A 13,300-year-old spear found on an island in the Arctic Ocean indicates that prehistoric humans reached territories where people avoid living even now.
The 90-centimeter spear made of a woolly rhinoceros's horn was found earlier this year on Bolshoi Lyakhovsky Island off the coast of Yakutia, The Siberian Times reported Monday.
The uninhabited island sits at a latitude of 73 degrees North in the Arctic Ocean.
So far, the northernmost paleolithic discoveries in the region, dating as far back as the 28th millennium B.C., were made on the Siberian mainland, 380 kilometers — three degrees of latitude — to the south.
Russian President Vladimir Putin examined the spear — said to still be sharp enough to kill — during his trip to regional capital Yakutsk last month, though he made no move to try it out.
The New Siberian Islands, which include the Bolshoi Lyakhovsky, also produced last year a uniquely preserved female mammoth carcass, its blood, according to an official report, remaining liquid after millennia in the permafrost.