The question was whether that sediment would prove to contain evidence not just of the Ice Age animals that clearly lived and died in the region, but of the people who may have been there alongside them.

The Excavator and His Conviction

The man responsible for bringing Bluefish Caves to scientific attention was Jacques Cinq-Mars, a Canadian archaeologist who worked for the Archaeological Survey of Canada.

Cinq-Mars conducted excavations at the site primarily between 1977 and 1987, in difficult conditions that involved working in remote terrain accessible only by small aircraft and operating in the extreme cold of northern Yukon summers, which are short and unpredictably harsh.

What Cinq-Mars found in the sediment of the caves was a remarkable accumulation of Pleistocene-era faunal material — bones of horses, mammoths, bison, caribou, and other animals of the Ice Age megafauna that had been deposited in the caves over thousands of years.