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Zhùr is a gray wolf pup. Dire wolves did not exist in the Yukon; the northernmost fossil evidence fore dire wolves was discovered in Medicine Hat, Alberta. You can learn more about it in this recent paper from 2023: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jqs.3516

Clovis doesn't even bear a resemblance to anything found in Siberia, the inhabitants of which used a completely different technology in constructing their tools and weapons, with the vast majority of Clovis artifacts being found in the east.

@@slappy8941 any research that puts Clovis in the rear view mirror is away forward for really understanding human evolution

A 600 mile hike over bare rock, scraped clean by glaciers. Nothing growing, just rock and ice. How did they carry enough food for a 600 mile hike?

@@garybowler5946 it was pretty lush by the time it was passable. I live in that area. You have to remember that there was a LOT of meltwater in the area that was scraped by glaciers once the corridor opened. Which is why they are suggesting that people didn’t pass through when it initially opened. It would have been very wet, boggy and lots of kettle lakes. But after a couple of thousand years, and the water drained off, down the middle of the corridor is the Main artery removing water, the Yukon River, but also lots of tributary creeks and other rivers that made their way into the Yukon River. For the southern region a lot of the water made its way to the Mackenzie drainage basin. Anyways, it was quite passable with lots of fauna and flora that populated the area as soon as it was possible. Food was in abundance by the time they travelled the corridor. Also, they were nomadic people that prepared a lot of dried meat for long periods of travel. If they did encounter areas of ice scraped areas that were barren of life they could have travelled few hundred kilometres easily.

The Ice Patches in the southern Yukon are a post ice age phenomenon. The entire area was uninhabitable during full glaciation being covered in glacial ice which only fully melted away at some point past 12,000 years ago. The non-glacial ice patches we study began to form around 9,000 years ago, though all but a few sites have ice records going back earlier than 6500 years ago. All of the paleontological and archaeological specimens collected at these sites date to within that time period. At present, the oldest glacial archaeological object recovered in North America is a fore shaft from an atlatl throwing dart that comes from Colorado and dates to 10,500 year before present.

Yes, do you know of sites in AK that might have ice records thawing from deeper time? In addition that is, to permafrost sites. Upland attracting modern critters, and 9KA animals, must have been similarly attractive to some megafauna previously. Anticipating sites from that long ago, for persistent snowfield paleo hunting, should potentially yield lost hard artifacts in concentrated distances from previous snowfield margins within range. And, looking for possible hunting blind remnants, could clarify even long after all ice had melted in more recent times? Further west in Beringia, out of maximal glaciation perhaps hold concentrations of oldest points.@@YukonBeringia

@@raykinney9907 At present there is no evidence of archaeological material coming from surface extent ice bodies, whether they are glaciers or Ice Patches (a non-glacial ice body created by wind drifted snow), anywhere in the world. This is partially a product of Holocene climatic histories where older ice bodies have come and gone at times. Throughout the Rocky Mountains archaeologists have been documenting built hunting features such as stone lookouts and blinds. At times these do correlate with extent or extinct snow and ice fields, but more often they are associated with other ecological phenomena such as trails, mineral licks or animal migration corridors. They are also very difficult to date due to an absence of preserved datable materials present at these sites. At sites in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem archaeologists have been able to use typological dating of projectiles to demonstrate that alpine environments were occupied as early as 12-13k years ago. We are not certain if they have been able to correlate built hunting structures like lookouts and blinds to the same age. In Yukon we are currently researching built hunting features that are located in the same environments as our ice patches, and better information will be available as that project comes to fruition. In the meantime you can see this BCST for a sense of how we are developing the research. facebook.com/yukonberingia/videos/bcst-pulling-up-the-blinds-pulling-up-the-blinds-using-drones-to-reveal-insights/529697415836351/ The exception to this is obviously subsurface terrestrial permafrost which does hold the potential to preserve objects and fossils in good condition for a very long time. Discoveries in Arctic Siberia have born this out revealing a 32,000 year long record of well preserved organic tools. One of the most striking examples of this were the bone and ivory tools discovered at Yana River in Russia. A great article is a Science report from 2004 by Pitulko etal. Titled “The Yana River RHS site: Humans in the Arctic before the last glacial maximum.” Here is link: www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1085219?siteid=sci&keytype=ref&ijkey=eVRlbnXb0f5iw#:~:text=A%20newly%20discovered%20Paleolithic%20site,occupations%20in%20any%20Arctic%20region. Yukon and Alaska have yet to recover well preserved frozen cultural objects older than 9,300 years before present. We also have not identified any cultural sites older than about 24,000 years old (Bluefish Caves), with the vast majority of our sites being more recent than 14,000 years ago.

Great. Thanks for this info!@@YukonBeringia