The 24,000-Year-Old Bones Found In A Yukon Cave — And The Cut Marks That Pushed Humans In North America Farther Back In Time
Mammoths were, in terms of the caloric and material resources they provided, the largest possible prey animal in the Beringian landscape.
A single mammoth carcass provided an enormous quantity of meat, fat, bone, ivory, and hide — enough to sustain a group of people for weeks or months.
The hunting or scavenging of mammoths, if it occurred, would have been a major economic event with major implications for the subsistence strategy of the people who accomplished it.
The evidence for human-mammoth interaction in other parts of the world — Europe, where both Neanderthals and modern humans exploited mammoths, and Siberia, where numerous sites document human use of mammoth resources — makes it a priori plausible that the people of eastern Beringia also exploited mammoths.
The absence of compelling modification evidence from the Bluefish Caves mammoth specimens does not preclude this possibility; it simply means that if it happened at Bluefish Caves, the evidence has not yet been conclusively demonstrated.