The dominant vegetation was a type of vegetation community that no longer exists in its full Pleistocene form — often called “mammoth steppe” or “steppe-tundra” — characterized by productive grasses, sedges, forbs, and low shrubs that could grow in the cold, dry conditions of Beringian summers while surviving the extreme cold of winters.

This mammoth steppe was not a barren wasteland in ecological terms.

It was, by the standards of the Ice Age world, a remarkably productive ecosystem.

The combination of continuous daylight during the short summer growing season and the relatively dry conditions that prevented the development of the thick, insulating peat layer that characterizes modern tundra allowed a diverse and nutritious grassland community to develop and sustain enormous populations of large herbivores.

The large herbivores of the Beringian mammoth steppe were the foundation of any human subsistence strategy in the region.