EARLIEST MODERN HUMANS IN WHAT IS NOW ALASKA AND CANADA

BLUEFISH CAVES — EARLIEST EVIDENCE OF MODERN HUMANS IN AMERICA?

Location of Bluefish Caves

The earliest purported evidence of humans in Canada — and one of the earliest for the Americas — is Bluefish Caves, which has been dated at 25,000–40,000 years before present. Human-worked mammoth bone flakes found at Bluefish Caves, Yukon, are much older than the stone tools and animal remains at Haida Gwaii in British Columbia (10,000-12,000 before present). [Source: Wikipedia]

Bluefish Caves is a network of three small cavities overlooking the Bluefish River in Canada's northwestern Yukon Territory, just over the Alaska border, north of the Arctic Circle, and about 250 kilometers south of the Arctic Sea. The site was first discovered during an air survey in 1975. A 10-year-long excavation project began there in 1977 and lasted about decade. Archaeologists discovered a small number of tools and 36,000 mammal bones — including from mammoths and extinct horses — some of which had cut marks and were later dated to be 24,800 years old. Based on bone fragments with cut marks, scientists who excavated the site claimed it 24,800 years old, or even older, far older than most of the other evidence suggested. Many experts remain skeptical of those results, as well as of those from a 2021 study that dated several long-debated flakes and fragments of mammoth bone to 28,000 years ago. [Source: Sascha Pare, Live Science, October 9, 2023]

The dating of human footprints at White Sands National Park, in southern New Mexico, to 23,000 to 21,000 years, and the declaration that this is the earliest "unequivocal evidence" of people in the Americas, makes the Bluefish Caves dating seem less improbable than it did in the past when it was though the first Americans came over around 16,000 years ago.

Evidence That People Lived in Bluefish Caves 25,000 Years Ago

Bluefish Caves contain the oldest undisturbed archaeological evidence in Canada and some regard it as evidence that the first humans arrived in the Americas as early as 40,000 years ago. According to the Canadian Encyclopedia: “Bluefish Caves consist of three small cavities in which loess accumulated during late Pleistocene time. Buried in these aeolian deposits are the bones of mammoths, horses, bison, caribou, sheep, saiga antelope, bear, lion and many other mammals, as well as birds and fish. Many of the bones of the larger animals exhibit butchering marks made by stone tools as well as, on a few mammoth bones, attributes indicative of a percussion/bone flaking technology. [Source: Canadian Encyclopedia ~~]

Bluefish Caves

“Also present in the loess are the lithic remains of a Burin and Microblade technology akin to that found in the American Palaeoarctic tradition. On the basis of this evidence and a growing series of associated radiocarbon dates, it is now possible to suggest that Bluefish Caves were sporadically and discontinuously used by small hunting groups or parties between 25,000 and 12,000 years ago. Finally, the palaeoenvironmental reconstruction based on pollen, macrofossil, pedological, sedimentological and micro-mammal evidence is in keeping with that obtained from other eastern Beringian regions for the period of the late Wisconsinan maximum and subsequent millennia. “ ~~

The site was excavated by archaeologist Jacques Cinq-Mars between 1977–87, and the initial radiocarbon dating suggested an age of 25,000 before present. This was considered controversial as it was in contrast to the Clovis-First theory, widely accepted by academics at the time, which considered the earliest settlement date of North America to be around 13,000 before. Cinq-Mars’s was even laughed at by other academics and is still quite bitter about the way he and his views were treated. A review of the site in 2017 found it to be 24,000 years old, lending support to the "Beringian standstill" hypothesis - that the ancestors of Native Americans spent considerable time isolated in a Beringian refuge during the Last Glacial Maximum before populating the Americas. [Source: Wikipedia, hakaimagazine.com]

Effort to Date Bluefish Caves in the Mid-2010s

University of Montreal PhD candidate Lauriane Bourgeon took a second look at 36,000 bone fragments from the excavations. After two years of analysis, she isolated 15 samples that seem to bear marks of human modification: cuts from stone tools that are deeper and thinner than if the bones had been trampled on. In cross-section, the cuts appear to be V-shaped, as opposed to the characteristic U-shape made by carnivores’ teeth. Bone samples were dated to between 12,000 and 24,000 years old, with the oldest being the jawbone of a horse that scientists believe was extinct in the region by 14,000 years ago.

In the abstract of their paper “Earliest Human Presence in North America Dated to the Last Glacial Maximum: New Radiocarbon Dates from Bluefish Caves, Canada,” Lauriane Bourgeon and Ariane Burke of Université de Montréal wrote: “The timing of the first entry of humans into North America is still hotly debated within the scientific community. Excavations conducted at Bluefish Caves (Yukon Territory) from 1977 to 1987 yielded a series of radiocarbon dates that led archaeologists to propose that the initial dispersal of human groups into Eastern Beringia (Alaska and the Yukon Territory) occurred during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). This hypothesis proved highly controversial in the absence of other sites of similar age and concerns about the stratigraphy and anthropogenic signature of the bone assemblages that yielded the dates. [Source: Lauriane Bourgeon and Ariane Burke of Université de Montréal and Thomas Higham of Oxford University,“Earliest Human Presence in North America Dated to the Last Glacial Maximum: New Radiocarbon Dates from Bluefish Caves, Canada, PLOS One, January 6, 2017]

The weight of the available archaeological evidence suggests that the first peopling of North America occurred ca. 14,000 cal BP (calibrated years Before Present), i.e., well after the LGM. Here, we report new AMS radiocarbon dates obtained on cut-marked bone samples identified during a comprehensive taphonomic analysis of the Bluefish Caves fauna. Our results demonstrate that humans occupied the site as early as 24,000 cal BP (19,650 ± 130 14C BP). In addition to proving that Bluefish Caves is the oldest known archaeological site in North America, the results offer archaeological support for the “Beringian standstill hypothesis”, which proposes that a genetically isolated human population persisted in Beringia during the LGM and dispersed from there to North and South America during the post-LGM period.

Nikhil Swaminathan wrote in Archaeology magazine: ““The controversial new finding not only pushes the occupation of North America back by 10,000 years, it also lends credence to the Beringian standstill hypothesis, which posits that humans, while migrating from Siberia to the Americas, paused in Beringia — the ancient, now largely submerged land that included Kamchatka and Alaska — during the Last Glacial Maximum. They waited there, the theory states, until conditions improved about 17,000 years ago. [Source: Nikhil Swaminathan, Archaeology magazine, May-June 2017]

The Laurentide Ice Sheet was a large mass of ice that covered most of Canada and the United States. It was four kilometer thick and formed about 2.6 million years ago and started to decline by about 11,600 years ago

“Lee Lyman, a bone-analysis expert at the University of Missouri, calls Bourgeon’s assessment that humans made the bone markings “pretty convincing.” But Ben Potter at the University of Alaska Fairbanks remains unconvinced that humans were in the region so long ago, even though he called the new work “as good as cut-mark analysis could get.” Without cultural features, such as organic residue or hearths, that can be dated and tied directly to the tools and bones, he says, the date appears to be an outlier. “We’re lacking archaeological evidence in Beringia,” Bourgeon says in response to her critics. “We need to find more evidence. It would help people to be less skeptical of this study.”

Excavations in the 1970s and 1980s uncovered stone artifacts and hearths that suggested the site was occupied by humans 32,000 years ago and even as far back as 50,000 years ago. But a 2022 study found that capuchin monkeys living in the national park are capable of creating objects out of stone that closely resemble those found at Pedra Furada. This finding — combined with the lack of any other trace of human presence, such as hearths or food remains — suggests the site was not populated by humans until much later.

Beringia

Almost all scientists agree, that the first Americans arrived via Beringia — a now-submerged, landmass that connected what is now Alaska and the Russian Far East. During the peak glaciation of the last ice age, when much of Earth's water was frozen in ice sheets, ocean levels fell. fall. Beringia emerged when waters in the North Pacific dropped roughly 50 meters (164 feet) below today's levels; At one time Beringia was 1,800-kilometers (1,100-mile) wide a could have been traversed on foot but was also often covered by large glaciers that would have made such travel difficult. [Source: Laura Geggel, Live Science, October 9, 2023]

Beringia includes parts of Russia, known as western Beringia; Alaska, called eastern Beringia; and the ancient land bridge that connected the two. According to a study published February 6, 2023 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the land bridge between Russia and Alaska existed for two relatively brief periods. The first period lasted from 24,500 to 22,000 years ago, and the other spanned lasted 16,400 to 14,800 years ago.

A digital map created in 2019 by Jeffrey Bond, who studies the geology of ice age sediments at the Yukon Geological Survey in Canada, revealed what the landscape of Beringia was likely like about 18,000 years ago. Laura Geggel wrote in Live Science; At 18,000 years ago, Beringia was a relatively cold and dry place, with little tree cover. But it was still speckled with rivers and streams. Bond's map shows that it likely had a number of large lakes. "Grasslands, shrubs and tundra-like conditions would have prevailed in many places," Bond said. These environments helped megafauna — animals heavier than 100 lbs. (45 kilograms) — thrive, including the woolly mammoth, Beringian lion, short-faced bear, grizzly bear, muskox, steppe bison, American scimitar cat, caribou, Yukon horse, saiga antelope, gray wolf and giant beaver, according to the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre. [Source: Laura Geggel, Live Science, February 16, 2019]

This vast, open region allowed megafauna and early humans to live off the land, said. Julie Brigham-Grette, a professor and department head of geosciences at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. However, it's still a mystery exactly when humans began crossing the land bridge. Genetic studies show that the first humans to cross became genetically isolated from people in East Asia between about 25,000 to 20,000 years ago. And archaeological evidence shows that people reached the Yukon at least 14,000 years ago, Bond said. But it's still unclear how long it took the first Americans to cross the bridge and what route they took. "The fact that this land bridge was repeatedly exposed and flooded and exposed and flooded over the past 3 million years is really interesting because Beringia, at its largest extent, was really a high latitude continental landscape in its own right," Brigham-Grette said. Now that the Bering Strait is filled with water, it's a gateway linking the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans through the Arctic Basin. "There are few places like it on our planet that have such a complex paleo geography," Brigham-Grette said.

Beringian Standstill Hypothesis

The “Beringian Standstill Hypothesis” theorizes that “Ancient Beringians” lived in isolation on the east Beringian Arctic steppe-tundra — when Beringia was a large chunk of land — during the last glacial maximum (LGM, 36,000 – 12,000 years ago) and are the sole ancestral population of all Native Americans. The word “standstill” is used because generations of people migrating from the East might have settled in Beringia for generations before moving on to North America. This hypothesis has been tested by looking at a wide array of biomarkers of Pleistocene humans, fauna, flora, pollen, charcoal, and fire-related chemical markers in the sediment cores of two volcanic lakes in Bering Land Bridge National Preserve. One project aims reconstruct past climates and fire history to test the idea that Ancient Beringians used fire for hunting, heating, and cooking during the LGM. [Source: National Park Service]

Fen Montaigne wrote in Smithsonian magazine: ““Much of this new theorizing is driven not by archaeologists wielding shovels but by evolutionary geneticists taking DNA samples from some of the oldest human remains in the Americas, and from even older ones in Asia. Those discoveries have opened a wide gap between what the genetics seem to be saying and what the archaeology actually shows. Humans may have been on both sides of the Bering Land Bridge some 20,000 years ago. But skeptical archaeologists say they will not believe in this grand idea until they hold the relevant artifacts in their hands, pointing out that no confirmed North American archaeological sites older than 15,000 to 16,000 years currently exist. But other archaeologists are confident it is only a matter of time until older sites are discovered in the sprawling, sparsely populated lands of eastern Siberia, Alaska and northwestern Canada. [Source: Fen Montaigne, Smithsonian magazine, January-February 2020]

“Eske Willerslev, who directs the Center for GeoGenetics at the Globe Institute at the University of Copenhagen and holds the Prince Philip chair of ecology and evolution at the University of Cambridge, sequenced the first ancient human genome in 2010. He has since sequenced numerous genomes in an effort to piece together a picture of the first Americans, including a 12,400-year-old boy from Montana, 11,500-year-old infants at Alaska’s Upward Sun River site and the skeletal DNA of a boy whose 24,000-year-old remains were found at the village of Malta, near Russia’s Lake Baikal.

According to Willerslev, sophisticated genomic analyses of ancient human remains — which can determine when populations merged, split or were isolated — show that the forebears of Native Americans became isolated from other Asian groups around 23,000 years ago. After that period of genetic separation, “the most parsimonious explanation,” he says, is that the first Americans migrated into Alaska well before 15,000 years ago, and possibly more than 20,000 years ago. Willerslev has concluded that “there was a long period of gene flow” between the Upward Sun River people and other Beringians from 23,000 to 20,000 years ago. “There was basically an exchange between the populations across eastern and western Beringia,” Willerslev said in a phone interview from Copenhagen. “So you had these groups hanging around Beringia and they are to some degree isolated — but not completely isolated — from each other. You had those groups up there, on both sides of the Bering Land Bridge, around 20,000 years ago. I think that is very likely.”

Global sea levels during the during the last glacial maximum (LGM, 36,000 – 12,000 years ago) of the last Ice Age

“This new evidence, coupled with paleoecological studies of Beringia’s ice age environment, gave rise to the Beringian Standstill hypothesis. To some geneticists and archaeologists, the area in and around the Bering Land Bridge is the most plausible place where ancestors of the first Americans could have been genetically isolated and become a distinct people. They believe such isolation would have been virtually impossible in southern Siberia, or near the Pacific shores of the Russian Far East and around Hokkaido in Japan — places already occupied by Asian groups. “The whole-genome analysis — especially of ancient DNA from Siberia and Alaska — really changed things,” says John F. Hoffecker of the University of Colorado’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. “Where do you put these people where they cannot be exchanging genes with the rest of the Northeast Asian population?”

Could People Live in the Frigid North During the Ice Age?

Fen Montaigne wrote in Smithsonian magazine: ““Could humans have even survived at the high latitudes of Beringia during the last ice age, before moving into North America? This possibility has been buttressed by studies showing that large portions of Beringia were not covered by ice sheets and would have been habitable as Northeast Asia came out of the last ice age. Scott Elias, a paleoecologist with the University of Colorado’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, used a humble proxy — beetle fossils — to piece together a picture of the climate in Beringia 15,000 to 20,000 years ago. Digging in peat bogs, coastal bluffs, permafrost and riverbanks, Elias unearthed skeletal fragments of upwards of 100 different types of tiny beetles from that period. [Source: Fen Montaigne, Smithsonian magazine, January-February 2020]

“Comparing the ancient beetle fossils with those found on similar landscapes today, Elias concluded that southern Beringia was a fairly moist tundra environment that could have supported a wide variety of animals. He says that winter temperatures in the southern maritime zone of Beringia during the peak of the last ice age were only slightly colder than today, and summer temperatures were likely 5 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit cooler. “People could have made a pretty decent living along the southern coast of the land bridge, especially if they had knowledge of marine resource acquisition,” says Elias. “The interior in Siberia and Alaska would have been very cold and dry, but there were large mammals living there, so these people may have made hunting forays into the adjacent highlands.”

“Proponents of the Beringian Standstill hypothesis also point to a cluster of remarkable archaeological sites on Siberia’s Yana River, located on the western edge of Beringia, 1,200 miles from what is now the Bering Strait. Situated well above the Arctic Circle, the Yana sites were discovered in 2001 by Vladimir Pitulko, an archaeologist with the Institute for the History of Material Culture in St. Petersburg. Over nearly two decades, Pitulko and his team uncovered evidence of a thriving settlement dating back 32,000 years, including tools, weapons, intricate beadwork, pendants, mammoth ivory bowls and carved human likenesses.

“Based on butchered animal skeletons and other evidence, Yana appears to have been occupied year-round by up to 500 people from 32,000 to 27,000 years ago and sporadically inhabited until 17,000 years ago. Pitulko and others say Yana is proof that humans could have survived at high latitudes in Beringia during the last ice age.

“Yet the ones who made it across the Bering Land Bridge were apparently not the people of Yana. Willerslev’s lab extracted genetic information from the baby teeth of two boys who lived at the site 31,600 years ago and found that they shared only 20 percent of their DNA with the founding Native American population. Willerslev believes Yana’s inhabitants were likely replaced by, and interbred with, the paleo-Siberians who did eventually migrate into North America.

Early Inhabitants of Northwest America

If the theory that the first Americans were Asians who traveled along the coast from Siberia then the first places they would have come to were Alaska and British Columbia. Jude Isabella wrote in Archaeology magazine: “In British Columbia, the oldest known archaeological sites point to continuous human occupation on the coast for at least 11,000 years. Since the coast is rugged fjord land at the mercy of shifting tectonic plates and rising sea levels, countless sites likely remain either underwater or are only revealed when the tide is out. [Source: Jude Isabella, Archaeology, September/October 2011 |*|]

“Although the archaeological record of this early period is sketchy, these “wet sites” potentially hold some of the richest information about the first people who arrived on North America’s west coast, probably hailing from northeastern Asia. It is believed that ancient people moved in as the glaciers moved out and the landscape became more hospitable to them and other animals. |*|

“Digs at sites like the one at Glenrose Cannery on the Fraser River, which dates to over 8,000 years ago and was first excavated in the 1970s, suggest that people lived in small groups that ranged across the landscape. They were seasonal locavores, eating what was available and moving around to find it. Twelve miles from the sea, the Glenrose riverbank is littered with fire-cracked rocks that once lined hearths; evidence of lithic artifacts such as hammerstones, scrapers, and leaf-shaped knives; and bone and antler tools. These were likely used to catch a menu heavy on bay mussels and other shellfish, salmon, and smaller fish, as well as deer and elk. Remains of all these animals were found at the site. |*|

“At some point—the date varies from site to site—these foragers settled down. In southeastern Alaska, evidence points to settlement at least 4,000 years ago, whereas on British Columbia’s central coast, the archaeological record points to settlement at a minimum of 7,000 years ago. On the lower Fraser River, settling is noted about 5,000 years ago, roughly when sea levels receded to closer to what they are today. |*|

“From the various settlements emerged distinct cultures that formed the beginnings of an ecologically diverse coastal landscape occupied by complex communities that had strong ties to the marine world. Salmon runs were important to all, yet each group responded to the unique challenges of their own environments, from storm-filled expanses of rough ocean up north to the open waters on Vancouver Island’s west coast. The most hospitable of these environments is the Mediterranean-like climate with warm, dry summers and mild, wet winters found in the traditional territory of the Coast Salish, a group of First Nations (non-Inuit aboriginal Canadians) who occupied land from the northern end of the Strait of Georgia to the southern end of Puget Sound in Washington state, along Vancouver Island’s eastern shores, the mainland coast of British Columbia, and along the Fraser River.” |*|

Beringia, 18,000 Years Ago

Seafood Harvested by Early Inhabitants of Northwest America

Jude Isabella wrote in Archaeology magazine: “Until recently salmon has tended to overwhelm the record. A mid-1950s archaeological dig by a group from the University of Oregon turned up salmon bones along the Columbia River in northwestern Oregon. These bones showed evidence of human consumption and dated to as early as 9,300 years ago. The finding prompted further fieldwork in the region to focus on salmon when searching for faunal remains. According to anthropologists at Portland State University and Western Washington University, the archaeological work dovetailed with anthropologists’ descriptions of Pacific Northwestern livelihood as being largely dependent on salmon. Further, R.G. Matson, professor emeritus of archaeology at the University of British Columbia, wrote in 1992 that salmon harvesting and storage were long believed to be the “economic underpinning of the Northwest Coast. [Source: Jude Isabella, Archaeology, September/October 2011 |*|]

“But evidence is piling up that smaller fish—herring, smelt, and anchovies—in addition to clams, waterfowl, and fish roe, were part of a diverse bounty that fed entire villages. For instance, archaeological work done over 10 years on California’s Channel Islands uncovered evidence that Paleoindians were likely manipulating the coastline to spur measurable changes in local shellfish populations. “It’s hard to believe that Native Americans, who were keen observers of the natural world, didn’t figure out management techniques,” says Jon Erlandson, an archaeologist at the University of Oregon. He and his team collected reams of data from a large range of sites and species and concluded that, for example, a noticeable jump in the size of mussel shells didn’t appear to be simply the result of natural fluctuations in local environments. “Native peoples were generally in it for the long haul and developed more sustainable practices over time,” he explains.” |*|

“In almost every estuary that’s been scoured in” British Columbia “archaeologists have turned up evidence of wooden or stone fish traps. They’ve also uncovered clam gardens, which were an unknown technology to archaeologists until a geomorphologist on an aerial survey of the coast in 1995 identified the rock formations as made by humans. On Quadra Island, the territory of the Laich-Kwil-Tach (Kwakwaka’wakw) and K’ómoks Nations, a team of ecologists led by Anne Salomon from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, “plants” Pacific littlenecks in the isolated clam gardens that ring Waiatt Bay. One site has an extensive rock wall that rises about three feet out of the water at low tide and forms a long, flat, cleared beach, perfect clam habitat. Over two days they seed five clam garden beaches with 450 juvenile clams, with plans to seed another five gardens. During the low tides in November, they’ll go back to weigh and measure the clams against a control group. The ecologists hope to answer the question: Does the clam garden stabilize the beach and trap sediment and phytoplankton, allowing for more clam recruitment, or does it cause the ones in the garden to grow bigger in a shorter amount of time?”|*|

“At nearby Kanish Bay, researchers led by Dana Lepofsky, an archaeologist at Simon Fraser University, canoe from beach to beach searching for clam gardens and any associated settlements. Lepofsky is targeting a particular type of site: early villages created shortly after the people from Asia settled down. These sites likely predate the development of clam gardens as a technology for ecosystem management, so their middens might show a transition that marks the advent of clam gardens. By looking at species’ relative abundance, age, and size over time, shells from these sites could reveal when clam harvesting began to be actively managed, and if the technology increased production in either size or number. “If there’s a transition, if there is some change in productivity, hopefully [the evidence] will mirror the results of the hypotheses being generated by the ecology,” says Lepofsky. |*|

“The picture emerging is of a culture that avoided relying on one plentiful species, as if people hedged their bets when it came to food. While salmon is abundant in the archaeological record, the boom/bust cycle that’s a hallmark of overexploitation is not. Just as the tastes of these ancient peoples along the west coast of British Columbia went beyond salmon, the technologies they developed went beyond fish traps and clam gardens. The Heiltsuk Nation, located nearly 400 miles north of Vancouver, harvested herring roe on kelp forests, another important indigenous fishery. Without kelp off their shores, the Tla’amin harvested roe from deliberately submerged branches of Douglas fir or other trees—a practice that only died out with the herring run.” |*|

13,000-year-old footprints found on Calvert Island, British Columbia

14,000-Year-Old “Village” Found in British Columbia

In 2017, a doctoral student from the University of Victoria, announced that she had found evidence of a 14,000-year-old settlement on Triquet Island on British Columbia's Central Coast. Leanna Garfield wrote in Business Insider: “For hundreds — perhaps thousands — of years, generations of the Heiltsuk Nation, an indigenous group in British Columbia, have passed down the oral histories of where they came from. The nation claims that its ancestors fled for survival to a coastal area in Canada that never froze during the Ice Age. A new excavation on Triquet Island, on British Columbia's Central Coast, has now backed up that claim, according to local news outlet CBC. [Source: Leanna Garfield, Business Insider, September 5, 2017 -]

“Archaeologist Alisha Gauvreau, a doctoral student from the University of Victoria and a scholar with the research institute Hakai, led a team that excavated the site in late 2016. They discovered several artifacts from what appears to be an ancient village, including carved wooden tools and bits of charcoal, in a thin horizontal layer of soil, called paleosol. The team sent the charcoal flakes to a lab for carbon dating and found that the pieces date back between 13,613 to 14,086 years ago, thousands of years before Egypt built its pyramids. -

“The artifacts are some of the oldest found in North America. In 1977, Washington State University archaeologists excavated a spear tip and mastodon rib bone (an extinct species related to elephants) near Washington's Olympic Peninsula. After CT scans in 2011, the fossils pushed estimates of the earliest human habitation on the West Coast back by 800 years (to about 13,800 years before present day). -

“The latest discovery will help archaeologists understand with more detail how more North American civilizations like the Heiltsuk Nation began. One popular theory is that the first native North Americans ventured from Asia over an ice-free, Alaskan land bridge to what is now western and central Canada during the Ice Age. Another theory, which the University of Victoria's research supports, is that they were sea mammal hunters and travelled by boat. In a 2016 paper Gauvreau said other oral histories could be further legitimized through archaeological digs. "This find is very important because it reaffirms a lot of the history that our people have been talking about for thousands of years," William Housty, a member of Heiltsuk Nation, told CBC News.” -

Archaeological Work at Quadra Island

Quadra Island is near Triquet Island, where the 14,000-year-old village was found, and Calvert Island, where 13,000-year-old footprints were found. Dig sites near the coastline on Quadra Island include places where sea levels 14,300 years ago were about 200 meters (650 feet) further out to sea than modern-day levels. By 12,000 years ago, they were within a few meters (ten feet) of today’s. Fen Montaigne wrote in Smithsonian magazine: ““The rugged shoreline of British Columbia is carved by countless coves and inlets and dotted with tens of thousands of islands. On a cool August morning, I arrived on Quadra Island, about 100 miles northwest of Vancouver, to join a group of researchers from the University of Victoria and the nonprofit Hakai Institute. Led by anthropologist Daryl Fedje, the team also included his colleagues Duncan McLaren and Quentin Mackie, as well as Christine Roberts, a representative of the Wei Wai Kum First Nation. [Source: Fen Montaigne, Smithsonian magazine, January-February 2020]

Tools and artifacts from the British Columbia coast

“The site was located on a tranquil cove whose shores were thick with hemlock and cedar. When I arrived, the team was just finishing several days of digging, the latest in a series of excavations along the British Columbia coast that had unearthed artifacts from as far back as 14,000 years ago — among the oldest in North America. On a cobble beach and in a nearby forest pit that was about six feet deep and four feet square, Fedje and his colleagues had discovered more than 1,200 artifacts, mostly stone flakes, a few as old as 12,800 years. All testified to a rich maritime-adapted culture: rock scrapers, spear points, simple flake knives, gravers and goose egg-size stones used as hammers. Fedje reckoned that the cove site was most likely a base camp that was ideally situated to exploit the fish, waterfowl, shellfish and marine mammals from the frigid sea.

“Five feet down in a pit at a wooded grove on Quadra Island, Daryl Fedje is handing up stone tools with the good cheer of someone hauling heirlooms out of grandmother’s trunk in the attic. From the pit, illuminated by powerful lights suspended from ropes strung between trees, Fedje passes the most promising items to his colleague Quentin Mackie, who rinses them in a small plastic container of water nailed to a tree and turns them over in his hand like a jeweler inspecting precious stones. “Q, have a look at this,” says Fedje. Examining a dark stone the size of a goose egg, Mackie turns to me and points out the rock’s pitted end, which is where it was used to strike objects in the toolmaking process. “This has got little facets,” says Mackie. “I’m sure it’s a hammerstone. It’s symmetrical, balanced, a good striking tool.” “Mackie drops the hammerstone into a plastic zip-lock bag with a small piece of paper denoting its depth and location in the pit.

“Next up is a two-inch-long gray rock with sharp edges, the chipped planes from the fracturing process clearly visible. “I think what we have here,” says Mackie, “is a double-ended graving tool — you can drill with one end and scribe antler with the other.” It, too, is dropped into a zip-lock bag. And on it goes, hour after hour, with Fedje and his colleagues pulling roughly 100 stone artifacts out of the pit in the course of a day: a sharp tool likely used to cut fish or meat, the bottom half of a small spear point, and numerous stone flakes — the byproducts of the toolmaking process.

Oldest Human in Alaska, a Three-Year-Old Child, Cremated 11,500 Years Ago

About 11,500 years ago, a 3-year-old child was burned and buried in a hearth in central Alaska. After the cremation, the home that housed the hearth was filled in and abandoned and the remains of the body — charred bone fragments — were found still arranged as they were when the fire sputtered out.[Source: Stephanie Pappas, Live Science, April 8, 2011]

Brian Vastag wrote in the Washington Post, “ Some 11,500 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, a child died near a river in what is now central Alaska. The people living with the child in a tent-pole house — presumably the parents — placed the 3-year-old's body in their home's cooking pit and lit a fire. After two to three hours of burning, the family covered the remains with dirt and left...That's the dramatic story emerging from the study of the oldest human remains ever found in Alaska — and some of the oldest in all of North America. “The cremation was the last event to take place in the hearth," said Ben Potter of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, who led the team of archaeologists investigating the site on a broad sandy plain southeast of the city. Their study of site appeared in Science. [Source: Brian Vastag, Washington Post February 24, 2011 ^^]

“The cremation left about 20 percent of the child's bones, enough for a detailed analysis of the scene. The child was placed on his or her back, with knees drawn toward the chest and arms placed to the side. Charcoal indicates that a fire was built on top of the body. Coloration of the skull shows that the fire was hot enough to burn the entire face and destroy the small bones there, said Joel Irish, also of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. But the fire was not hot enough to destroy the whole body. Because no other evidence of use of the cooking pit was found above the body, Potter and Irish concluded that the family left soon after the cremation. “This is a child people loved, took care of," Potter said. “The fact the house was abandoned speaks to that." ^^

“The child's teeth show that he or she was 2 to 4 years old, while stone knives at the site — and a peculiar scalloped feature of the child's teeth — connect the child to the wide-ranging band of early North American immigrants, who researchers say migrated from Siberia during the last Ice Age, when the Bering Strait was exposed, to colonize a wide swath of northern North America.Until now, no one had found a permanent or semi-permanent house associated with the hardy people who survived in an subarctic region even colder than it is today. Other sites in Alaska and Siberia from around the same period look like temporary hunting camps. ^^

“The cremated human bones are the "first evidence for behavior associated with the death of an individual," Potter said. "This was a living, breathing human being that lived and died," he said. The child has been named Xaasaa Cheege Ts'eniin (or Upward Sun River Mouth Child) by the local Native community, the Healy Lake Tribe. ^^

“At the site — called Upper Sun River in a translation of the Native American word for the locale — Potter and company were astonished to find a six-foot-wide circular pit, dug about a foot into the ground. Four post-holes surrounding the hearth and two other holes outside the circle indicate a tent-pole structure, perhaps covered with sod or animal skins, Potter said. ^^

“Archaeologists discovered the site in 2006 but did not find the child's remains until the summer of 2010. The cooking pit also held bones of rabbits, squirrels, grouse and salmon, the last indicating that the family lived there during the summer.Ancient DNA experts at the University of Utah are now trying to extract DNA from a sample of the child's bones, although it is unclear if they will succeed. In recent years, researchers have extracted DNA from 40,000-year-old Neanderthal remains. Burning the flesh off the bones may have helped preserve the DNA, Potter said, as it left no food for bacteria that could have decomposed the bone. ^^

“While Potter reported that the child probably died before being cremated, Michael Kunz, an archaeologist with the Bureau of Land Management in Fairbanks, suggested another possibility: "I don't think that there is any more evidence that the burned remains of the child indicate a cremation than they indicate that the child may have been cooked and eaten," he told AP. The body was found buried in the fire pit, Kunz noted via e-mail, and "the bones that are missing are the bones that have the most flesh on them and would most likely be used for food...Cannibalism among humans is not new news," added Kunz, who was not part of Potter's team. Potter said he disagreed, because it appeared soft tissue remained when the child was burned. And Irish said the child had been laid out with knees drawn up and hands placed to one side in a relatively peaceful position. Missing bones, he said, could simply have been destroyed by the fire.” ^^

mammoths

Alaskan Site Shows How People Lived 11,500 years Ago

The Upper Sun Rivers site where the cremated 11,500-year-old child was found has provided useful insights into how people lived at that time in what is now Alaska, researchers reported in the journal Science. The bones represent the earliest human remains discovered in the Arctic of North America, a "pretty significant find," said Ben A. Potter of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. [Source: Associated Press, February 24, 2011 /~]

Associated Press reported: “While ancient Alaskan residents were known to hunt large game, the newly discovered site shows they also foraged for fish, birds and small mammals, Potter told AP. "Here we know there were young children and females. So, this is a whole piece of the settlement system that we had virtually no record of." The site of the discovery, Upper Sun River, is in the forest of the Tanana lowlands in central Alaska, Potter and his colleagues report. /~\

“Potter said the find, which included evidence of what appeared to be a seasonal house "is truly spectacular in all senses of the word...Before this find, we knew people were hunting large game like bison or elk with sophisticated weapons, but most of sites we had to study were hunting camps." Now they have the remains of the residence, which they say was occupied in summer, based on the evidence of bones from salmon and immature ground squirrels. /~\

“In addition to the human and animal bones at the site, the researchers also found stone tools used for cutting. William Fitzhugh, director of Arctic studies at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, agreed that "this is definitely a unique and important site." He said the most interesting aspects were the very early, well-dated home site and its broad range of small animal food remains, stone tools, hearth pit and a possible ritual cremation site, "all with strong associations to Siberia. Indeed, a great documentation of one of America's first families," said Fitzhugh, who was not part of the research team. /~\

“The new find adds to knowledge of the pioneering people of Beringia, the region extending from eastern Siberia into Alaska, which was connected by a land-bridge across the Bering Strait thousands of years ago, aiding the movement of people from Asia into North America. The researchers said the stone artifacts, house structure and the types of animal remains more closely resemble items found at Siberia's Ushki Lake than to anything from the U.S.'s lower 48 states. Kunz told AP the site is a unique find, commenting: "This is also, to my knowledge, the earliest known example of a formal dwelling in Eastern Beringia." And, he added, "it bolsters evidence from other sites in the Tanana Valley the Paleo-Indians in the region were not just big game hunters, but foraged widely." The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.” /~\

Very Early Hunters and Fishermen in Canada and Alaska

Swan Point is the oldest known archaeological site in Alaska. Located on a hilltop in the east-central part of the state, it is also the only site in Alaska showing evidence of humans hunting mammoths. According to Live Science: Excavations have uncovered evidence of human occupation — such as hearths, tools and animal bones — dating to more than 14,000 years ago. Based on what has been recovered from the site, archaeologists think early occupants may have camped there and survived by hunting game in the surrounding wetlands, now known as the Shaw Creek Flats. Tools discovered at Swan Point include projectile points made of stone and antlers, fragments of an adze for chopping wood or bone, scrapers for skinning and an awl to pierce animal hides. These objects, together with a mammoth tusk, suggest the site may have been a mammoth ivory workshop at some point in prehistory. [Source: Sascha Pare, Live Science, October 9, 2023]

wild imagining of a mammoth hunt

According to Archaeology magazine: It was long thought that Ice Age humans in the Americas were primarily big-game hunters. But sharp-eyed archaeologists have found evidence that they ate fish as well. In an 11,500-year-old hearth, researchers found salmon bones, the earliest known evidence for the use of the fish as food in North America. Because the bones were found more than 800 miles from the ocean, it is clear that long-distance salmon migrations likely date back at least to the last Ice Age. [Source: Samir S. Patel Archaeology magazine, January-February 2016]

When archaeologists in the southern Yukon recovered a 6,000-year-old atlatl dart—a deadly projectile used by First Nations peoples—from melting alpine ice, they noticed it was coated with a mysterious orangish substance. The researchers initially suspected it was red ochre, but further examination revealed that it was actually castoreum, a secretion beavers use to mark their territory. This is the first known archaeological evidence of the substance’s use. It might have been applied to the dart as an adhesive, a preservative, or a colorant. [Source: Archaeology magazine, September 2021]

Mammoth Blood Found on 11,000-Year-Old Canadian Stone Tools

According to research published in the journal of Archaeological Science on December 14, 2022, based on stone tools unearthed in Ontario, Canada long ago and later rigorously tested to find traces of organic material, indigenous people in southern Canada hunted and butchered mammoths 11,000 years ago. Brendan Rascius wrote in the Miami Herald: A single intact biface, a tool sharpened on both sides, was examined in addition to fragments of many other tools, researchers said, adding that they were estimated to be around 11,000 years old. Researchers studied the prehistoric tools under a microscope to determine the characteristics and locations of various residues, which included “smear-like” organic material and soil sediments. [Source: Brendan Rascius, Miami Herald, December 23, 2022]

A scraper and a wedge were among the six tools identified as potential hosts of organic residue, researchers said. These were then sent to a lab in Oregon for forensic analysis, which involved testing protein residues from the artifacts against the blood serum of known animals, researchers said. Blood from an Asian elephant, deer and horse was used, among other animals. One tool, a graver — a square-shape shard about 5 centimeters in length — tested positive against the Asian elephant’s blood serum, researchers said.

Given that mammoths and elephants are closely related, the finding suggests, “for the first time,” according to researchers, that early indigenous people might have hunted and butchered mammoths or mastodons, which share a resemblance and are both members of the proboscidean family. “The theory has been out there a long time that we certainly hunted down mastodons in the past, and then finding this physical evidence of that, it’s an archaeologists’ delight,” Rick Hill, a former advisor to the archaeological site in Ontario, told CBC. Mammoths entered North America over 1 million years ago, according to the National Park Service. The species died out on Russian Arctic island roughly 10,000 years ago .

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons except Bluefish Caves maps from the Canadian Encyclopedia, Bluefish Caves from the Canadian Museum of History, Beringia map from Jeffrey Bond

Text Sources: National Geographic, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Nature, Scientific American. Live Science, Discover magazine, Discovery News, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, BBC, The Guardian, Reuters, AP, AFP, and various books and other publications.

Last updated June 2024