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Ice Age Eskimos? 40,000 year old finds from northern Siberia

It was long thought that the world above the Arctic circle was empty of humans of any kind until the last few thousand years of the Palaeolithic. A few groups may have stopped there to hunt, or to take shelter on their way elsewhere, but generally the picture was that until about twenty thousand years ago Arctic Siberia was one huge glacier, a wall of ice impenetrable to both man and beast. Two weeks ago, that picture was proven wrong.

In yet another archaeological breakthrough by the Russian Academy of Sciences, pieces of worked antler were found at Kushevat, beside the lower reaches of the Ob river, and AMS-dated to c.40,000 BP, and complementary paleoenvironmental data suggested that unlike what was believed, the Ob river region was fully glaciated only until 60,000 years ago, making the land traversable and liveable by humans from that point on. These grooved antlers are nothing special by themselves, and confirms that whoever was there visited the region ephemerally. However, the dates have big implications for the spread of humans towards the Americas. If Homo Sapiens was already able to live in north-eastern Siberia by the start of the Upper Palaeolithic, there would have been nothing to stop them in travelling to Beringia and Alaska within a few thousand years. 

In support of this, an anatomically modern human femur bone was previously found in Omsk, toward western Siberia, which was AMS-dated to about 45,000 BP. It is hard to tell which direction they came from. The two possibilities are from China, where DNA shows a strong link between individuals there and early Americans, or from eastern Europe, which modern humans settled from 50,000 BP or thereabouts. 

The worked antlers from Kushevat. Image credit: Archaeology, Ethnography and Anthropology of Eurasia (vol. 47).


On the other hand, all the evidence is here is a set of worked antler bones, not tools or human bones. As the grooves can't be fitted with a particular type of tool or technique of tool use, it is altogether possible that Homo Sapiens were not responsible for them in the first place. Apparently, Neanderthal remains were recovered from Yanskaya, in Yakutia, dated to ~28,000 BP, and slightly earlier Neanderthal Mousterian flakes have been found in the northern Urals, at the site of Byzovaya. With competition scarce, late Neanderthals might have been able to hold out in the far north and east, encountering other humans only very occasionally. Alternatively, late-surviving Denisovans could be the culprits, as they were evidently already present in eastern Russia and, based on the sizable genetic imprint on modern east Asians, could have lingered until 20,000 BP. 

We might also have an idea of what these Ob-dwellers might have looked like, if they were modern humans at all. Another recent study found that the robust and archaic-looking humans from Red Deer Cave in Yunnan province, China, who lived about 11,000 years ago, show very close genetic affinities with early eastern Siberian and American human groups. The implication is that the Red Deer Cave people moved into southern China early on and later migrated north-east, potentially across to Japan and the Kurils, leaving a remnant of their kind behind. Maybe their morphology was ideal for the challenging climates and diets they had to endure. 

The sum of these findings is that it makes an earlier settlement of the Americans much more credible, and leaves open the possibility that Neanderthals or Denisovans might have got as far as Beringia or even further. It also reinforces that the late Palaeolithic, like many phases of prehistory, was an incredibly mobile, dynamic and exciting time. 

References:

https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/arctic/2022/06/humans-dated-back-arctic-over-40000-years

Xiaoming Zhang, Xueping Ji et al (2022) A Late Pleistocene human genome from Southwest China. Current Biology; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.06.016





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