Kara-Bom is an Initial Upper Paleolithic archaeological site dating to 46,620 +/-1,750 cal years before present (BP), and located in Southern Siberia. It is among the earliest (probable) modern human sites for Siberia, together with Kara-Tenesh, Kandabaevo, and Podzvonskaya.
The site of Kara-Bom has lithic assemblages consisting in classic and elongated Levallois points. The site would represent a key station in the expansion of modern humans associated with the IUP wave out of Southwest Asia slightly before 47 ka cal BP, one of the next stations being Ust-Ischim. They ended in Bacho Kiro cave and Oase, but this wave of colonization did not go as far as Western Europe, and apparently was not successful.
Unambiguous modern human sites in Siberia and Eastern Asia where modern human remains were found, start with Ust-Ischim (45,000 years BP) or Tianyuan (c. 40,000 BP), followed by significantly later sites such as Yana RHS (c. 32,000 BP).
^Hublin, Jean-Jacques (15 June 2015). "The modern human colonization of western Eurasia: when and where?". Quaternary Science Reviews. 118: 194–210. Bibcode:2015QSRv..118..194H. doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2014.08.011. hdl:11858/00-001M-0000-0024-11F6-F. Over a geographical domain, covering a large portion of Eurasia, the IUP displays a number of shared features in terms of blank production. Although its exact chronology is still under investigation, the start of its expansion out of southwest Asia most likely predates 47 ka cal BP, as suggested by the dates obtained at Bohunice (Richter et al., 2009) and Kara-Bom (Goebel et al., 1993). This early expansion would be more in agreement with an older date for the beginning of the IUP (Marks, 1983) than with those produced at Ksar Akil (Douka et al., 2013) and Üçagızlı (Kuhn et al., 2009). The recent discovery of the femur of Ust-Ischim in Siberia, directly dated at 45 ka BP and indisputably modern both anatomically and genetically, completes the more fragmentary discoveries from Ksar Akil (layer XXV), Üçagızlı and Bacho Kiro (layer 11), and brings support to the notion that the IUP represents a wave of migrations of fully modern humans. This wave, however, might not have been completely successful and apparently did not make it to western Europe.
