The word Siberia is almost a synonym for extreme cold. It’s hard enough to imagine living there today, but humans have been wandering the icy terrain for thousands of years. The accepted estimate for the arrival of the first humans north of the Arctic circle was upped in 2004 from about 12,000 years ago to 35,000 years ago. And now that number’s been revised again. Because in 2012 a young boy some 1,250 miles south of the North Pole in Siberia stumbled across the leg bones of a woolly mammoth protruding out of the ground.

“What really made this a super-important find were two things.”

Ann Gibbons, contributing correspondent for the journal Science, which published an analysis of the frozen mammoth, talking about the finding on the Science podcast.

"One, it had a lot of injuries that showed it had been battered and shot with projectile points by humans…and then the second part that was really exciting was that when they used radiocarbon dating…it dated to about 45,000 years of age. So this was at least 10,000 years older than the earliest presence of humans in the Arctic circle before." [Vladimir V. Pitulko et al, Early human presence in the Arctic: Evidence from 45,000-year-old mammoth remains]

People may have gone so far north because of the mammoths.

"This was a huge, vast steppe region full of mammoths and large woolly rhinoceroses and reindeer and elk…so if humans could figure out how to live in the cold up north they were lucky and would have a great source, a great packet of meat to get when they needed it.”

You can hear the entire episode of the Science podcast with Ann Gibbons talking about the mammoth find at www.science.com.

—Steve Mirsky

[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]