One of the aspects of the Bluefish Caves faunal record that has attracted less attention than the horse and caribou specimens is the presence of mammoth remains in the site’s collections.

The woolly mammoth — Mammuthus primigenius — was one of the dominant large herbivores of the Beringian mammoth steppe.

Mammoth bones are found at numerous sites throughout the northern Yukon and Alaska, preserved in the permafrost that characterizes much of this region.

Their presence in the Bluefish Caves deposits is not surprising — mammoths were a major component of the regional fauna during the Last Glacial Maximum — but the question of whether any of the mammoth specimens in the Bluefish Caves collection show evidence of human modification has significant implications.

The 2017 study focused its most detailed taphonomic analysis on the specimens for which the strongest evidence of human modification existed — the 15 confidently modified specimens that form the core of the published evidence.