IT鈥橲 a trope of life in the ice age: a giant mammoth brought down by a hunting party鈥檚 spears. But such a scene can also provide evidence of the migration of our ancestors. Now, the discovery of a butchered mammoth carcass in north-west Siberia suggests humans were living in the Arctic 10,000 years earlier than we thought.
The 45,000-year-old find, along with that of a similarly ancient wolf bone bearing signs of arrow damage in eastern Siberia, suggests humans had colonised the region by this time. If so, this could reset our picture of when people first reached the Americas from Asia, assumed to be around 20,000 years ago. They may have had the chance to move east into North America earlier, says at the Russian Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg, leader of the team that studied the remains (Science, ).
The ice age was at its height 20,000 years ago, and the Bering Strait between Siberia and Alaska would have been a land bridge. An earlier migration is not impossible because the land bridge probably existed earlier, says Pitulko.
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This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淢ammoth spawns migration rethink鈥�