The most effective Arctic hunting communities in the ethnographic record — Inuit and other Arctic peoples documented in the historical period — maintained networks of alliance and cooperation across large territories, networks that served both economic and social purposes and that involved the regular exchange of marriage partners between groups.

The people at Yana appear to have been embedded in such a network 31,000 years ago.

The community that camped on the Yana River terrace was connected to other communities across the region, part of a social and genetic network that maintained population diversity and enabled the scale of hunting activity visible in the archaeological record.

The Silence Before The Find — Why It Took So Long

There is a gap of nearly forty years between when humans first started seriously investigating the prehistoric archaeology of northeastern Siberia and when the Yana RHS was discovered.