Calibrated to calendar years, this placed the occupation at somewhere in the range of 30,000 to 32,000 years ago.

This was twice the age of any other human occupation known anywhere in any Arctic region.

The previous record for the northernmost early human site had been well below the Arctic Circle.

These people at Yana had pushed that threshold dramatically farther north and dramatically further back in time.

The 2004 paper concluded with a statement that now reads as something of an understatement: “This site shows that people adapted to this harsh, high-latitude, Late Pleistocene environment much earlier than previously thought.”

But for all its significance, the 2004 Yana paper was working without human remains.