Stunning new archaeological finds humans lived much farther north than previously thought, reported the Live Science website on Oct. 1. The expedition, led by Alexander Kandyba, an archaeologist at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Siberian branch, was conducted during the summer of 2021. The team made the find on Kotelny Island, remotely located 615 miles north of the Arctic Circle. (“Russian Expedition Finds Evidence of Northernmost Stone Age Hunters above the Arctic Circle,” https://www.livescience.com/northernmost-stone-age-hunters-found)
The team uncovered the skeletal remains of a woolly mammoth (lived about 26,000 years ago), and most of the bones showed cut marks from bone or stone tools, indicating that the huge mammal was methodically butchered by early human hunters. “The discovery of this site makes it possible to move the northern border of the existence of ancient man and the development of the territory by him in the Pleistocene by almost 600 km [370 miles] to the north,” said Kandyba. He also remarked that “until now, the northernmost traces of Stone Age humans came from the valley of the Yana River in the Yakutia region of Siberia, and dated to between 27,000 and 29,000 years ago.”
Live Science also reported that “At the time the mammoth was killed, the sea level was lower, and so Kotelny Island was joined to the mainland. The climate was also milder, although temperatures were still near or below freezing for most of the year.”
To hunt and kill a woolly mammoth, without any evidence of some kind of trap, indicates a high degree of social skills, cooperation, and scientific knowledge in terms of making the tools and butchering the animal.
