Ice age Siberians

The verified human history of eastern Siberia just got 16,000 years longer. Several hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, along one of northeast Asia's largest rivers, a team led by Vladimir V. Pitulko, an archaeologist at the Institute for the History of Material Culture in Saint Petersburg, Russia, recently discovered a 30,000-year-old encampment--almost twice as old as the next-oldest known Arctic settlement. The team has unearthed stone tools, animal bones showing signs of butchering and cooking, and spear shafts made from woolly rhinoceros horn and mammoth tusk.

Plant and pollen remains suggest the region was probably dominated by large expanses of floodplain meadow--an attractive landscape for plant eaters such as bison, hare, and reindeer. Whether the people at the site were permanent residents or seasonal hunters is unclear, but to some investigators their mere presence indicates that people had already habituated to a cold climate. More important, it raises the possibility that people were poised to cross the Bering land bridge to North America earlier than commonly believed--well before the height of the last ice age, 20,000 years ago. ("The Yana RHS site: Humans in the Arctic before the last glacial maximum," Science 303:52-56, January 2, 2004)

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