)