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

Bluefish Caves provides the missing piece: direct evidence of people in the right place at the right time, using the subsistence strategies appropriate to the Beringian environment.

The cut marks on a horse jaw in the Yukon are, in this sense, connected to the early human presence in Patagonia.

Not directly — we cannot draw a genealogical line from the specific individual who processed that horse to any specific individual at Monte Verde.

But through the logic of population history, through the genetic models that propose a Beringian founding population, and through the geographic and temporal constraints on how the Americas could have been peopled, the Bluefish Caves evidence and the Monte Verde evidence are part of the same story.

That story begins in Beringia, in a cold cave above a river, with someone removing a horse’s tongue with a stone tool.

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