Today, the region is accessible by the Trans-Siberian Railway and supports a modest tourism industry alongside the fishing and hunting that have sustained communities around the lake for millennia.

The winters are severe by most standards — temperatures dropping well below freezing for months, the lake itself freezing in the coldest periods, the surrounding landscape buried in snow.

The summers are short and intense: warm, productive, and followed rapidly by the returning cold.

In 24,000 BCE, the land around Lake Baikal was even less welcoming by modern measure, and yet people lived there.

The site now known as Mal’ta sits along the Belaya River, a tributary that feeds into the Angara River not far from the lake.