Yuka is a juvenile female natural mummy that was found near and named after the village of Yukagir, whose local people discovered it.

The north-facing bluff was composed of loess that forms part of a rich Late Pleistocene fossil-bearing yedoma exposed by coastal erosion.

The yedoma consists of ice-rich silts and silty sand penetrated by large ice wedges, resulting from sedimentation and syngenetic freezing.

At that time, a team led by Semyon Grigoriev from the Lazarev Mammoth Museum (North-Eastern Federal University, Yakutsk) arrived to study these mummified remains.

[4][6] In March 2019, a Japanese research team led by Kazuo Yamagata, a biologist at Kindai University, worked with Yuka's tissue.