Two Teeth At The Edge Of The World

There is a river in northeastern Siberia called the Yana.

It flows north from its headwaters through a landscape that even today qualifies as one of the most remote and hostile places on Earth — a vast tundra of permafrost and ancient frozen ground, bisected by river channels that run wild in summer and lock up solid in the darkness of Arctic winter.

The Yana drains eventually into the Laptev Sea, one of the coldest and most ice-choked bodies of water on the planet.

Nothing about this country is gentle.

About 100 kilometers south of where the Yana empties into the Arctic Ocean, on a flat alluvial terrace along the river’s left bank, there is a site that archaeologists have named the Yana Rhinoceros Horn Site.

It sits at roughly 70 degrees and 43 minutes north latitude.

The Arctic Circle is at 66 degrees.

This site is above it.

Well above it.

And in the deep frozen sediment of that terrace, archaeologists found two teeth.

Tiny teeth.

Milk teeth.

The kind of teeth that fall out of children’s mouths all over the world, tiny hard objects that parents set aside in little boxes or tuck under pillows in cultures where the tooth fairy has a role.

Deciduous teeth — the baby teeth that children shed between roughly six and twelve years of age as their adult dentition grows in beneath them.

These two teeth, from what the genetic evidence later revealed were two different boys, had been shed or lost at this place on the edge of the Arctic world.

Thirty-one thousand years ago.

The number requires a moment.