Human presence in the Arctic is older than previously estimated – Daily Mail

Human beings were in the Arctic 45,000 years ago, 10,000 years before than we thought, we revealed marks arrowheads and other sharp objects observed in the frozen mammoth skeleton, according to a Russian study published Thursday in United States.

This discovery could tell the oldest survivor example in the Arctic, where are rare signs of human Paleolithic, according to these researchers, whose work was published in Science.

In 2012, a team led by Alexei Tikhonov of the Zoological Museum of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, dug a partial skeleton of a woolly mammoth male who was in a frozen sediments cliff on the east coast of Yenisei Bay, in the center of the Arctic Siberia.

Radiocarbon dating of the animal warm and materials that were near the dated at 45,000 years.

The mammoth skeleton shows signs of unusual injuries to the ribs on the right tusk and jaws. Brands are most likely the result of very sharp spear tips, scientists estimated.

The mandibular branches, lower jaw bones, are mostly intact when they are discovered. But in the most recent remains of mammoths killed by human jaws they are often incomplete, which could have resulted from the removal of the language involved.

The hunters used to eat the tongue of mammoths in a sort of ritual or because that part of the animal could have been considered a delicacy, the researchers said.

The only thing that kept this mammoth tusk, right, shows signs of human work to change the way: these brands reveal an attempt to separate it from the rest of the body.

Instead, the outer extremity of the tusk, usually blunt, worked to make it a tool according to various techniques observed much later in the Arctic.

These men wore long, sharp ivory fragments to cut meat in a region where were hard to find other lithic raw materials.

It is likely that advances in hunting techniques mammoth allow these groups could spread in the far north of the Arctic Siberia, the authors say.

These movements represented an important turning point that may facilitate the arrival of humans to the areas near the Bering Strait, which at that time stood out from the water surface.

So, they could have entered the Americas before the last glacial maximum, 22,000 years ago, researchers estimate.