And the most significant thing about this part of the story is that it was entirely unknown until two milk teeth, extracted from permafrost and processed through a genomics laboratory, said: we were here.

We were real.

We were part of what became you.

Above the Arctic Circle, in the Ice Age dark, children grew and shed their teeth.

And the world, eventually, learned something from those teeth that changed how we understand the story of ourselves.

The Mammoth Steppe — Reconstructing The World

To understand the world those children inhabited, you need to understand a landscape that no longer exists anywhere on Earth.

The Mammoth Steppe was not a tundra in the modern sense — not the boggy, moss-covered ground of today’s Arctic lowlands, which is far too wet and nutrient-poor to support the kinds of animal populations that lived in the Pleistocene far north.