Friday, January 15, 2016

Humans Were in the Arctic 10,000 Years Earlier Than Thought

"Even though it was his first time handling the wooly mammoth’s bones, Vladimir Pitulko could envision the sequence of events that led to the animal’s demise on a desolate Siberian plain as clearly as if had witnessed it himself.
The grizzled mammoth lumbered into the clearing, its eyesight so poor it barely saw the small band of hunters leap from their hiding place and begin their coordinated assault. The humans hurled stone-tipped javelins at the mammoth to slow it down, and felled it by stabbing its sides with heavy spears. They focused their attacks on the beast’s left side, where it had suffered a previous head injury and was missing a tusk.
Amidst the carnage, one hunter saw an opening. He raised his weapon high and slammed it down, aiming for a spot at the base of the trunk. The hunter’s killing blow missed, and the errant spear tip gouged a deep hole in the mammoth’s cheekbone instead. But the animal was already mortally injured, and other blows quickly followed. The outcome was inevitable.
Plenty of previous evidence shows that humans hunted wooly mammoths during the late Pleistocene, with some studies arguing that our species hastened the mammoths' extinction. But the Siberian discovery is a surprise because it shows a mammoth hunt high in the Arctic around 45,000 years ago—ten millennia before humans were thought to have existed in this far north..."
Humans and Arctic

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