The fact that someone had the patience and the skill to carve a foreshaft from rhinoceros horn tells us something about the relationship between the hunters of Yana and the animals they pursued: these were not opportunistic scavengers but skilled hunters who took large and dangerous animals and then worked their remains into useful tools.

Wild horses.

Bison.

Reindeer.

Musk oxen.

The Mammoth Steppe supported a diversity of prey that would have fed communities across vast territories, and the evidence from Yana suggests a community engaged in hunting at a substantial scale.

But here is what makes the Yana community particularly remarkable from a purely logistical standpoint: the hunting of mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses on the open steppe above the Arctic Circle, in a climate where winters plunged to extreme temperatures and where darkness dominated for months, required capabilities that go well beyond simply being brave and strong.

It required clothing.