In the Upper Paleolithic period, this area was part of a vast steppe-tundra environment — treeless, wind-swept, rich in grass and sedge and the large animals that grazed on them: woolly mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, horses, reindeer, bison, and the many species of Pleistocene megafauna that have since vanished.

The human communities that lived in this landscape were not primitive in any meaningful sense.

They were sophisticated hunters and gatherers who had mastered survival in one of the most demanding environments on earth.

They built shelters — not the tipis or longhouses of later periods, but semi-subterranean structures reinforced with mammoth bone, roofed with whatever materials the landscape offered, designed to hold warmth in a world that actively tried to drain it away.

They worked stone into tools of remarkable precision.