They were fully modern humans with fully modern cognitive capacities, expressing those capacities in the production of art and ornament as well as in the production of sophisticated hunting technology.

The Latitude That Rewrote The Rules

When the Yana RHS paper was published in Science in 2004, one of its most immediate effects was to force a recalibration of assumptions about the northern limits of human habitation in the Pleistocene.

Prior to Yana, the consensus view was that humans had not penetrated above the Arctic Circle during the Last Glacial Period — that the combination of extreme cold, low resource productivity, and long periods of winter darkness made the far north effectively off-limits until after the glacial maximum had passed and conditions had improved.

The evidence supported this view because there were no confirmed human sites above the Arctic Circle dating to the height of the glacial period.