Slashdot Mirror
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."
2000km south of the North Pole sounds like you'd be in a fairly warm area....
Around 71 degrees north (latitude).
So... northern alaska, greenland, northern tips of scandinavia, siberia... are all around 2000 km from the pole.
All of Iceland is further south.
The world is a big.
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.
From the article - “The impact wounds on the bones with embedded stone fragments is conclusive evidence that people slayed this mammoth.”
They can often determine cause of death from skeletons long after any flesh has rotted or been removed. Impact strikes or piercing weapons leave imprints on the skeleton that are different to those of removing meat from a carcass. They can even tell which side a woman tended to carry her handbag from the dints left in her skeleton.
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.