The site at Yana River in Russia is the oldest and northernmost (70°43'N 135°25'E) site discovered, to date in Northeastern Siberia. The people who lived there used a distinct type of stone tools, replaced by later waves of humans who reached the region. It has been dated to 32,000 years ago.
The Yana site was disvovered and studied by Vladimir Pitulko et al., (2004); the team followed up on a discovery that took place in 1993, when a spear foreshaft, crafted from the horn of a wolly rhinoceros was discovered, by chance, on the bank of Yana River by a local scientist named Mikhail Dashtzeren. Dashtzeren led Pitulko's team th the spot, and a methodical search of the area led to the 2001 discovery of the Yana Rhinoceros Horn Site (Yana RHS); Pitulko et al., also found mammoth tusk foreshafts.
The interesting part, is that the wooly-rhino horn foreshaft is very similar to the mammoth ivory foreshafts used by the American natives of the Clovis culture dating back 14,000 years. Foreshafts made of rhino horn were tough and flexible, and not as rigid as the Clovis ones. There were no wolly rhinos in America, so the Clovis had to use mammoth ivory. The foreshaft allowed hunters to replace broken stone points quickly when they broke while hunting megafauna. This implies that there was a shared know-how concerning spear-making, that spanned 18,000 years across two continents. But, as we will see below, the Yana people had vanished in Siberia, replaced by others, long before the Clovis appeared in America. How was this know-how shared?
The people who lived in Yana also shared genes with Amerindians. More recent research (Sikora M, Pitulko VV, et al. The population history of northeastern Siberia since the Pleistocene. Nature. 2019 Jun;570(7760):182-188. doi: 10.1038/s41586-019-1279-z. Epub 2019 Jun 5. PMID: 31168093; PMCID: PMC7617447) noted their specific stone tool technology and that there are no other sites in northeastern Siberia until the final part of the Last Glacial Maximum or LGM: "Following the occupation at Yana RHS, there is an absence of archaeological sites in northeastern Siberia until the latter part of the LGM, when groups bearing a very distinctive stone tool technology appear (~20 kya). It was within that intervening period that the ancestral Native American population emerged, but to date no genomes from individuals of this age have been recovered in northeastern Siberia."
Clearly, the Yana people who had been living there 32 kya had vanished 20 kya. Their stone tool style had also vanished: "by the time of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) ~23-19 kya, the Yana-related assemblage had disappeared. LGM and later artefact assemblages are dominated by a distinctive microblade stone tool technology, which spread in a time-transgressive manner north and east out of the Amur region, but did not reach Chukotka or cross the Bering Land Bridge (Beringia) until the end of the Pleistocene, and thus later than the earliest known sites in the Americas." This suggests that those who replaced the Yana came from the southeast, and did not move on, into America until it was already inhabited.
What happened to the Yana? Why did they vanish without a trace? The 2019 paper offers a timeline for the Ancient Siberian population or ANS: "The initial movement into the region represents a now-extinct ANS population diversifying ~38 kya, soon after the basal West Eurasian and East Asian split, represented by the archaeological culture found at Yana RHS... The arrival of people carrying ancestry from East Asia, and their admixture with descendants of the ANS lineage ~20-18 kya, led to the rise of the AP and Native American lineages. In the archaeological record this is reflected by the spread of microblade technology that accompanies the post-LGM contraction of the once-extensive mammoth steppe10. This group was, in turn, largely replaced by Neosiberians in the early and mid-Holocene... We find that, despite the complex pattern of population admixture throughout the last 40,000 years, the first inhabitants of northeastern Siberia, represented by Yana, were not the direct ancestors of either Native Americans or present-day Siberians, although traces of their genetic legacy can be observed in ancient and modern genomes across America and northern Eurasia. These earliest ancient Siberians (ANS), who are known from a handful of other ancient genomes (Mal'ta and Afontova Gora), are the descendants of one of the early modern human populations that diversified as Eurasia was first settled by our species, and thus highly distinct."
The Mal'ta and Afontova Gora remains are much younger, and dated to 25 kya and 17 kya, respectively, and also further south and west from Yana River. They came from central Siberia. The Mal'ta remains carry the U haplogroup (mtDNA) like Yana people, it is rare nowadays in Eurasia and has not yet been detected among Amerindians or ancient Native American remains, Mal'ta's Y-chromosome was haplogroup R, close to its root (Source) so it was also different to the Amerindian Q and Yana River's P haplogroups.
Could the Yana people have moved on, heading east, and entered America? This would explain their sudden disappearance from Siberia, and the transfer of the ivory foreshafts technology used much later by the Clovis people.
In Northwestern Canada 24,000 years ago?
If modern humans were in northern Siberia, 100 km from the frozen Arctic sea, ~71° latitude north, the earliest and northernmost people to have been yet detected in such a northern climate, what stopped them from moving further east and entering America at that time? Nothing.
Research from 2017 (Bourgeon, Lauriane; Burke, Ariane; and Higham, Thomas, Earliest Human Presence in North America Dated to the Last Glacial Maximum: New Radiocarbon Dates from Bluefish Caves, Canada (2017). KIP Articles. 1595. https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/kip_articles/1595), though supporting the Beringian Standstill hypothesis (which I do not agree with), describes radiocarbon dating of bones found in America (Bluefish Caves, Yukon, Canada, 67°09'N 140°45'W, right beside the border with Alaska) which according to the authors "confirm that Bluefish Caves is the oldest known archaeological site in North America ", adding that, "in conclusion, while the Yana River sites indicate a human presence in Western Beringia ca. 32,000 cal BP, the Bluefish Caves site proves that people were in Eastern Beringia during the LGM, by at least 24,000 cal BP" This is an early date for human presence in America.
Y-chromosome Haplogroup P
The 2019 paper on the Yana site (see Suppl. Table 1) mentions that the remains of two men unearthed in the Yana region, dated to ~30 kya, were sequenced. They carried U2 mtDNA (a maternal haplogroup which is not found in among Native Americans). Their Y-chromosome Haplogroup was P1, which is ancestral to two main haplogroups: (1) haplogroup Q, preponderant among Amerindians, and (2) haplogroup R, which very frequent across Eurasia.
These two men from Yana River dated to 31,000 years ago, carried P haplogroup in their Y-chromosome. This variant is not considered a founding lineage in America, where it is found, it is regarded as "imported" after the European discovery in 1492. Only Q, which descends from haplogroup P, is considered a founding Amerindian lineage.
I believe that a deeper look into haplogroup P would be interesting, and that will be the subject of my next post.
Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall ©
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