The faunal material from the cave — the bones of animals from the archaeological layers — provides some indication of what resources the people who used the cave were exploiting.

The specific species represented, and the specific ways in which those bones were processed (whether they show evidence of marrow extraction, butchering, or other processing activities), can help reconstruct the subsistence activities of the cave’s occupants.

This faunal evidence, combined with the genetic and dating evidence from the human tooth, builds a picture of a specific community of people adapted to a specific ecological setting — people who knew the Seward Peninsula landscape intimately, who had developed effective strategies for exploiting its resources, and who maintained the Ancient Beringian genetic profile of the earliest well-documented human occupants of Alaska.

The Ethics That Frame the Research