This is scientific Americans 60 second science. I'm Steve Mursky. Got a minute?

The word Siberia is almost a synonym for extreme cold. It's hard enough to imagine living there today, but humans have

been wandering the icy terrain for thousands of years. The accepted estimate for the arrival

of the first humans north of the Arctic Circle was upped in 2004 from about 12,000 years ago to 35,000 years ago.

And now that number's been revised again because in 2012 a young boy some

1250 miles south of the North Pole in Siberia stumbled across the leg bones

of a woolly mammoth protruding out of the ground.

What really made this a super important fine were two things.

Ann Gibbons, contributing correspondent for the journal Science, which published an analysis of the

frozen mammoth, talking about the finding on the science

podcast. One it had a lot of injuries that show it had been battered and shot

with projectile points by humans and then the second part that was really exciting was that when they

used radiocarbon dating, it dated to about 45,000 years of age. So this was at least

10,000 years older than the earliest presence of humans in the Arctic Circle before.

People may have gone so far north because of the mammoths.

This is a huge fast step region full of mammoths and large woolly rhinoceroses and

reindeer and elk so if humans could figure out how to live in the cold up north

they were lucky and would have a great source a great packet of meat to get

when they needed it.

You can hear the entire episode of the science podcast with Ann Gibbons talking about the

mammoth find at www. Science.com.

Thanks for the minute for Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Steve Mursky.

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