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
Dismemberment is consistent with either in-field processing (dividing a carcass at the kill site for transport to a base camp) or with the sequential processing of pre-divided portions brought to the cave site.
Together, these four categories of modification tell a coherent story of people who were engaged in the full economic exploitation of the large animals of the Beringian landscape — not just eating what they could reach, but systematically extracting every useful product a carcass provides.
This is the economic behavior of people with a sophisticated understanding of carcass anatomy and a comprehensive toolkit for exploiting large animals, consistent with a long history of large-animal hunting adaptation in cold environments.
The specific combination of resources being extracted — hides, meat, tendons, and possibly bone marrow (the direct evidence for marrow processing is less clear in the Bluefish Caves material, but marrow extraction is a common component of large-animal butchery in cold-climate contexts) — is exactly what would be expected from people adapted to life in the mammoth steppe environment of eastern Beringia.