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Grisly Find Suggests Humans Inhabited Arctic 45,000 Years Ago (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit points out this story which may rewrite the early history of humans in North America. From the Sciencemag story: "In August of 2012, an 11-year-old boy made a gruesome discovery in a frozen bluff overlooking the Arctic Ocean. While exploring the foggy coast of Yenisei Bay, about 2000 kilometers south of the North Pole, he came upon the leg bones of a woolly mammoth eroding out of frozen sediments. Scientists excavating the well-preserved creature determined that it had been killed by humans: Its eye sockets, ribs, and jaw had been battered, apparently by spears, and one spear-point had left a dent in its cheekbone—perhaps a missed blow aimed at the base of its trunk. When they dated the remains, the researchers got another surprise: The mammoth died 45,000 years ago. That means that humans lived in the Arctic more than 10,000 years earlier than scientists believed, according to a new study. The find suggests that even at this early stage, humans were traversing the most frigid parts of the globe and had the adaptive ability to migrate almost everywhere."
old Johnny Carson joke
Nature tells us no and we do it anyway.
2000km south of the North Pole sounds like you'd be in a fairly warm area....
I'm betting it was about 20,000 km from the (south) pole. :)
Sounds to me like they found a Mammoth, not a Grisly Bear...
It was warmer back then, so i suppose the hunting was great. We could use some warming other than the hot air we get from Washington.
But, but, they told me that the earth was only 6000 years old?!
Cheers, Glen
now that the permafrost is melting
picture of the area for visually oriented ppl
perhaps we'll find that Atlantis really did exist, somewhere in the artictic, and our civilization actually came from there, and much later conquered the desert dwellers in egypt. :-)
I am a sys admin and while I love learning about history, I definitely didn't pay much attention to it during my education days, so excuse my ignorance if this is a dumb question. How do they know that humans didn't just find the frozen, preserved carcass later on like this kid did, say 35,000 years ago. They find it and figure it's an easy way to harvest some tools which would explain the tool marks. Any science\archeology nerds care to shed any light on this for me?
These sorts of finds are wonderful (IMHO) and the more we learn about our distant ancestors, the more they turn out to have been resourceful and clever.
The article mentions Siberia. Siberia is roughly 65 degrees north latitude, or 2,700 km from the pole. So they probably DID mean 2,000 km , which would be northern Siberia (not a warm place).
The three countries who claim territory at 2,000 km from the pole Russia, Canada and Greenland.
Is my ham sandwich a "Grisly find?"
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Yeah, only now we spend 90% of our energy trying to prevent it... Oy, the bureaucrats' burden is a heavy one.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Can the arctic ocean be open during an ice age? It seems that if the arctic ocean stays open during the winter, the polar vortex would seek the path of least resistance and settle over a continent. The jet stream would change also. This could explain why palm pollen from the Caribien was found in core samples in northwestern Canada. It's kinda like what's going on now with our weather.
So all the liberal, alarmist, media that live and work in NYC are waffling? When NBC closes their Rockefeller center studio and moves it to Denver I'll take notice. You know because a lot of New York City is less than 16 feet above mean sea level!
Considering carbon dating has been shown to be about as accurate as a politicians promises, they should have just said they were guessing at how long it had been there.
how frigid was it?
+3 Hillary's?
"Humans using primitive tools killed and we assume ate a giant fucking hairy elephant"
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
How so?
Damn straight it is!
I have my suspicions that cavemen didn't suck on the tit of social services when they migrated somewhere, making the situation quite different indeed.
Assuming the dating system works. hard to believe in something that can't be proven.
couldn't resist
Pedantic point: It's redundant to say "2000 kilometers south of the North Pole". Any point on the Earth's surface that's 2000 kilometers from the North Pole is automatically 2000 km south of the North Pole. There is no way for something to be west or east of the North Pole, and definitely not north, so naming the cardinal direction is pointless. It's south by necessity.
I agree! Thank you for helping me resolve my uncertainty about this issue!
Thats because it has so much geothermal energy, you don't need to burn any fossil fuels, or nuclear or even wind turbines that might kill birds...
Nope, just proof you're an ignorant dumbfuck.
Wow, mod him down for that, must be the AC troll poster, too gutless to give his login, what an asshole.
Food supply is a big reason, and infrastructure. Now if you want to completely revert to a hunter-gatherer society, where do you think we're going to find enough food for everyone?
Neither hunting nor scavenging is going to do it. Mass-production is where it's at.
Oh, and shelter? Sorry, but a tarp hanging off a tree probably ain't gonna cut it for most people. Especially if it's cold and winter'ish.
Cities are generally built around resources. This can include minerals, water, food sources, or access. Even the stuff we can make ourselves doesn't spring up overnight, and things like water aren't as readily available everywhere as you seem to think, or at least not in quantities needed for any modern sized civilization.
It is difficult to believe caveman hunted wholly-wooly mammoths with just stone tipped spears. The beast grew larger than modern asian elephants, about as big as the largest african elephant bulls and its body was covered in half a meter thick long, heavy greasy hair, almost like felt that easily stops thrown projectiles. The turnk would catapult people into LEO. More or less the biological equivalent of the AT-AT. Furthermore, it's a mammal with a large brain, not a bug with 2-bit DAC ladder neural system.
Trying to attack elephantoids in the eye is not exactly wise. They have tiny eyes and are almost completely blind by default, relying on smells and sounds for perception. In the antique age, war elephants dispersed armies clad in armour, so let me say I wouldn't bet money on the 45k BC era neanderthals versus Hairy Jumbo. I don't think the small number of humans alive at that time could afford exchanging a dozen or two of their warriors (male posse) for each mammoth felled, because that way homo-allegedly-sapiens would have gone extinct well BEFORE the mammoths.
They didn't even RTFA; they didn't find a grizzly, but a mammoth!
I've read TFS several times and not one mention of an inquisitive bear! Come on, editors; up your game!
Or someone from further south tried and failed to kill a mammoth and mammoths are migratory, as some of the great Pixar documentaries claim.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Mother Earth 45000 years ago was pissed off because there were all these humans up north, so she turned down the climate a notch and caused all these bitches to move to the middle where they are supposed to be. Then evil white republicans started spewing a lot of C02 into the air to heat things up again so they can build a tropical resort in Nunavut.
Stop anthropogenic climate change now. It will create more useable land for people. We don't want that. We want all our land to be barren, cold, and owned by the federal government.
A Google search yields Yenisei Bay, Russia. I'm not sure why this find rewrites the history of "North America". The quality of reporting has fallen.
Or they were clubbed to death and eaten by the aboriginals. *Be a dear and pass the salt, would you, darling?*
You never even called me by my name...
This is disgusting and anyone who uprates it should have all rating privileges rescinded.