Work conducted in March 2021 in the collections storage facility of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography SB RAS was very difficult for our team. Faunal collections are ready to be moved to new storage facilities, so we needed to locate the Mongolian collections that have been stored there, untouched and unanalyzed, since the 1980s. We thank our Master’s degree student, Ivan Dolgushin, and Dr. Sergei Vasiliev for their assistance!
Dr. Alexei Klementiev is a unique specialist in the Pleistocene faunas of Siberia and Central Asia. He is a co-investigator of the RSF 19-78-10112 project, “Human adaptations in arid and high-altitude regions of eastern Central Asia in the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene.” Last March he studied roughly 670 faunal remains from Paleolithic and Neolithic sites in Mongolia. Some of his results will significantly enhance our knowledge of Late Pleistocene faunal complexes in Asia. We now have roughly 50 samples prepared to undergo CT-scanning, 3D-scanning, isotopic and, in some cases, aDNA analyses. The first results of our study of faunal remains collected during our excavations in 2018-2019 at the Orkhon-1, Orkhon-7 and Moiltyn-am sites will be published in June 2021.
PaleoMongolia 