The 24,000-Year-Old Boy Buried Beneath A Stone Slab With 120 Beads And Mammoth-Ivory Jewelry — And The DNA Test That Revealed A Hidden Source Of Native American Ancestry

The Climate That Formed The Context

The Last Glacial Maximum — the period, roughly 26,000 to 19,000 years ago, when the great ice sheets were at their greatest extent — was the defining environmental context of the Mal’ta burial.

At its peak, the Laurentide Ice Sheet covered most of Canada and extended into the northern United States.

The Eurasian ice sheets covered Scandinavia, Britain, and parts of western Russia.

Sea levels worldwide were approximately 120 to 130 meters lower than today, because so much of the world’s water was locked in glacial ice.