The last ice age began just as humans were beginning to move out of Africa, and only began to wane around 18,000 years ago. For a long time, the extreme cold was assumed to be the reason that no human artifacts older than that have been found in the Arctic Circle. Yet Siberians migrated into the Americas during that time, albeit below the Arctic Circle, so they must have been tough people. A Siberian archaeological site first discovered twenty years ago is beginning to reveal just how tough they were.
The situation changed when a Russian geologist, searching for animal fossils, came across a foreshaft (the detachable end of a spear) crafted from a wooly rhinoceros horn. At 70 degrees latitude, the site was well north of the Arctic Circle, along the Yana River about 60 miles from its outlet to the Arctic Ocean. The artifact was almost certainly ancient, considering wooly rhinos were Ice Age creatures, now extinct.
In 2001, excavations began at this Yana “Rhinoceros Horn Site” (RHS), led by archaeologist Vladimir Pitulko of the Institute for the History of Material Culture in St. Petersburg, Russia. Over the next two summers, the team unearthed hoards of stone tools, animal bones and artifacts carved from mammoth ivory. Because the finds were buried under about 30 feet of frozen ground, perishable remains were exceptionally well preserved.
But the most exciting results from these initial digs were radiocarbon dates published in a 2004 Nature paper: The Yana RHS site was roughly 30,000 years old, which more than doubled the age for humans in the Arctic Circle.
Read about the thousands of artifacts retrieved from Yana and what they tell us about the people who made them at Discover magazine. -via Strange Company
(Image credit: Basilyan et al. 2011 Journal of Archaeological Science)