PEOPLING × ENVIRONMENT × GENETICS
Yana, the First Arctic Humans
~31,600 years ago
Palaeolithic · Upper Palaeolithic · Last glacial
Yana RHS is a Palaeolithic camp on the lower Yana River in northeastern Siberia, at 71 degrees north, beyond the Arctic Circle. Its cultural layer dates to about 27,000 radiocarbon years, which calibration converts to ~31,600 calendar years, an age that in 2004 doubled the known antiquity of human occupation in the Arctic. Its people lived there during glacial times, worked mammoth ivory and rhinoceros horn into foreshafts, the detachable front sections of hunting spears, and left decorated beads, pendants and needles, the tools of sewn clothing. In 2019, two fragmentary milk teeth from the site, the northernmost Pleistocene human remains known, yielded the genomes of two unrelated males belonging to a previously unknown population, the Ancient North Siberians, distantly related to the early hunter-gatherers of western Eurasia, a lineage that branched off about 38,000 years ago, soon after West Eurasians and East Asians split.
Why it matters
Living beyond the Arctic Circle in a glacial period, some ten thousand years before the Last Glacial Maximum, demanded sewn clothing and ivory weaponry; Yana shows that Homo sapiens had both long before the coldest phase. The genomes give the camp a place in the peopling of two continents. The Ancient North Siberians were later largely replaced by groups of East Asian origin, but a related lineage, known from Mal'ta near Lake Baikal, contributed about 40 per cent of the ancestry of Native Americans: the first Americans carry, through a sister lineage, the heritage of these Arctic pioneers.
Dating & uncertainty
Two figures coexist because radiocarbon years are not calendar years: the atmosphere's carbon-14 content has varied, so a measurement of 27,000 radiocarbon years (2004), or about 28,000 (2012), calibrates to ~31,600 years, retained here with a margin of a thousand years on either side, ~32,500 to ~30,500 years. What Yana is the oldest of also needs stating: the oldest Arctic site with a full toolkit and human remains, not the oldest trace of people in the Arctic. A mammoth killed at almost 72 degrees north is dated to 45,000 years; if that kill site is accepted, humans entered the Arctic more than ten thousand years before Yana, and the camp is the earliest surviving settlement rather than the first arrival.
Sources
- Pitulko et al. (2004), Science · The Yana RHS Site: Humans in the Arctic Before the Last Glacial Maximumdoi:10.1126/science.1085219
- Sikora et al. (2019), Nature · The population history of northeastern Siberia since the Pleistocenedoi:10.1038/s41586-019-1279-z
- Pitulko et al. (2012), Antiquity · The oldest art of the Eurasian Arctic: personal ornaments and symbolic objects from Yana RHS, Arctic Siberiadoi:10.1017/s0003598x00047827
- Pitulko et al. (2016), Science · Early human presence in the Arctic: Evidence from 45,000-year-old mammoth remainsdoi:10.1126/science.aad0554
Our species’ history as one day
21:35:322 h 24 min before midnight
if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day