The Peopling of Australia

After humans migrated to southeast Asia, they continued to expand their

territory eventually making the journey to Australia. The first hominins to
arrive in Australia were anatomically modern humans. Recent
archaeological investigations suggest that people arrived in Australia as
early as 65,000 years ago.
Sunda and Sahul
Sea levels were lower during the Pleistocene epoch when glaciers covered
more of the earth’s surface. As a result, the land masses that were present
in southeast Asia and Australia at that time were different than today. Many
of the islands of southeast Asia including Java, Borneo, Sumatra, and Bali
were connected to mainland southeast Asia forming a land mass
called Sunda. A second large landmass called Sahul incorporated
Australia, New Guinea, and Tasmania. The combined land mass of Sahul
remained connected until sea levels rose about 9,000 years ago. However,
even during periods of lower sea levels, Sunda and Sahul were separated
by the deep waters in Wallacea (Figure 8-1). This means that the migration
to Australia would have required the use of watercraft. The gaps between
islands would have been smaller with the largest gaps about 90 kilometres
across. The early migrants to Australia could have travelled through this
region using the islands in Wallacea as stepping stones as they made their
eventual journey to Australia. Archaeologists estimate that the migration to
Australia would have required up to 10 sea crossings between islands
(Malaspinas et al. 2016).
Early Australian Archaeological Sites
Recent archeological investigations in northern Australia at Madjedbebe
Rockshelter (formerly called Malakunanja II; see Figure 8-1 and Figure 8-2)
have revealed evidence of human occupation as early as 65,000 years ago
(Clarkson et al. 2017). Currently, this is the earliest reliably dated
archaeological site in Australia. Previous estimates have placed the timing
of the initial human occupation of Australia between about 47,000 and
60,000 years ago, so this new date extends that date back substantially
(Clarkson et al. 2017).
At Madjedbebe Rockshelter, archaeologists excavated many artifacts
including stone flakes, ground stone axes, ochre, reflective mica, and
features such as middens and fire pits. Many absolute dates were
obtained using a dating method called optically stimulated luminescence
(OSL). Optically stimulated luminescence can determine the burial age of
sediments and is useful for quartz mineral grains. It measures the amount
of time that has passed since sediments were exposed to sunlight. When
buried, these grains absorb radiation over time from surrounding
sediments. In the lab scientists can measure the amount of radiation that
has been absorbed by the particles since they were buried.
Ancient sites have also been identified in southern Australia. Absolute
dates obtained from occupation levels at Devil’s Lair (see Figure 8-1)
confirm a human presence in southwest Australia by 50,000 years ago
(Turney et al. 2001). Another of the oldest Australian archaeological sites is
Lake Mungo, in the Willandra Lakes World Heritage Area of southeast
Australia (see Figure 8-2). Willandra Lakes is a series of dried up lake
beds, and it is here that the earliest Australian human skeletal remains
have been discovered. The skeletal materials at Lake Mungo include
evidence of elaborate intentional burials. An individual labeled Mungo III
(Mungo Man) represents the world’s oldest ritual ochre burial, and Mungo I
(Mungo Lady) represents the first recorded cremation burial (Bowler et al.
2003). Absolute dates reveal that both of these burials date to about 40,000
years ago. Additional artifacts recovered from Lake Mungo reveal evidence
of an earlier human occupation between 46,000 to 50,000 years ago
(Bowler et al. 2003).
Another interesting find in the Willandra Lakes region is the 2003 discovery
of human footprints. The footprints represent at least 8 individuals,
including adults and children, who walked across the ground when the
surface was moist. Scientists used OSL dating of quartz sand grains above
and below the compacted sediments of the layer bearing the footprints to
assign an age for the footprints of between 19,000 and 23,000 years ago
(Webb et al. 2006).
Forty years ago the remains of a man were found at Lake Mungo in NSW.
This discovery would forever change our understanding of the Aboriginal
history of Australia. In geological layers dated as far back as 50,000 years,
there are stone tools and hearths, shellfish middens and butchered animal
bones. The bones of both Mungo Lady and Mungo Man, as well as the
fragmentary remains of as many as 100 other people found at Willandra,
made their way into ANU collections in Canberra during the 1970s and
’80s. The NSW State Government purchased Mungo station and turned it
into a national park in 1979 (funds from Australian Geographic’s founder
Dick Smith helped establish the visitors centre, which includes a small
museum). Gazetting of the larger WHA followed in 1981. THE WILLANDRA
LAKES Region World Heritage Area covers 2400sq.km of semi-arid
saltbush plains, dunes and sparse woodlands in the Murray Basin of south-
western NSW. It consists of 19 dry relict lakes (see map, overleaf) that
were once filled with glacial meltwater flowing east along the Willandra
Creek from the Great Dividing Range. These Pleistocene-era lakes, which
were full from about 50,000 years ago, vary in size from 6 to 350sq.km; all
have crescent-moon-shaped dunes called lunettes on their eastern sides,
formed by prevailing winds. Mungo NP itself covers about 70 per cent of
Lake Mungo, including the striking Walls of China, which are part of the
lake’s 26km-long lunette. “Some of the very earliest modern human
remains in the world are here at Mungo,” says Harvey Johnston, a NSW
Office of Environment and Heritage archaeologist, who’s been involved with
Willandra since the late 1980s. “You have this record of human occupation
going back 40,000 years and burials and ceremonies associated with that:
cremations, burials with ochre, multiple individuals and burials with unusual
features.”

Australia's indigenous sanctuary will

and relaxed region will Andra Lakes
region is in New South Wales in
Australia many thousands of years ago
there were many lakes in this inland
area however they all dried up about
20,000 years ago it's believed that
indigenous hunter-gatherers lived here
for fifty to sixty thousand years
however after the arrival of European
settlers in the late 18th century they
were persecuted and their numbers
declined dramatically today plants and
trees grow out of what used to be the
lake bed
eroded by the rain and the wind sound
pinnacles have formed and ants and
termites make their home here previously
the indigenous people used to dig up the
ants nests and either ate them in small
pieces or use the nest to make fires
one area is particularly sacred for
descendants of the ancients it's covered
for preservation footprints belonging to
their ancestors were discovered here
human bones from 40,000 years ago have
also been discovered here researchers
have also uncovered signs suggesting
ritual ceremonies were held when the
bones were buried for the indigenous
descendants
it's a highly spiritual place where they
can reconnect with their ancestors

What DNA reveals about the migration to Australia

Recent information about population movement is derived from DNA
samples obtained from contemporary Indigenous people from Australia and
Papua New Guinea (Malaspinas et al. 2016). Historic hair samples have
also been used to reconstruct the genomes of Indigenous Australians
(Tobler et al. 2017, Rasmussen et al. 2011). DNA analysis has also
revealed details about the timing of the migration to Australia and confirms
that today’s Indigenous Australians descend from the earliest people to
occupy the continent (Rasmussen et al. 2011). Genetic evidence suggests
that there was a divergence of Aboriginal Australians and Papuans from
Eurasian populations 51,000 to 72,000 years ago following a single out-of-
Africa dispersal (Malaspinas et al. 2016). Australians and Papuans are
more closely related to each other than to any other populations. This
suggests that they share a common ancestor who migrated to Sahul
(Malaspinas et al. 2016).
To date, geneticists have had little success extracting ancient DNA from
skeletal remains recovered from the earliest Australian archaeological
sites. In 2016, scientists reported the first successful extraction of DNA
from a skeleton from an Australian archaeological context. The specimen
was relatively recent, dating between 3,000 and 500 years old, but it
demonstrates the possibility of reconstructing ancient DNA sequences from
Australian skeletal materials (Heupink et al. 2016).
The Peopling of the Americas – Proposed Migration Routes
Modern humans were the first to migrate to the Americas, and
archaeological and genetic evidence indicate that the earliest people to
arrive in the Americas descended from populations that originated in Asia.
Similar physical characteristics, such as shared dental traits, have long
been cited as evidence of shared ancestry (Turner 1984). In recent
decades, genetic studies have also demonstrated an affinity between the
Indigenous inhabitants of Asia and the Americas.
Explanations for the geographic origins of the Indigenous inhabitants of the
Americas have primarily focused on a migration from northeast Asia to
northwest North America. The two land masses are close together. Today,
they are separated by less than 90 kilometres of ocean. In the past, the
land masses were connected during periods of maximum glaciation which
reduced sea levels worldwide. The two most likely migration routes are via
the exposed land or along the Pacific Coast. A route across the North
Atlantic has also been proposed by some, but the evidence does not
support that hypothesis. See Figure 8-3 for an illustration of the proposed
migration routes.
The Bering Land Bridge Hypothesis
The Bering Land Bridge Hypothesis is the traditional explanation for how modern
humans migrated to the Americas. The Last Glacial Maximum was a period when the
earth’s glaciers were at their greatest extent. This period,18,000 to 24000 years ago,
reduced sea levels worldwide. In northeast Asia and northwest North America, the floor
of the Bering Strait was exposed creating a land bridge called Beringia. Beringia was
exposed between 35,000 and 11,000 years, ago and during that time, people could have
walked from Siberia across the land bridge to migrate to the Americas.

When the Bering Land Bridge was exposed, most of northern North America was
covered by glaciers. The Cordilleran ice sheet covered northwestern North America, and
the Laurentide ice sheet extended from the Rocky Mountains to northeastern Canada
(see Figure 8-3). Eventually, the ice sheets began to retreat creating an ice-free corridor.
Recent studies of the ancient environment of the ice-free corridor indicate that although
the ice sheets begin to retreat between 15,000 and14,000 years ago, this area was not
suitable habitat for human occupation until about 12,600 years ago (Pedersen et al.
2016). The fact that the ice-free corridor was not viable until after 12,600 years ago
suggests that the inhabitants of the earliest sites in the Americas must have entered the
Americas using a route other than the ice-free corridor (see Figure 8-4).
Pacific Coastal Route Hypothesis
Recent data suggest there was an initial wave of colonization along the coast prior to
14,000 years ago and a later movement into the ice-free corridor after 12,600 years ago
(Pedersen et al. 2016). The presence of archaeological sites located south of the ice
sheets that predate the opening of the ice-free corridor suggests that the first people to
arrive in the Americas must have migrated along the Pacific Coast. People may have
used watercraft to travel along the coast of Beringia and the Pacific Coast of the
Americas. Archaeological sites off the coast of British Columbia and evidence of the
utilization of resources including shellfish and seaweed are indicative of marine adapted
populations. Dixon (2013) also suggests that large areas along the Pacific Coast of North
America would have been free of glaciers by 16,000 years ago. This would provide a
coastal corridor for people to move along as they migrated into the Americas.
Several sites in coastal British Columbia yield evidence of early habitation along the
Pacific Coast. An interesting example comes from an archaeological site on Calvert Island
where human footprints dating to about 13,000 years ago were recently discovered
(McLaren et al. 2018). The 29 footprints in three different sizes are the earliest
footprints in North America. Their presence supports the idea that people moved along
the glacier free areas of the Pacific Coast in their migration from Asia to North America
(McLaren et al. 2018).

Willandra Lakes Region

Until 20 years ago, the prevailing theory
for how the earliest human settlers arrived in America
came down to one thing: big game
It was thought that humans followed megafauna
such as mammoths and bison across the Bering strait
and through an ice-free corridor down
into North America around 13,500 years ago.
These early humans, the Clovis,
left behind spear points with telltale grooves,
evidence of their big game hunts.
But this theory collapsed
when evidence of human occupation
dating to 14,500 years ago
was found at the Monte Verde site in Chile--
1,000 years before Clovis points
appear in North America.
This gave rise to a new theory--
that humans may have traveled by boat,
starting in Beringia
and sailing down the coast
some 16,000 years ago.
Since the discovery at Monte Verde,
researchers have turned their attention
to the Pacific coast in search of early sites.
Cedros Island is practically brimming
with archaeological evidence
for an early American culture that
had mastered coastal environments.
Stone tools and clam shells found at
several sites on the island were radiocarbon dated
to between 11,000 and 13,000 years ago,
not quite pre-Clovis, but getting there...
In the hunt for evidence of these early settlers,
researchers have been searching not only on land
but also under the sea.
As the ice sheets covering North America
began to melt around 16,500 years ago,
the sea level rose 120 meters,
likely swamping any early settlements
along the Pacific coast.
To uncover these drowned settlements,
researchers tried to deduce the location
of these settlers’ most important resource--
fresh water.
They started mapping the ocean floor
off the coasts of Oregon and California,
in search of evidence of
ancient riverbanks and estuaries.
By taking core samples of the ocean floor
where these riverbanks lie, researchers hope
to understand these lost environments
and perhaps even eventually find
evidence of early human occupation.
As the glaciers melted and sea levels rose,
parts of the coasts of British Columbia and
southwestern Alaska rose as well,
no longer bearing the weight of the
massive sheets of ice.
The consequences of this geological quirk
can be found on Calvert Island, where the
sea level rise was as little as 2 meters,
leaving easily accessible evidence
of coastal settlements.
Here researchers found 29 footprints
preserved in clay buried underneath a
half a meter of soil.
A piece of wood embedded in one of the footprints
allowed them to date the footprints to just
over 13,000 years ago.
More evidence has been found
on nearby coastal islands,
12,700-year-old spear points left
over from a bear hunt and
14,000-year-old stone tools left next to a hearth.
Clues that the first Americans made their way down
the coast by boat continues to present themselves,
but archaeologists aren’t ready to confirm the theory just yet.
A string of well-documented sites along the coasts of
southwestern Alaska and British Columbia
dating back to at least 15,000 years ago
and extending through time down the coast
will be needed to truly prove
the coastal migration theory.
Until then, archaeologists in both
North and South America
will continue the hunt for signs
that the earliest Americans were, indeed,
a seafaring people.

The Solutrean Hypothesis (North Atlantic Ice Edge)

The Solutrean hypothesis (also called the North Atlantic Ice Edge Hypothesis) suggests
that people used watercraft to travel from Europe across the North Atlantic Ocean to
Eastern North America. This is not a mainstream hypothesis. Archaeological and genetic
evidence do not support this theory. Nevertheless, many media outlets have reported on
it, often without addressing the lack of evidence. Stanford and Bradley (2012) are vocal
proponents of the Solutrean hypothesis. They suggest that the origin of the Clovis
tradition of North America can be traced to the Solutrean, which is an Upper Paleolithic
culture that flourished in France and Spain. They suggest that these European people
migrated across the Atlantic Ocean to eastern North America. Most archaeologists reject
this hypothesis.
Archaeological and genetic evidence supports a Beringian (northeast Asian) point of
entry to the Americas. Straus (2000) published an article that outlines the many
weaknesses of the Solutrean hypothesis including the fact that the Solutrean were not a
marine adapted population, that 5,000 kilometres of harsh Atlantic Ocean separated that
two landmasses, and that the Solutrean ended 5,000 years before Clovis appears in the
Americas. There are general similarities between the method used to manufacture
Solutrean and Clovis points, but the points are not identical (Strauss 2000).
Genetic evidence, including the recently reconstructed genome of a Clovis skeleton from
the Anzick site in Montana confirms the shared genetic ancestry between the Clovis
population of North America and northeast Asian populations, as well as the shared
ancestry between Clovis and modern Indigenous North and South Americans
(Rasmussen et al. 2014). The Anzick site will be discussed in more detail later in the
module.

Timing of the Initial Migration to

the Americas
For many decades, a hypothesis called the Clovis First Model dominated discussions
about the timing of the initial peopling of the Americas. The Clovis First model suggested
that the Clovis tradition, which appears in the archaeological record about 13,000 years
ago, represents the first occupation of the Americas. This view was strongly held until
archaeologists began to uncover cultural materials that predate Clovis. There are now
several well stratified, well dated, and widely accepted sites with evidence of pre-Clovis
occupations. The Pre-Clovis Model suggests that the initial occupation predates the
appearance of Clovis.
Clovis tools are found at sites across much of unglaciated North America and as far
south as Venezuela in South America. The dates of Clovis sites have been constrained
between 13,250 to 12,800 years ago, confirming that Clovis technology spread rapidly
across the continent (Waters and Stafford 2007). The first detailed descriptions of Clovis
are from discoveries at Blackwater Draw near Clovis, New Mexico (Howard 1935). At
this site, Clovis tools were found in association with mammoth bones. The Clovis
tradition is characterized by distinctive projectile points, representing great skill in stone
tool making. The bifacial spearpoint is fluted at the base (Figure 8-5). A flute is formed
when a flake is removed from the base of the point. The flute may aid in attaching the
point to the shaft of a spear. Bone foreshafts recovered from Clovis sites suggest that
foreshafts were used to attach fluted points to the shafts of spears (see Figure 8-6).
Foreshafts allow a spear to be rapidly reloaded. Clovis people came to be known as big
game mammoth hunters. While there are a number of sites with Clovis tools in
association with large game such as mammoth and mastodon, the Clovis people were
not exclusive big game hunters and they utilized a wide variety of resources including
small mammals and fish as well as plants resources like seeds, nuts, and berries.
The Anzick site is a significant Clovis site in Montana. It is the only confirmed Clovis burial. This
site, which was accidentally uncovered in the late 1960s, included the skeleton of an 18 month
old boy who lived almost 13,000 years ago. The child was buried with grave goods including red
ochre and numerous Clovis tradition tools (see Figure 8-7). Scientists successfully extracted DNA
from the child’s remains. They were able to reconstruct the genome and compare it to the
genome of Indigenous populations in the Americas. Scientists discovered that today’s Indigenous
North and South Americans are closely related to Clovis people. The Anzick site boy’s DNA also
indicates that the Clovis population originated from ancestral northeast Asian populations
(Rasmussen et al. 2014). This ancient DNA confirms that that Clovis had ancestral origins in Asia
and refutes the Solutrean hypothesis which suggested that Clovis had its origins in the European
Solutrean.

Archaeological sites in Northeast Asia and Northwest North America

It has been established that the first people to migrate to the Americas came from
northeast Asia. Therefore, it is important to understand when areas surrounding Beringia
were occupied. There is evidence of human occupation in the Russian Arctic by 45,000
years ago. The Sopochnaya Karga (SK) Mammoth site is a mammoth butchering site in
the central Siberian Arctic. Here, the remains of a butchered mammoth date to 45,000
years ago (Pitulko 2016). Mamontovaya Kurya is another site in the Russian Arctic. This
site has yielded stone tools and butchered animal bones that date to 40,000 years ago
(Pavlov et al. 2001). Closer to the Bering Land Bridge, is Yana RHS in northeastern
Siberia. This site is located on the Yana River above the Arctic Circle and was occupied
30,000 years ago (Pitulko 2004). This is the same time the Bering Land Bridge was
exposed and could serve as a viable migration route to northwest North America.
Numerous butchered animal bones and artifacts were recovered from Yana RHS
including stone tools, a spear foreshaft manufactured from a rhinoceros horn, and others
that were manufactured from mammoth ivory. The aforementioned sites demonstrate
that human populations inhabited the Russian Arctic by 45,000 to 40,000 years ago and
were present in eastern Siberia by 30,000 years ago.
Early Sites in Eastern Beringia
Once people travelled across the Bering Land Bridge, they may have remained in the
unglaciated region of eastern Beringia, before migrating south. Two significant early sites
in northwest North America include Swan Point, Alaska and Bluefish Caves, Yukon
Territory.
Swan Point is in the Tanana River Valley of central Alaska. It is identified as the oldest
archaeological site in Alaska and dates between 14,000 and 14,500 years ago (Holmes
2001). Finds at this site include butchered animals such as mammoth, horse, wapiti, and
bison. Stone tools including microblade technology have also been identified at the site.
Holmes (2001) labels the early Alaskan assemblages “East Beringian tradition” and notes
that the earliest Alaskan assemblages have antecedents in the Dyuktai Culture. The
Dyuktai culture originates in eastern Russia and is characterized by wedge shaped cores
from which microblades were removed.
Bluefish Caves, Yukon Territory is a significant archeological site demonstrating an early
human presence at the eastern margin of Beringia. The site was excavated by Jacques
Cinq-Mars in the 1970s and 1980s. This site revealed evidence of a very early
occupation of eastern Beringia, but it has been considered a controversial site (Adovasio
and Pedler 2016). However, recent reanalysis of faunal material and additional AMS
radiocarbon dating of animal bones exhibiting human made cut marks confirm that
cultural materials date to 24,000 years ago (Bourgeon et al. 2017). If these dates are
accurate, Bluefish Caves would be the oldest known archaeological site in North
America. It also suggests that after crossing the Bering Land Bridge, people remained in
Beringia before eventually migrating southward into the rest of the continent (Bourgeon
et al. 2017).

From Vilified to Vindicated: the Story of Jacques Cinq-Mars

What I remember most about Jacques Cinq-Mars the first time we met was his
manner—one part defiance, one part wariness. It was 1994, and I had just
flown into the small village of Old Crow in northern Yukon; Cinq-Mars was
waiting in the tiny airport. Tall, grizzled, and unshaven, the French-Canadian
archaeologist looked every bit the old Yukon hand. Still fit in his early 50s, he
worked as a curator at what is now called the Canadian Museum of History in
Gatineau, Quebec. But Cinq-Mars lived for summer fieldwork, combing Yukon
riverbanks and rock shelters for traces of Ice Age hunters. In three hollows
known as the Bluefish Caves, he and his team had discovered something
remarkable—the bones of extinct horses and wooly mammoths bearing what
seemed to be marks from human butchering and toolmaking. Radiocarbon
test results dated the oldest finds to around 24,000 years before the present.
Bluefish Caves directly challenged mainstream scientific thinking. Evidence
had long suggested that humans first reached the Americas around 13,000
years ago, when Asian hunters crossed a now submerged landmass known as
Beringia, which joined Siberia to Alaska and Yukon during the last ice age.
From there, the migrants seemed to have hurried southward along the edges
of melting ice sheets to warmer lands in what is now the United States, where
they and their descendants thrived. Researchers called these southern hunters
the Clovis people, after a distinctive type of spear point they carried. And the
story of their arrival in the New World became known as the Clovis first
model.
 Cinq-Mars, however, didn’t buy that story—not a bit. His work at Bluefish
Caves suggested that Asian hunters roamed northern Yukon at least 11,000
years before the arrival of the Clovis people. And other research projects lent
some support to the idea. At a small scattering of sites, from Meadowcroft in
Pennsylvania to Monte Verde in Chile, archaeologists had unearthed hearths,
stone tools, and butchered animal remains that pointed to an earlier migration
to the Americas. But rather than launching a major new search for more early
evidence, the finds stirred fierce opposition and a bitter debate, “one of the
most acrimonious—and unfruitful—in all of science,” noted the
journal Nature. Cinq-Mars, however, was not intimidated. He fearlessly
waded into the fight. Between 1979 and 2001, he published a series of studies
on Bluefish Caves.
It was a brutal experience, something that Cinq-Mars once likened to the
Spanish Inquisition. At conferences, audiences paid little heed to his
presentations, giving short shrift to the evidence. Other researchers listened
politely, then questioned his competence. The result was always the same.
“When Jacques proposed [that Bluefish Caves was] 24,000, it was not
accepted,” says William Josie, director of natural resources at the Vuntut
Gwitchin First Nation in Old Crow. In his office at the Canadian Museum of
History, Cinq-Mars fumed at the wall of closed minds. Funding for his
Bluefish work grew scarce: his fieldwork eventually sputtered and died.
Today, decades later, the Clovis first model has collapsed. Based on dozens of
new studies, we now know that pre-Clovis people slaughtered mastodons in
Washington State, dined on desert parsley in Oregon, made all-purpose stone
tools that were the Ice Age version of X-acto blades in Texas, and slept in
sprawling, hide-covered homes in Chile—all between 13,800 and 15,500 years
ago, possibly earlier. And in January, a Université de Montréal PhD candidate,
Lauriane Bourgeon, and her colleagues published a new study on Bluefish
Caves bones in the journal PLOS One, confirming that humans had butchered
horses and other animals there 24,000 years ago. “It was a huge surprise,”
says Bourgeon.
The new findings, says Quentin Mackie, an archaeologist at the University of
Victoria in British Columbia who was not a member of the team, are
prompting the first serious discussion of Bluefish Caves—nearly 40 years after
its excavation. “This report will tilt the scales for some [archaeologists]
towards accepting the site, and for some more, it will inspire a desire to really
evaluate the caves more seriously and either generate new data or try to
replicate this study,” Mackie notes.
But the study also raises serious questions about the effect of the bitter
decades-long debate over the peopling of the New World. Did archaeologists
in the mainstream marginalize dissenting voices on this key issue? And if so,
what was the impact on North American archaeology? Did the intense
criticism of pre-Clovis sites produce a chilling effect, stifling new ideas and
hobbling the search for early sites? Tom Dillehay, an archaeologist at
Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and the principal investigator at the
Chilean site of Monte Verde, thinks the answer is clear. The scientific
atmosphere, recalls Dillehay, was “clearly toxic and clearly impeded science.”
I first came across the research at Bluefish Caves in the early 1990s. As a
science journalist, I was working on a book on North American archaeology,
and I was curious about what Cinq-Mars and his team had found. I called him
up and near the end of the conversation, I inquired about the possibility of
traveling to Bluefish Caves, which lay north of the Arctic Circle. A few weeks
later, Cinq-Mars invited me along on some helicopter surveying planned for
the summer and offered to show me the caves. I booked a ticket to Old Crow.
Cinq-Mars was working out of a small field station in the village, a cabin that
backed onto the Porcupine River, whose waters meandered their way to the
Bering Sea. He had teamed up that summer with Bernard Lauriol, a
geographer at the University of Ottawa, on an environmental study of
Beringia. I pitched my tent out behind the cabin and swatted in vain at the
dense cloud of Yukon mosquitoes. That night, I lay awake for hours. In the
distance, I could hear children laughing and giggling on rooftops in the village,
making the most of the midnight sun.
The next morning, Cinq-Mars made coffee and bannock for us, and we headed
off to the airport, a pattern we followed for the better part of a week. And each
day, as the helicopter lifted off and swung west or north, we left the modern
world behind us: in the green below, there were no roads, no pipelines, no
mines, no clearcuts. Below us lay unbroken forest, jagged peaks, and silvery
threads of creeks and rivers, shimmering in the morning light. It was beautiful
beyond description, and even now, more than two decades later, I dream at
night about those flights, soaring effortlessly over paradise.
Some days we stopped in lowland areas, trudging through tussocky tundra or
muskeg to get to a sampling site. On others, Cinq-Mars led the way into caves
he wanted to check out. As the helicopter pilot waited, we ducked into
shadowy entrances and wriggled through narrow passages, looking for traces
of red ochre on the walls, or flecks of charcoal on the cave floor. There was no
sign of either, but Cinq-Mars wasn’t deterred. He carried a big map in his pack
and continually tugged it out to add more notes to the margin.
Finally, the day for Bluefish Caves arrived. Cinq-Mars needed additional
measurements of the caves, and had asked an assistant, Stringer Charlie, to
 help. As the helicopter swept southwest from Old Crow, the three of us gazed
out in silence at the forest until Cinq-Mars and the pilot spotted a small
limestone ridge rising from the spruce, and dark, shadowy gashes in the rock—
Bluefish Caves. Landing nearby, Cinq-Mars, Charlie, and I clambered out with
our gear and began hiking up a narrow trail to the first of three small caves.
The ridge looked out on a stunning expanse of lowland and the winding banks
of Bluefish River, named after the Arctic grayling that flourished there. Cinq-
Mars had first spotted the shallow caves from the air, while helicopter
surveying in 1975. Landing briefly, he had taken a quick look inside the
shallow caverns. Over the next three years, he and a small archaeological team
returned twice, once for 10 days to open a test excavation. The preservation
inside the caves was remarkable: the dry, cold environment conserved even
fragments of ancient beetles and weevils. And in the sediments, the team
found the bones of extinct horses and other large ungulates, as well as ancient
stone tools, including microblades—a narrow cutting tool used by Ice Age
hunters in Asia.
Encouraged, Cinq-Mars expanded the excavation. And back in Quebec, at the
Canadian Museum of History, he worked closely with botanists,
entomologists, zoologists, and other researchers to analyze the environmental
data. It was a heady time. The dig yielded more stone tools, as well as other
evidence of human activity—a horse jaw with incisions resembling cut marks,
and a mammoth long bone that seemed carefully worked and flaked, as well as
a cutting tool made from the bone. Samples from these finds yielded
radiocarbon dates as old as 24,800 years ago.

As we stood and chatted near the rugged entrance of Cave II in 1994, Cinq-
Mars shared his thoughts on what had taken place at the site. During the
depths of the last ice age, large carnivores had prowled the ridge, gnawing
carcasses in the caves. But from time to time, Ice Age humans had taken
shelter there, too. “You can think of a small hunting party stopping in one of
these caves for an afternoon, if it was a rainy day or a bad blizzard or a freak
storm,” he said
And he steadfastly refused to budge from the early dates he had published.
“I’m now in a position to state that Bluefish Caves represent the oldest-known
archaeological site in North America,” he told me.

But relatively few of Cinq-Mars’s peers shared his confidence. And as I began
regularly attending archaeological conferences in the years following that trip
 to Bluefish Caves, I saw what Cinq-Mars was up against. Sitting in halls with
Canadian and American researchers, I witnessed what happened when
archaeologists presented data that contradicted the Clovis first model. Often a
polite bemusement spread through the room, as if the audience was dealing
with some crackpot uncle, or the atmosphere grew testy and tense as someone
began grilling the presenter. But once or twice, the mask of professional
respect slipped completely; I heard laughter and snickering in the room. Tom
Dillehay remembers such conferences well. “Some Clovis first people had a
suffocating air of defiance and superiority at times,” he says.
n general, the critics focused their attacks on two major fronts. They
questioned whether key artifacts at proposed pre-Clovis sites were really made
by humans, as opposed to natural processes. And they pored over
presentations and reports for any possible errors in dating.
At Bluefish Caves, the crucial evidence consisted of animal bones that
were dated to around 24,000 years ago and seemed to be cut, shaped, or
flaked by humans. So critics focused on those. They dismissed Cinq-
Mars’s identification of butchery marks and tools, and offered alternative
explanations. Rockfall from the caves, they suggested, had fractured the
bones, leaving splinters that merely looked like human artifacts. Or large
carnivores had chomped on a carcass, producing grooves that resembled
cut marks or fragments mirroring artifacts. Some skeptics even
suggested that living mammoths could have taken bad tumbles nearby,
accidentally splintering limb bones. Other critics wanted to see multiple
lines of evidence for the presence of early humans at Bluefish Caves,
including dated hearths with stone tools in close association
Funding for Cinq-Mars’s research at Bluefish Caves eventually trickled to
a stop. But in 1997, archaeological finds in Chile began winning over
archaeologists to the view that a pre-Clovis people arrived in the
Americas first. Twenty years later, in 2017, a Université de Montréal
team reported new evidence of a human presence at Bluefish Caves
24,000 years ago, just as Cinq-Mars had contended. Photo by Heather
Pringle
Stung as he was by the criticism, Cinq-Mars refused to back down. None
of the explanations for splintered bones, he noted, could account for the
complex chain of steps that produced the mammoth-bone flake tool his
team found. But by then, serious doubts about the Bluefish Caves
evidence had been sown, taking firm root in the archaeological
 community: hardly anyone was listening. Cinq-Mars couldn’t believe it.
At one presentation he gave, “they laughed at me,” he says angrily today.
“They found me cute.” Embittered by the response, he stopped attending
conferences, and gave up defending the site publicly. What was the point?
To Cinq-Mars, the Clovis first supporters seemed almost brainwashed.
Ruth Gotthardt, a member of the Bluefish Caves excavation team who
went on to become a senior archaeologist in the government of Yukon,
thinks the scientific community of the day failed to give the Bluefish
research a fair hearing. “From what I saw of Jacques’s work at Bluefish
Caves, it was good science,” she says, but the burden of proof demanded
by most archaeologists for a pre-Clovis site was extreme. “And I think
[Jacques] got pretty beat up in the process.”
In January 1997, a dozen North American archaeologists accepted an
invitation from Dillehay to fly to southern Chile to inspect the
controversial site of Monte Verde. Dillehay and a large interdisciplinary
scientific team had studied the site intensively for two decades after its
discovery by loggers. Beneath layers of marshy peat some 50 kilometers
east of the Pacific Ocean, the team had discovered stone tools, remains of
a large hide-covered shelter that may have housed 30 people, communal
hearths, chunks of mastodon meat, and three human footprints. Dillehay
and his colleagues had meticulously dated the oldest human activity at
the site to 14,500 years ago. But for years, most North American
researchers refused to accept the date. So Dillehay took the bull by the
horns, inviting several skeptics and other prominent archaeologists to
Monte Verde.
The visitors personally inspected the site, examining the stratigraphy,
and they pored over the evidence for days. At the end, all 12 researchers
accepted the evidence from Monte Verde, publicly agreeing that humans
had reached southern Chile 1,500 years before the Clovis people. It was a
moment akin to “aviation’s breaking of the sound barrier,” wrote one New
York Times reporter. Soon after, Dillehay and his colleagues published a
1,300-page report on the site, laying out all the details. Eventually, the
findings and new research on the first Americans from the field of
genetics put remaining doubts to rest. The Clovis first model was dead,
and thousands of researchers began rethinking the timing of the earliest
migration to the New World and the routes the migrants may have taken.
A growing body of scientific research is pushing back the timeline for the
arrival of humans in the New World. The sites shown here all point to the
presence of pre-Clovis hunters. Illustration by Mark Garrison and Joel
Friesen
By then, however, Bluefish Caves had been largely forgotten. But in 2012,
Lauriane Bourgeon, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the
Université de Montréal, decided to take a new look. She began
microscopically examining 36,000 bone fragments that Cinq-Mars and
his team had excavated. Archaeologists who specialized in the study of
old animal bones had developed six criteria for the identification of
human cut marks, such as the precise shape of the incision and its
trajectory. Bourgeon only accepted a mark as evidence of human
butchery if it met all six criteria.

In two years of intensive work, Bourgeon identified human butchering

marks on 15 bones from Bluefish Caves. She then took samples from six
and sent them off for radiocarbon dating: the results showed that the
oldest dated to 24,000 years ago—confirming Cinq-Mars’s original
contention. Bourgeon now plans to write about two other key objects that
Cinq-Mars found at Bluefish Caves: the mammoth bone flake and the
worked bone core it came from. She is not ready to divulge the results of
her analysis, but based on her published evidence, she describes Bluefish
Caves as “the oldest-known archaeological site in North America.”

The new findings are sparking a lot of talk and serious interest in
Bluefish Caves. While some archaeologists remain skeptical, withholding
acceptance until they see more traces of early human activity at the site,
as well as additional sites in the region dated to this period, others, such
as archaeologist Ian Buvit, manager of the Shared Beringian Heritage
Program at the National Park Service in Anchorage, Alaska, think
Bourgeon has come up with important new evidence. “I am convinced
those are human cut marks,” Buvit notes. And the study, he adds, lends
support to a relatively new scientific model, the Beringian standstill
hypothesis. Based initially on studies of DNA from modern indigenous
people, this hypothesis suggests that humans roamed Beringia for
thousands of years—even during the depths of the last ice age—before
their descendants ventured south to colonize the Americas. “I cautiously
accept [the new Bluefish Caves study] as the first evidence of humans in
eastern Beringia at the Last Glacial Maximum,” Buvit writes in an email.

Strong archaeological and genetic evidence shows that small groups of

hunters—maybe no more than 5,000 people in all—trekked across
Beringia from Asia to the Americas during the last ice age. The location of
ice sheets and glaciers over time suggests where they moved and when.
Before the opening of the coastal route some 16,000 years ago, the
migrants were likely trapped in Beringia. After that, humans could travel
along the de-glaciated west coast—likely in small boats. The inland
corridor did not open until around 13,000 to 12,600 years ago. (The
map’s light green areas indicate now-submerged land that was dry
during the last ice age due to changes in sea level.) Animation by Judy
Somers

Sitting back now, and reflecting on what happened to the original

research at Bluefish Caves, Cinq-Mars says the vitriolic debate at the
time hindered real progress on important questions related to the
peopling of the New World. For the French-Canadian researcher and
others, the deep suspicion and skepticism took a serious toll, consigning
their research to the dustbin for decades, without a fair hearing. In the
case of the original Bluefish Caves work, notes Mackie, “I only had a
fairly vague notion of what had actually been found—it was a classic
example of enough criticism lowered my motivation to even find out
more. I’m not proud of that.”

For Mackie and others, the protracted battle over the Clovis first model
now stands as a cautionary tale for archaeologists. Notes Mackie, “Clovis
first will, I believe, go down as a classic example of a paradigm shift, in
which the evidence for the collapse of an old model is present for many
years before it actually collapses, producing a sort of zombie model that
won’t die.”

Early Archaeological Sites South of the Ice

Sheets
Until just a few decades ago, most archaeologists believed that the oldest
sites in the Americas were Clovis sites that dated no older than 13,500
years ago. In recent years, however, a number of well documented and
well dated sites have been discovered that predate Clovis. Monte Verde,
Meadowcroft Rockshelter, Cactus Hill, Paisley Five Mile Point Caves,
Debra L. Friedkin, Page Ladson, and the Manis site all provide evidence
that people were present in the Americas before the appearance of
Clovis. There is convincing evidence that people were in regions south of
the ice sheets by 15,000 years ago.

Monte Verde, Chile

Monte Verde is a significant archaeological site in Chile, South America.

The site is widely recognized as providing definitive evidence of a human
occupation in the Americas before Clovis (Adovasio and Pedler 2016). The
location is significant. Close to the southern tip of South America, it is
about 16,000 kilometres south of the Beringian point of entry to the
Americas. The location suggests that people must have migrated along
the Pacific Coast in order to arrive in this region as early as they did. The
preservation of organic material at Monte Verde is exceptional. This was
an open-air settlement on the banks of a creek. A peat bog developed
forming an environment that lacked oxygen. These environmental
conditions preserved organic materials that would normally decompose.
Even animal tissue, identified as mastodon, was recovered from the site
(Dillehay 1989). Excavations, led by Tom Dillehay, began in 1977. He
identifies Monte Verde as a community of about 20-30 people that was
occupied almost 15,000 years ago (Dillehay 2000). Excavations
uncovered the remains of dwellings, communal hearths, wooden tools,
plant materials, and faunal remains. Mastodon, llama, freshwater
mollusks, and vegetable matter, including wild potatoes, demonstrate the
diversity of resources that were being utilized by this community.

Meadowcroft Rockshelter, Pennsylvania

Meadowcroft Rockshelter is a site in the eastern United States (see

Figure 8-8). Archaeological evidence indicates that Meadowcroft
Rockshelter was occupied about 2,000 years before Clovis points
appeared, and the site is identified as the longest continuous occupation
sequence in eastern North America (Adovasio and Pedler 2016). This site
has been the focus of archaeological investigations, led by James
Adovasio, since the 1970s. He suggests that at least 15,000 years of
human history are represented at the site including occupation levels
that predate Clovis.

Figure 8-8: Excavations at Meadowcroft Rockshelter.

Source Links to an external site.. Permission: This material has been
reproduced in accordance with the University of Saskatchewan
interpretation of Sec.30.04 of the Copyright Act.

Cactus Hill, Virginia

This site in southeastern Virginia is recognized as another legitimate pre-

Clovis site (Adovasio and Pedler 2016). A pre-Clovis level containing
stone blades was identified 7-20 cm below the Clovis levels. Analysis of
the stratigraphy of the site suggests that the blades are in an undisturbed
context and are older than the Clovis artifacts (Wagner and McAvoy
2004). Macphail and McAvoy (2008) further analyzed the stratigraphy of
the site and identified no signs of disturbance. The site is intact with
defined layers of undisturbed, sterile soil between the Clovis and pre-
Clovis levels attesting to that.

Paisley Five Mile Point Caves, Oregon

The remarkable discovery of ancient human coprolites (fossilized feces)

was made at Paisley Five Mile Point Caves, Oregon (Figure 8-9).
Scientists directly dated the coprolites using AMS dating and arrived at a
date of 14,270 to 14,000 years ago (Gilbert et al. 2008). The site
assemblage also included stone tools, wooden artifacts, textiles, and bone
tools. The dry cave environment was excellent for the preservation of
organic materials. This site provides evidence of a pre-Clovis occupation
in North America, and remarkably scientists were able to extract DNA
from the coprolites. This makes it the oldest DNA evidence of human
occupation in the Americas. Mitochondrial DNA analysis indicates that
the coprolites contained mtDNA haplogroup A which is also present in
modern Indigenous populations of the Americas (Jenkins et al. 2012).
Figure 8-9: Human coprolite from Paisley Five Mile Point Cave, Oregon
Source Links to an external site.. Permission: This material has been
reproduced in accordance with the
University of Saskatchewan interpretation of Sec.30.04 of the Copyright
Act.

Page-Ladson Site, Florida

The Page Ladson site is a unique archaeological site in Florida where

stone tools and butchered mastodon remains were recovered. This site is
significant because it is a well stratified site with numerous radiocarbon
dates indicating a human presence 14,550 years ago (Halligan et al.
2016). Located close to the Gulf Coast of Florida, it is the oldest site in
this southeast region of North America. This site is now submerged
beneath the Aucilla River. The discovery and excavation of this site
required underwater archeological investigations.

Debra L. Friedkin, Texas

The Debra L Friedkin site is located in central Texas along the Buttermilk
Creek. Artifacts dating between 13,200 and 15,500 years ago were
recovered from stratigraphic layers below Clovis levels. The pre-Clovis
tools recovered from the site (Figure 8-10) were assigned to the
Buttermilk Creek Complex and are identified as precursors to the Clovis
complex (Waters et al. 2011).

Manis Site, Washington

The Manis Site is a pre-Clovis site in Washington that dates to 13,800

years ago. This site demonstrates that people hunted megafauna. The tip
of a bone projectile point was embedded in the rib of a mastodon (Figure
8-11). Scientists extracted DNA from both the bone point and the rib to
confirm that both samples were mastodon (Waters et al. 2011).
Figure 8-11: Multiple views of mastodon rib with embedded bone
projectile point. Source: Waters, Michael R., Thomas W. Stafford Jr.,
Gregory H. McDonald, Carl Gustafson, Morten Rasmussen, Enrico
Cappellini, Eske Willerslev 2011 Pre-Clovis mastodon hunting
13,800 years ago at the Manis site, Washington. Science 334(6054), (p.
352). Permission: Access provided by University of Saskatchewan Library
license.

What DNA reveals about the

peopling of the Americas
In recent years, scientists have successfully extracted DNA from several ancient
skeletons from sites in east Asia and the Americas. These reconstructed genomes have
contributed to a better understanding of the peopling of the Americas. Studies that
investigate genetic diversity amongst living and ancient Indigenous people also support
the evidence that the initial occupation of the Americas predate the Clovis tradition
(Skoglund et al. 2015, Raghavan et al. 2015). Genetic evidence suggests that the
ancestors of contemporary Indigenous North and South Americans entered the Americas
in a single population wave from Siberia no earlier than 23,0000 years ago (Raghavan et
al. 2015).
Mal’ta, Siberia
In 2014, a group of scientists sequenced the genome of a young juvenile (MA-1) that
lived 24,000 years ago in southcentral Siberia near Lake Baikal (Raghavan 2014). The
genome was identified as “intermediate between modern western Eurasians and Native
Americans” (Raghavan 2014:88). MA-1 is genetically closest to Indigenous people living
in the Americas with 14% to 38% of their ancestry originating from the Mal’ta child’s
population (Raghavan 2014). This study provides evidence of gene flow from a
population of people of the Siberian Upper Paleolithic into the first people of the
Americas.
Hoyo Negro, Mexico
In 2007, a nearly complete skeleton was recovered from Hoyo Negro, a submerged cave
in Mexico’s eastern Yucatan Peninsula. This small statured female, often referred to as
Naia, was 15 or 16 years old when she died 12,000 to 13,000 years ago (Chatters et al.
2014). The site is located in a collapsed cave which is part of a submerged cave system.
The cave which became inundated when sea levels rose also contains the bones of many
extinct animals. Scientists were able to extract DNA from one of Naia’s molars. When
they reconstructed the genome, they identified Beringian derived mtDNA (Chatters et al.
2014). Her mtDNA lineage is one of the founding lineages in the Americas with a high
frequency in Argentina and Chile. This person, like other ancient skeletons dating to this
time period is morphologically distinct from modern Indigenous Americans, but DNA
analysis confirms a shared ancestry (Chatters et al. 2014). Chatters and colleagues
conclude that genetic evidence confirms that these earliest people and today’s
Indigenous Americans derive from a single population. The differences in the skulls are
explained as “evolutionary changes that postdate the divergence of Beringians from
Siberian ancestors”(Chatters et al. 2014:754).
Kennewick, Washington
The Kennewick Man was a 40-year-old man that lived about 9,000 years ago. His
skeletal remains were discovered in 1996 eroding from the banks of the Columbia River
in Washington State. Like many of the earliest skeletons in the Americas, the cranial
morphology of the Kennewick Man differs from modern Indigenous Americans. This led
to questions about his ancestral relationship to modern Indigenous people. Early
attempts to sequence his DNA were unsuccessful, but scientists have recently
reconstructed the genome of the Kennewick Man and determined that he is more
closely related to modern Indigenous Americans than any other populations (Rasmussen
et al. 2015).
Texas Malta Boy video
It tells us that these individuals that were living in Siberia, in Southern South Central
Siberia at 24,000 years ago. Their genes contributed to the first Americans' genes, at
least 14
to 48 percent of Native Americans that live in North and South America today, share
their
genetic makeup with the Mal'ta Boy. I think what it does is it helps clarify somethings
and the first is that the first Americans came from Siberia, it helps to clarify that
question. Some archeologists have suggested that first Americans could have came
from
Europe directly via transoceanic migration and I think that this does a fairly good job
clarify that it was via land migration or at least a coastal migration through Beringia.

Hoyo Negro, Mexico

In 2007, a nearly complete skeleton was recovered from Hoyo Negro, a submerged cave
in Mexico’s eastern Yucatan Peninsula. This small statured female, often referred to as
Naia, was 15 or 16 years old when she died 12,000 to 13,000 years ago (Chatters et al.
2014). The site is located in a collapsed cave which is part of a submerged cave system.
The cave which became inundated when sea levels rose also contains the bones of many
extinct animals. Scientists were able to extract DNA from one of Naia’s molars. When
they reconstructed the genome, they identified Beringian derived mtDNA (Chatters et al.
2014). Her mtDNA lineage is one of the founding lineages in the Americas with a high
frequency in Argentina and Chile. This person, like other ancient skeletons dating to this
time period is morphologically distinct from modern Indigenous Americans, but DNA
analysis confirms a shared ancestry (Chatters et al. 2014). Chatters and colleagues
conclude that genetic evidence confirms that these earliest people and today’s
Indigenous Americans derive from a single population. The differences in the skulls are
explained as “evolutionary changes that postdate the divergence of Beringians from
Siberian ancestors”(Chatters et al. 2014:754).

The Americas' Oldest Most Complete Human Skeleton

at the bottom of oon negro which is a
large collapse chamber inside an
underwater cave lie the bones of a girl
16-year-old girl and a
gath we have determined that that girl
is one of the earliest human skeletons
in the
Americas we've been able to determine
using radiocarbon dating of tooth
enamel and uh uranium thorium dating of
calcium carbonate crystals that formed
on the bone after the bone came to rest
on the bottom of the
cave uh that Nia died between 12,000 and
13,000 years ago oo negro is going to
tell us about the human life animal life
and plant life of Ice Age Central
America it's a time capsule that is
absolutely
unequaled as we were swimming around all
the soling we start finding bonds we go
a little bit up and we look and then
there's this human skull it's upside
down you know beautiful teeth kind of
pointing up and then then you have the
ice socket I mean this is where all is
like okay this is the discovery of of
our lifetime it's not going to get
inated than than
this oo negro at its bottom is over 60 m
in diameter it's the size of an American
football
field along with the girl in the gath
the in the bottom of way o negro are uh
bones of nine other species of animals
large animals and included are
saber-tooth cats giant ground ground
sloths two species including one that's
new to science um there are cougars Cave
Bears uh coyotes Bobcats and other small
animals this is a unique opportunity for
Mexico with the experts and the group
and the team that is working together to
get this knowledge and to set the
standards of what you can do with the
right people with the right tools with
the right authorities of the
country we now have Nia's skull and Nia
has a complete skull and from that
complete skull we are going to
reconstruct her
face and so we're going to be looking on
the face of the earliest American that
we know of and part of what's surprising
is our earliest American is a teenage
girl

Kennewick, Washington
The Kennewick Man was a 40-year-old man that lived about 9,000 years ago. His
skeletal remains were discovered in 1996 eroding from the banks of the Columbia River
in Washington State. Like many of the earliest skeletons in the Americas, the cranial
morphology of the Kennewick Man differs from modern Indigenous Americans. This led
to questions about his ancestral relationship to modern Indigenous people. Early
attempts to sequence his DNA were unsuccessful, but scientists have recently
reconstructed the genome of the Kennewick Man and determined that he is more
closely related to modern Indigenous Americans than any other populations (Rasmussen
et al. 2015).

The peopling of the Americas

The oldest most widely accepted evidence of humans in the Americas dates to about
15–14 kyr ago85, and widespread settlement of the Americas appeared with the
emergence of the Clovis complex (around 12.6–13 kyr ago), which is the earliest
well-characterized archaeological assemblage in the Americas. However, until around
13 kyr ago, much of North America was covered by a large ice sheet, which would
have made it difficult for people to move from Beringia (now northeastern Siberia and
northwestern North America) to the southern parts of the Americas. After the ice
melted, a roughly 1,500 km interior ice-free corridor formed3. Metagenomic analyses
of lake cores from Canada86 have estimated that this corridor first became biologically
viable around 12.6 kyr ago, which makes it an unlikely early route for the southward
migration of pre-Clovis and Clovis groups of people, although a study of bison is in
disagreement87. How and when the earliest ancestors of Americans crossed the
Pleistocene ice sheets into southern North America is unknown, as is whether
movement of the pre-Clovis and Clovis groups represents the same migration.
However, a movement towards the south along the west coast of North America that
occurred more than 14 kyr ago, and that was possibly followed by southerly or
northerly back-migrations through the interior, seems to be the most plausible
scenario (Fig. 3).

On the basis of cranial morphology and lithic analysis, it has been proposed that early
Americans were not direct ancestors of contemporary Native Americans, but instead
were related to Australo-Melanesians, Polynesians, the Ainu people of Japan or
Europeans who were later replaced or assimilated by ancestors of Native Americans
from Siberia88,89,90. However, several genomic studies have largely rejected these
models. In 2014, the oldest and the only Clovis-associated human genome from the
Americas (found in Montana, United States), which belonged to an individual who
lived about 12.6 kyr ago, was published91. Analyses suggested that the Clovis
population from which the genome came was directly ancestral to many contemporary
Native Americans. Similarly, analysis of the genome sequence of the roughly 9.5-kyr-
old Kennewick Man skeleton found in the state of Washington in the United States92,
which was thought to be closely related to the Ainu and Polynesians on the basis of
cranial morphology, determined that he was most closely related to contemporary
Native Americans. Moreover, populations that were considered to be relicts of an
early migration into the Americas and closely related to Australo-Melanesians have
been shown to be genetically related to contemporary Native Americans93,94.

Estimates of the time of divergence between Siberians and Native Americans, based
on whole-genome sequences, point to the formation of the Native American gene pool
as early as around 23 kyr ago93, which lends further support to the early entrance of
ancestors of Native Americans into the Americas. When the accepted dates for the
earliest archaeological sites in the Americas are taken into consideration, ancestors of
Native Americans could have remained in isolation until around 8 kyr ago in Siberia
or Beringia, following the split from their Siberian ancestors, before moving
eastwards into the Americas. Although modern Siberians are the closest relatives of
Native Americans outside of the Americas, genome sequencing of a 24-kyr-old Mal'ta
skeleton73 suggests that Native Americans are derived from a mixture of populations
that are related to the Mal'ta lineage as well as one or more unknown East-Asian
lineages. Because the Clovis-associated genome and contemporary Native Americans
contain similar amounts of the Mal'ta genetic signature (14–38%), the admixture
event happened more than 12.6 kyr ago. However, whether it took place inside or
outside the Americas remains unclear.

In Native Americans, genomic data have been used to locate a basal division that can
be dated to about 14–13 kyr ago73,91. The southern branch includes groups of
Amerindian-language-speaking people and the northern branch includes groups of
Athabascan-language-speaking people as well as other groups that speak languages
such as Cree or Algonquin. Divergence estimates based on analyses of whole-genome
sequencing data suggest that both groups diversified from Siberians concurrently,
implying that there was only one founding event for both Amerindian and Athabascan
populations that was followed by subsequent gene flow from Asia93. Whether the
divergence between the two Native American branches took place in Siberia or the
north or south of the American ice sheets is still under debate, and the analysis of
further ancient genomes will be needed to resolve this. Similarly, it remains
undetermined whether the discovery of the Australo-Melanesian signature in some
contemporary Brazilian Native Americans (Fig. 3) can be attributed to gene flow at a
later time93 or an unknown early founding population94. So far, no studies of the
genomes of ancient humans from the Americas have shown this genetic signature.

The Inuit of the American Arctic have been shown to originate from a migration
separate to that of other Native Americans95,96. However, it has long been discussed
whether the first people to inhabit the Arctic, the now extinct Paleo-Eskimo culture,
which appeared about 5 kyr ago in the Americas, represent the ancestors of the
present-day Inuit or an independent founder population from Siberia96 (Fig. 3).
Sequencing of DNA from a 4-kyr-old tuft of hair from Greenland5 showed that the
population the individual belonged to had migrated from Siberia to the North
American Arctic independently of the Native American and Inuit migrations 97. The
group then survived in the Arctic for about 4 kyr by reinventing their subsistence
strategies and technology but were eventually replaced by the Inuit around 700 yr ago.

Early Archaeological Sites in Western Canada

During the Last Glacial Maximum, most of Canada was covered by ice sheets, and areas
immediately south of Beringia were not available for human habitation until the ice
sheets began to melt. Wally’s Beach and Tse’K’Wa (Charlie Lake Cave) are two early
western Canadian sites that show evidence of human occupation soon after the ice
sheets began their retreat.
Tse’K’Wa (Charlie Lake Cave) Site, British Columbia
Tse’K’Wa (formerly called the Charlie Lake Cave) site is a deeply stratified (see Figure 8-
13) Paleoindian site in the Peace River district of northeastern British Columbia. A
significant discovery at this site is a Paleoindian fluted point which is one of the only
Paleoindian fluted points discovered in Canada from an undisturbed context (Fladmark
et al. 1988). This site is in the region of the ice-free corridor. The oldest components at
the site, including the fluted point, date to about 12,500 years ago (see Figure 8-12). The
fluted point is similar to points from Alberta and Montana which suggests a northward
expansion of populations into the Peace River Region (Driver and Guerrero 2015:153).
Wally’s Beach Site, Alberta
The Wally’s Beach site is a significant Paleoindian site in southwestern Alberta. At
Wally‘s Beach, archaeologists have discovered the only confirmed evidence of horse and
camel hunting in North America (Waters et al. 2015). Butchered animals and associated
stone tools that date to 13,300 years ago demonstrate that humans hunted these now
extinct species. The stone tools which are 300 years older than the oldest firm date for
Clovis in the Americas, suggest that Wally’s Beach is a pre-Clovis site on the southern
margin of the ice-free corridor (Waters et al. 2015).

Pleistocene Megafauna
Large mammals that lived during the Pleistocene epoch are called megafauna. Many of
these megafauna went extinct in both Australia and the Americas. Scientists debate the
cause of the Pleistocene megafauna extinctions with explanations focusing on factors
such as climate change, the impact of hunting, and human alteration of habitat. Many
Pleistocene mammals were huge compared to modern species. In Australia, most of the
large animals, including giant kangaroos and rhinoceros-sized wombats went extinct
about 45,000 years ago. In North America most megafauna went extinct by 11,000
years ago. In North America, this is a period of significant climate change and also
corresponds to the widespread dispersal of modern humans. The extinction of Australian
megafauna does not appear to correspond to a period of significant climate change, but
it does correspond to the timing of the dispersal of modern humans throughout the
continent. Recent studies of the distribution of the fungus Sporomiella, associated with
herbivore dung, shows a significant decline, indicating Australian megafaunal population
decrease, from 45,000 to 43,100 years ago, placing the extinctions within 4,000 years of
human dispersal across Australia. These findings rule out climate change, and implicate
humans, as the primary extinction cause (van der Kaars et al. 2017).
Examples of North American Pleistocene megafauna include mammoths, mastodon,
giant ground sloths, and now extinct forms of bison called Bison antiquus (see Figures 8-
14 to 8-16). There are numerous examples of archaeological sites with evidence that
humans utilized these large animals. Scientists continue to debate the degree to which
humans were responsible for the extinction of North American megafauna. The
extinction of the North American megafuana corresponds to a period of significant
climate change and is also a time when people were becoming widely dispersed across
the continent.

Summary - Module 8
Near the end of the Pleistocene, humans continued to expand their geographic range
making their way to Australia and the Americas. Recent archaeological excavations
suggest that the initial occupation of Australia dates as long as 65,000 years ago. In
order to migrate to Australia, people would have required boats to travel through the
open waters of Wallacea. Humans became widespread in Australia by about 45,000
years ago which is the same time that most of the Australian megafauna became extinct.
Archaeologists suggest that human expansion into Sahul was the main contributor to the
extinction of Australian megafauna. Pleistocene megafauna also went extinct in the
Americas. Archaeologists continue to debate the degree that human activity and climate
change contributed to the extinction of animals such as mammoth, mastodon and giant
ground sloths.
North and South America were the last continents to be colonized by humans.
Populations from northeast Asia expanded their geographic range and migrated from the
area of Beringia into the Americas. Sea levels were much lower during the Pleistocene.
This exposed the sea floor in the Bering Strait connecting Asia and North America, so
that humans could walk across a vast land bridge. When people first crossed the land
bridge, large ice sheets would have barred access to much of North America. Early
archaeological sites south of the ice sheets suggest that the initial movement into the
Americas involved some travel along the Pacific Coast. Sites like Monte Verde that
predate the opening of the ice-free corridor suggest a coastal migration route was used
by the earliest inhabitants of occupation sites south of the ice sheets. Clovis technology
was once identified as the first to arrive in the Americas. In recent decades, several well
dated pre-Clovis sites demonstrate that Clovis technology does not represent the
earliest occupation of the Americas, but it is the first widely dispersed technology across
North America.

Learning Activity 8-8

Add to the summary table of key archaeological sites that you worked on in previous
modules by adding more information about the following sites:

▪ Madjedbebe Rockshelter, Australia

▪ Devil’s Lair, Australia
▪ Willandra Lakes/Lake Mungo, Australia
▪ Blackwater Draw, New Mexico
 ▪ Anzick Site, Montana
▪ SK Mammoth Site, Russia
▪ Mamontovaya Kurya, Russia
▪ Yana RHS, eastern Siberia
▪ Swan Point, Alaska
▪ Bluefish Caves, Yukon Territory
▪ Monte Verde, Chile
▪ Meadowcroft Rockshelter, Pennsylvania
▪ Cactus Hill, Virginia
▪ Paisley 5 Mile Point Caves, Oregon
▪ Page Ladson, Florida
▪ Debra L. Friedkin, Texas
▪ Manis Site, Washington
▪ Mal’ta, Siberia
▪ Hoyo Negro, Mexico
▪ Kennewick, Washington
▪ Tse’K’Wa (Charlie Lake Cave), British Columbia
▪ Wally’s Beach, Alberta

Bering Land Bridge Hypothesis: a hypothesis that suggests that the first people who
migrated to the Americas travelled by walking across the Bering Land Bridge (Beringia)
which was exposed during periods of maximum glaciation when lower sea levels
exposed the floor of the Bering Strait.
Beringia: a land bridge that connected northeast Asia (Siberia) to northwest North
America (Alaska). This land bridge was exposed during the Pleistocene but was later
submerged when melting glaciers caused sea levels to rise at the end of the Pleistocene.
Bifacial: refers to an artifact that is worked on both faces
Clovis tradition: a widespread Paleoindian tool tradition that appeared in the Americas
about 13,000 years ago. It is characterized by finely made, fluted spear points called
Clovis points. These points have been found in association with mammoth, mastodon,
and other extinct mammals.
Clovis First Model: a hypothesis which suggested that the Clovis tradition represented
the first human occupation of the Americas.
Cordilleran ice sheet: an ice sheet that covered much of northwestern North America
during the Pleistocene
Cremation: disposal of a body by burning.
Dyuktai Culture: a culture characterized by blade and core technology that is found at
sites in northeast Asia.
Flute: a vertical groove extending from the base of a spear point.
Foreshafts: tools that are used to attach a spear point to the shaft of a spear and allow a
spear to be rapidly reloaded.
Gomphothere: an extinct proboscidean mammal that lived in the Americas during the
Pleistocene. The order Proboscidea includes elephants and extinct related forms.
Ice-free corridor: an ice-free area between the Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets.
This corridor was exposed as the ice sheets began to retreat.
Last Glacial Maximum: a period when the earth’s glaciers were at their greatest extent.
This period 18,000 to 24,000 years ago reduced sea levels worldwide.
Laurentide ice sheet: the large ice sheet that covered much of northern North America
during the Pleistocene. This ice sheet covered most of Canada east of the Rocky
Mountains.
Megafauna: a term applied to the large, now extinct mammals of the Pleistocene.
Microblade: very small stone blades which would be inserted into slotted handles.
Midden: an accumulation of domestic waste (garbage).
Optically stimulated luminescence: a dating method used to obtain the burial age of
sediments. Useful for quartz sediments, it can measure the amount of time that has
passed since sediments were exposed to sunlight.
Pacific Coastal Route Hypothesis: suggests that the people who migrated to the
Americas used watercraft to travel from Northeast Asia along the Pacific coast of
Beringia and the Americas.
Pre-Clovis Model: a model for the peopling of the Americas which suggests that the
human occupation of the Americas predates the Clovis tradition.
Sahul: the combined land mass of Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania. These land
masses were connected when sea levels were lower during the Pleistocene.
Solutrean Hypothesis: (also called the North Atlantic Ice Edge Hypothesis) suggests that
Solutrean people used watercraft to travel from Europe across the North Atlantic Ocean
to Eastern North America. This is not a mainstream hypothesis. Archaeological and
genetic evidence do not support this theory.
Solutrean: a European, Upper Paleolithic tool tradition present in France and Spain about
20,000 years ago. It is characterized by finely made, leaf-shaped spear points.
Sporomiella: a type of fungus present in the dung of herbivores.
Sunda: the combined landmass of the islands of Java, Sumatra, Borneo, and Bali that
were connected to the Malay Peninsula of southeast Asia during periods of the
Pleistocene when sea levels were lower.
Wallacea: the geographic region, comprised of many of the Indonesian islands, that
separates southeast Asia and Australia.
Wedge shaped core: stone cores that are shaped like wedges from which blades were
removed. Wedge shaped cores are found at archaeological sites in the Siberian and
northwest North American Arctic.