Logistically, the area is extremely difficult to reach and work in.

Conceptually, the consensus view that humans had not been in the far Arctic during the Last Glacial Period reduced the incentive to look for sites there.

The 1993 discovery of the rhinoceros horn foreshaft by geologist Mikhail Dashtzeren was an accident of the best scientific kind: a trained observer, looking for something else, recognizing that something out of place was actually something important.

Dashtzeren was looking for fossils.