A New View of Paleo-Indian Migration
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Archaeologists have assumed early Americans migrated south from Beringia. New evidence from northwest Alaska suggests they could have also migrated south to north.
Ted Goeble
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team of researchers has recently discovered the first fluted projectile points in a datable context on the Seward Peninsula of northwest Alaska. Led by Ted Goebel of Texas A&M, the group discovered the points near Serpentine Hot Springs, now part of the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve. The find suggests that American fluting technology made its way north, and that early migration patterns may be more complex than previously believed. In their paper published in the online version of the Journal of Archaeological Science, the researchers note that fluted points have been found in Alaska, but not in a datable context.The points discovered at Serpentine Hot Springs, however, were in a geologic deposit that was dated to approximately 12,000 years ago. Until now, the general consensus among scholars was that fluted point makers in Alaska represented either a pre-Clovis population that carried the technology southward into the Americas from Alaska or a post-Clovis population that brought the technology with them from temperate North America as they travelled to Alaska at the end of the Ice Age. The team’s recent work supports the latter theory. Because the Clovis culture dates to some 13,000 years ago, the Serpentine points are too young to have been left by pre-Clovis humans coming to the Americas from Asia. This new information suggests a different view of the peopling of
american archaeology
An archaeologist excavates a test pit at the site.
Beringia as well as how technology was transmitted during the late Pleistocene period. “The traditional theory of people simply crossing the land bridge, entering the America, moving south, and becoming Clovis have changed,” says Smith. While researchers are still unsure of how this unique American technology reached Beringia, they speculate that it may have occurred through trade or migration. “Plains bison are known genetically to have dispersed northward from western Canada at about this time—perhaps human hunters did, too.” “For decades, hypotheses regarding the peopling of the Americas have considered the Bering Land Bridge to be the route late Pleistocene peoples
traversed when moving from Northeast Asia to Alaska; however, only recently have archaeological sites been found that actually confirm human presence on the land bridge during that time, and Serpentine is among the oldest and westernmost of these,” says Smith. So far, no evidence of the fluted point technology has surfaced in Asia. Goebel and his team suggest that by this time, the Bering Land Bridge was flooding and becoming the Bering Strait. “Fluting technology simply arrived too late in eastern Beringia to be transmitted terrestrially into western Beringia,” they write. “Serpentine may represent the northwestern-most outpost of late Paleo-Indian in the Americas.” —Melissa Montoya
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