A Russian geologist named Mikhail Dashtzeren was working in the region in 1993, doing what geologists do in that part of Siberia: looking at exposures in river banks, examining the sediment layers laid down over thousands of years, searching for fossils of the great animals of the Pleistocene that erode out of the permafrost wherever rivers cut through it.

What Dashtzeren found was not what he was looking for.

On the left bank of the Yana River, protruding from the frozen sediment, was a carefully worked artifact: a foreshaft, the detachable front end of a spear, carved from the horn of a woolly rhinoceros.

The Coelodonta antiquitatis — the woolly rhino — is one of the iconic animals of the Pleistocene.

It wore a coat of thick fur and carried two horns on its nose, and it roamed across the cold grasslands of Ice Age Europe and Asia in enormous numbers.