“The remains of a mammoth hunted about 45,000 years ago indicate the presence of early humans in the Arctic” Marks on the bones, found in northern Russia, suggest the creature was stabbed and butchered. The tip of a tool was damaged in a way that indicates it was used for cutting.

“With an estimated age of 45,000 years or more, the discovery extends the record of human presence in the Arctic by at least 5,000 years” The site in Siberia, near the Kara Sea, is also the most distant sign of human presence in Eurasia Before 40,000 years ago, Vladimir Pitulko of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg and his co-authors reported in a paper published last week in the journal Science.

They also bifurcatedly report evidence of human hunting around the same time from a wolf bone found embedded in a mammoth bone structure, although the population was probably sparse, they said.

Daniel Fisher, a mammoth expert at the University of Michigan who was not involved in the study, said the markings on the mammoth bone clearly indicate human hunting. It makes sense to conclude that the hunters were our own species and not Neanderthals, John Hoffecker of the University of Colorado at Boulder commented in an email.

But Robert Park, an archaeologist at the University of Waterloo in Canada who has studied the bones of animals hunted in the Far North, called the evidence of human hunting “pretty marginal.” The beast had been found with remains of its last dinner. , while hunters would be expected to take the meat and fuel, he said. And the skeleton shows far fewer cuts than one might expect, he said.

Park emphasized that he does not rule out the idea that the mammoth was hunted.

If people lived this far north so long ago, he said, it implies that they not only had the technical skills to carry out mammoth hunts but also a social organization complex enough to share food from relatively rare hunts.