A Surprising Survival Story in The Siberian Arctic

摘要

Primates are simply not primed for Arctic survival. A person lost on the tundra in winter will quickly perish, and even the sturdiest shelter atop the permafrost provides scant refuge without a supply of fuel. Yet somehow, at the height of the last Ice Age, humans endured a similarly unforgiving environment in northern Siberia, in the Yana River valley 500 kilometers above the Arctic Circle. That's the surprising conclusion from a trove of artifacts uncovered at Yana and dated to about 30,000 years ago (using corrected radiocarbon dates). The find, described on page 52, pushes back the earliest known human occupation in the Asian Arctic by some 16,000 years. It's impossible to know what forces drove or enticed these Stone Age pioneers so far north or how long they clung to a precarious existence in the High Arctic. That they were there at all, though, is a revelation. It's "an extremely important site," says Donald Grayson, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Washington, Seattle. Or as paleoanthropologist Frank "Ted" Goebel of the University of Nevada, Reno, sums it up: "Wow."