Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas

uy in packs of 16 for about $4 at a craft store, was a wondrous device
38,000 years ago. The eye in the needle, which required complex planning
and dexterous craftsmanship to make from mammoth ivory, allowed people
to tailor insulated clothing, sleeping bags, gloves, and house coverings.
Imagine standing on the windswept plains of northern Oklahoma on a
December evening, or walking by Lake Michigan in the depths of a
Chicago winter. Now imagine the temperature about twice as cold. It’s easy
to see how tailored fur clothing would have allowed you to spend many
hours each day outdoors hunting and gathering food, making the difference
between life and death in these climates.
Despite the bitterly cold, long winters with average temperatures falling
to around –36°F (–38°C), a group of Ancient North Siberians thrived in this
region for almost 200 years. They lived in permanent settlements up and
down the banks of the Yana River, which archaeologists collectively named
the Yana Rhinoceros Horn Sites (Yana RHS).
Thanks to the work of archaeologist Vladimir Pitulko and colleagues
who have been excavating at Yana RHS since the 1990s, we know a great
deal about the lives of their residents.
They made clothing from rabbit and hare fur. They flaked stone tools
and used them to hunt rhinoceros, horses, mammoths, wolves, reindeer,
brown bears, and even lions. They carved special vessels from ivory. They
wore elaborate necklaces made of ivory beads, some painted with red ochre,
and pendants in the shape of horses or mammoths made from amber, teeth,
or the dark silver-gray mineral anthraxolite. They made bracelets and hair
diadems out of the same materials, and carved mammoth tusks with images
of hunters or dancers (5).
Yana RHS was not a small community. The genomes that the team of
geneticists, led by Eske Willerslev, sequenced from the two boys’ teeth tell
us that they were not brothers or cousins, as we might expect from finding
the remains of two contemporaneous children from a small population. On
the contrary, we can tell from their genomes that the effective population
size (the number of breeding adults) was around 500. The actual population
size would have been much bigger—perhaps 1,000 people, or more. We’re
not sure why no burials have been found at the site; perhaps they cremated
their dead, or perhaps their cemeteries are still to be discovered.