What were humans doing in the Yukon 24,000 years ago?

I lived in the Yukon for 4 years - it's an incredible place for anyone yearning for more adventure in their life. Snowboarding, back country skiing in Alaska, hiking, hunting, paddling with icebergs, snowshoeing at -40C/F, etc.

There were so many woolly mammoths up there it's virtually impossible to go mining and not dig one up. (Mining is VERY big business up there) It's not uncommon for someone to have a tusk lying around in their yard.

They spent more time surviving. Plus many 'discoveries' were likely accidents.

Like, if you put even modern humans with knowledge of technology out in the wild how quickly do you think they'll be able to invent agriculture or work metals from minerals in rocks?

Total population was much smaller, communities were smaller, communication was oral. I think all that results in restricted dissemination as well as technologies and techniques that died with the innovators in many instances.

As I understand it, this is an open question, but one explanation has a few factors:

a) In the absence of many external pressures, hunting and gathering is actually a reasonably low-effort and flexible lifestyle. From a moment-to-moment perspective, agriculture (and our "technological" world) mostly doesn't seem like an improvement. Long-term, the quality-of-life improvements come about in resiliency and stability, but those aren't visible to the people making the decision.

b) The transition to agriculture (which triggered the technology explosion) took a long period of luck, including groups of people living in a floodplain for a long enough time to breed plants that were suitable for agriculture. Note that this was an extremely rare thing, in that it probably only happened ~4-5 times in human history and spread everywhere else.