Professor Willerslev described the significance: “These people were a significant part of human history, they diversified almost at the same time as the ancestors of modern day Asians and Europeans and it’s likely that at one point they occupied large regions of the northern hemisphere.”

The Ancient North Siberians were not a small isolated group huddled in one corner of Siberia.

They represented a major branch of the human family tree, a population that had diverged early and spread widely across the northern latitudes, leaving their genetic signature in the archaeological record at Yana and potentially across a vast region that remains poorly sampled by ancient DNA research.

And they had not survived.