Brought skulls home, their back molars, shoot, their teeth in general are vicious, notably different than dogs.
Being a 5'6, 130 lb. girl who has run across them alone often, I fear them. I'd say 2 could take me down. The guys crossing the Bering were of Mongolian stature, about my size, and if their hyenas were much bigger than the typical 50 lb. coyote, that'd put kinks in my migrating, too.
Thanks for the article. I love pondering the peopling of our continent.
Farther south, at about the latitude of Mongolia, "there are hundreds and hundreds of [human] archaeological sites that go back 50,000 to 60,000 years ago," he says, but just a few degrees north and the sites are no older than 12,000 years.12K years ago was near the beginning of the last/current inter-glacial period. If Siberia is cold now, what was it like during the glacial period?
It may not have been just the hyenas. You need it cold enough to keep a lot of ice in the glaciers, exposing the land bridge. But you can't have it so cold that you can't get from Mongolia across Siberia to the land bridge.