A quiet stretch of Alaska's interior may hold new clues to how people pushed into the Americas roughly 14,000 years ago. In a study in Quaternary International, researchers say stone and ivory tools uncovered at the Holzman archaeological site in the Tanana Valley appear to bridge an important gap between early Siberian migrants and the later Clovis culture long linked to the first Americans, per Phys.org. For decades, the prevailing view held that the so-called Clovis people—known for their distinctive fluted spear points dating to around 13,000 years ago—were the continent's earliest inhabitants, a claim increasingly challenged by older sites.
The authors of this study appear skeptical of evidence of humans in North America up to 30,000 years ago, per IFL Science, instead suggesting these Ice Age Alaskans may have been the first inhabitants of the continent—descendants from Siberian hunters who first ventured across Beringia, the now-submerged land bridge that once connected Siberia and Alaska. Excavations by teams from Adelphi University and the University of Alaska Fairbanks revealed stacked layers of activity at Holzman. In the oldest layer, dated to about 14,000 years ago, they found stone flakes, remnants of campfires, and a nearly intact mammoth tusk.
Just above that, in a 13,700-year-old layer, they identified what appears to be an ivory-working station where quartz tools were used to carve mammoth ivory rods—the earliest such ivory implements known in the Americas. Those rods were made using the same shaping and carving methods seen later in Clovis artifacts, the researchers report, suggesting that the people at Holzman carried these techniques as they moved south into the Rocky Mountains and Northern Plains. "It seems reasonable to conclude that the early sites in the Tanana Valley are ancestral to the Clovis tradition and their Native American descendants," they conclude.
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