The story of this find begins in August 2012, when an 11-year-old boy discovered in the Siberian Bay of Yenisei, on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, the bones of a leg belonging to a huge animal . Paleontologists who came to the site unearthed the exceptionally preserved remains of a woolly mammoth specimen that they named Zenhya, which was the nickname of the discoverer boy.
Well, Zenhya was going to bring great satisfaction to the researchers of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences who took it upon themselves to examine it. In the first place, it presented clear indications that he did not die a natural death, but at the hands of human beings: he had marks of alleged spears in his jaw, ribs and eye sockets. His tongue had probably been cut off and pieces of his fangs were missing , a highly prized raw material for making all kinds of tools and decorative objects.
But as has just been made public in the journal Science , the big surprise arose when dating the remains with radiocarbon: Zenhya would have died about 45,000 years ago . This revelation upsets the accepted chronology of human expansion across the planet, since it was believed that Homo sapiens had reached the Arctic Circle so far north some 35,000 years ago.
Experts do not believe that Zenhya’s wounds were inflicted by other species of humans, such as Neanderthals or Denisovans, as the hunting techniques necessary to shoot down the woolly mammoth require sophisticated coordination and technology than our “cousins” evolutionary surely did not possess. In addition, the finding would imply that our lineage, Homo sapiens , was already prepared to colonize any corner of the globe at a much earlier date than previously believed.
