What Eastern Beringia Looked Like in Detail

The landscape of eastern Beringia during the Last Glacial Maximum — the specific physical environment that the Bluefish Caves people inhabited — can be reconstructed with reasonable precision from a combination of paleoenvironmental sources, including pollen sequences from lake sediments, macrofossil records from permafrost deposits, stable isotope data from herbivore bones and teeth, and the genetic analysis of ancient plant and animal material.

The reconstruction that emerges from these sources is a landscape that was, by contemporary standards, strikingly open and dry.

The closed-canopy boreal forest that covers much of the Yukon today did not exist during the Last Glacial Maximum.