These questions are worth taking seriously, because they get at the nature of the human adaptation that the Bluefish Caves evidence implies.

Modern human beings have lived in extreme cold environments throughout their history.

Indigenous peoples of the Arctic — Inuit, Yupik, Aleut, and others — have maintained populations in some of the harshest environments on earth for thousands of years, developing technological and cultural adaptations that allow survival in conditions where an unprepared person would die within hours.

The technologies that make arctic survival possible — insulated clothing, efficient shelter, specialized hunting weapons, detailed ecological knowledge, and social organization that allows for effective cooperative resource acquisition — are the product of long evolutionary and cultural histories of adaptation to cold environments.

The people who were in eastern Beringia 24,000 years ago were not the same as modern arctic peoples.