The griffin, though. That's not an animal seen in the natural world, but in human imagination — shared imagination, mythology, stories. And yet we recognize it to this day.
It's an image that pops up in ancient Egypt, the Minoan civilization, Mesopotamia, early India: griffins or something very similar go back five millennia.
The Greeks, from whom we get the name gryphos/ griffin, associated it with the Scythians, the nomadic horse-riding peoples of the Eurasian steppes.
From the ancient Greek perspective, the remote and vast territories of the Scythians—sometimes referred to as Hyperborea (the land “beyond the North Wind”)—made it a realm beyond sure knowledge, where fantasy and reality freely mixed. Herodotus wrote of a semi-mythical Scythian tribe of one-eyed men called the Arimaspeans who spent their time stealing gold from “gold-guarding griffins.” Griffins and Arimaspeans became a popular artistic motif in Greek art […]. While mythical creatures were often associated with distant, unknown, barbarian lands in Greek thought, it is possible that the connection between Scythians and gold-guarding griffins in Greek art and literature shows that the Greeks were aware of the prominence of griffins in Scythian art.
— "Gold, Griffins, and Greeks: Scythian Art and Cultural Interactions in the Black Sea," The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The BBC article linked to in the OP says the tattooed woman belonged to a horse-riding nomadic people called the Pazyryk.
Looking them up, I found they are one of the Saka peoples, an ancient Persian word for the Scythians of central Asia whose burial sites and DNA studies reveal the truth behind the legends. They started in Siberia, fanned out across central Asia and the Russian steppe, and reached the shores of the Black Sea by the 9th to 7th centuries BCE.
I found this great intro to them (with handy map) in the World of Archaeology: The Scythians: discovering the nomad-warriors of Siberia
From that article: Scythian gold belt ornament of griffin attacking horse, 4th-3rd c BCE, Siberia. I wonder if garbled descriptions of such ornaments spawned the rumors of a "one eyed tribe"?
Until now, we had their artifacts and garbled legends from ancient historians. But there she is. Her griffin shows that she's one of those warrior nomads the Greeks thought lived beyond the north wind.
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