14,000-year-old ivory tools discovered in Alaska suggest how Clovis’ ancestors first arrived in the New World

Ancient tools discovered in Alaska could shed light on how humans first reached the Americas, a new study has found.

These artifacts include items related to stone tool making and ocher, a red mineral often used in rituals, and are about 600 years older than similar artifacts from the Clovis people who lived further south, including in New Mexico.

This similarity suggests that the people who used the craft in Alaska were ancestors of Clovis, who may have marched across the land bridge that once connected Asia to the Americas, rather than along a coastal route as has recently been claimed.

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Based on stone artifacts dating back 13,400 years, most 20th century archaeologists suggested that the ancestors of a prehistoric culture called the Clovis were among the first people to migrate to the Americas from Asia. Researchers have discovered Clovis artifacts, including unique pointed stone tools, throughout the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. (However, research over the past few decades has revealed that the Clovisians were not the first people to reach the Americas.)

It remains unclear how Clovis’s ancestors reached the New World. For a long time, it was thought that they reached North America via the Bering Land Bridge, which appeared as sea levels fell during the last Ice Age (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago). These immigrants may have crossed this vast land and continued south through ice-free corridors, giving rise to the Clovis River.

But other research has raised questions about whether the corridor that runs through what is now Canada was actually ice-free at the time Clovis’ ancestors might have been able to traverse it. Competing ideas therefore propose that they migrated to the New World via other routes such as watercraft along the coasts of Asia, the Bering Land Bridge, and the Americas.

alaska archeology

To investigate this mystery, scientists analyzed finds from the Tanana Valley in central Alaska. For more than 40 years, excavations there have uncovered remains of early Alaskans who hunted woolly mammoths and other “megafauna,” or giant beasts.

The researchers focused on a recent discovery at the Holzman site in central Tanana Valley. Evidence of stone and mammoth ivory tool making dating back some 14,000 years was discovered there, including a nearly complete mammoth tusk that may have been the raw material for ivory production, and a hammerstone for making stone tools. This makes this pre-Clovis area one of the earliest known human sites in the Americas.

“What makes it exceptional? [about this site] study co-author Kathryn Krasinski, an archaeologist at New York’s Adelphi University, told Live Science. “Because the lower components tend to be frozen most of the year, we recovered ancient plant DNA and even a 13,600-year-old tuft of bison hair.” This type of preservation of organic material is extremely rare. ”

Scientists noted that Tanana Valley is located between the Bering Viaduct and the Ice-Free Corridor, and that the ivory tools and manufacturing process at the Holtzmann site are similar to those used for Clovis artifacts found further south.

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“About 1,000 years before Clovis technology emerged further south, people were living and thriving in interior Alaska,” study co-author Brian Weigal, an archaeologist at Adelphi University, told Live Science. “We argue that increasing evidence from interior Alaska confirms an inland route through an ice-free corridor as the most likely scenario for people to first arrive in central North America.”

In other words, Clovis’ ancestors may have first wandered from Asia across the Bering Land Bridge to Alaska, then migrated further south through the ice-free corridor to create Clovis.

Evidence from Holzman and other sites in that region of Alaska is consistent with “migration to the mainland United States by an inland route,” Todd Surovell, an anthropology professor at the University of Wyoming who was not involved in the study, told Live Science. “Evidence that the ivory was worked indicates a cultural connection with the Clovis tradition further south.”

difficult to understand

But Jack Ives, a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Alberta who was not involved in the study, cautioned that the peoples of ancient Northeast Asia, where immigrants to the Americas likely originated, share many characteristics, including the symbolic use of ocher in burials and similar stone artifacts. This raises the question of whether the ivory artifacts seen at Holzman and elsewhere are directly linked to Clovis, or whether “they were part of a broader set of ideas for different groups coming into the Western Hemisphere,” Ives told Live Science.

Ives also noted that scientists often raise inland and coastal scenarios of migration to the Americas as competing ideas, with “one or the other telling the whole story.” But a better approach is to “recognize that if we want to get a comprehensive picture of this early period, we need to understand what was happening both on the coast and in the ocean in the early years,” he said. [ice-free] Geneticists often suggest that New World peoples involved successive episodes of small-scale founding lineages, so both inland and coastal scenarios may have played a role, Ives added.

Weigal and his colleagues aim to continue excavating in Tanana Valley to learn more about how the first Alaskans interacted with woolly mammoths and other aspects of their environment, he said. Future research should also examine “the ice-free corridor itself,” Surovell said. “While considerable research has been conducted on coastal areas, ice-free corridors, in contrast, have been largely ignored.”

The scientists detailed their findings in the February 15 issue of the journal Quaternary International.

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