The specific engagement with First Nations communities in the Yukon — the peoples whose territories include the Bluefish Caves site — has varied across the different phases of research.

Ensuring that future research at and around the site is conducted with appropriate engagement with the relevant First Nations communities is both an ethical obligation and a practical necessity, given the legal frameworks governing archaeological research on Indigenous territories in Canada.

The World That Ended: Megafauna Extinction

The animals whose bones carry the cut marks at Bluefish Caves were members of a fauna that no longer exists in the form it had during the Last Glacial Maximum.

The woolly mammoths, the Ice Age horses, the giant bison, the woolly rhinoceroses — these animals went extinct at the end of the Pleistocene, roughly 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, in what is one of the most dramatic faunal turnover events in the recent history of the earth.