An Unearthed Woolly Mammoth Places Humans In The Arctic 45000 Years Ago

Radiocarbon dates on the collagen from the mammoth’s tibia bone, as well as from hair and muscle tissue, produce a direct date of 45,000 years, the team reports online today in Science. The hunting marks were identified by matching them to those found on a previously excavated site in Siberia which also had plentiful mammoth hunting and where we did the job with lots and lots of spears.

In this undated photo provided by researchers on January 12, 2016, volunteer Sergey Gorbunov works at the excavation site of a mammoth carcass in northern Russia’s Siberia region near the Kara Sea.

A frozen mammoth carcass reveals that humans were in the Arctic far earlier than expected.

The earliest Arctic denizens likely were hunter-gatherers.

Advancements in mammoth hunting probably allowed people to survive and spread widely across the most northern part of Arctic Siberia, representing an important cultural shift.

Stretch a dried mammoth skin over a frame of its bones and tusks and you have got yourself a tent. The site where the mammoth’s remains were found is positioned at 72 degrees north, right in the Arctic Circle.

The researchers flew the block of ice by cargo plane to their zoological institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg.

The mammoth was really killed by humans, and evidence for that is unbeatable.

Mammoth had a number of unusual injuries on the ribs, right tusk and jaw bone. “So this was at least 10,000 years older than the earliest presence of humans in the Arctic Circle before”. “This is the kind of strategy in use in Africa by native elephant hunters and described ethnographically not so long ago”, said Dr Pitulko, the lead author of the study published in the journal Science. And the skeleton shows far less butchering than one would expect, he said.

Mammoths and other large animals, such as woolly rhinoceros and reindeer, may have been the magnet that drew humans to the Far North. “Mammoth hunting was an important part of survival strategy, not only in terms of food, but in terms of important raw materials-tusks, ivory that they desperately needed to manufacture hunting equipment”, Pitulko says. “Whether or not it has direct consequences for the peopling of the New World remains to be seen”.