Human Adaptation at the Pleistocene—Holocene Boundary (circa 13,000 to 8,000 bp) in Eastern Beringia

Abstract

During the past two decades, there has been a substantial evolution in thinking about the earliest human populations in Alaska. The advent of accelerator mass spectrometry CAMS) dating, enabling the dating of small amounts of remnant collagen in ancient bones, allowed the redating of the most diagnostic human implement from the Old Crow basin in the northern Yukon Territory—the famous caribou tibia flesher—from circa 28,000 bp to circa 1,800 bp. Coupled with demonstrations that other taphonomic agents—ranging from carnivores to ice push—could have been responsible for spiral fractures and polish found on the redeposited bones of the Old Crow River gravels, this redating took away the confidence of most Arctic archaeologists that such “preprojectile point” sites did in fact represent an earlier stage in the peopling of northern North America. Thus, Old Crow joined earlier constructions such as Sedna Creek, Engigstciak, and the British Mountain Complex of the North Slope of Alaska and the adjacent Mackenzie River drainage as representative elements of a hypothetical but unproven stage of occupation of northwest North America predating circa 13,000 bp.KeywordsLate PleistoceneLast Glacial MaximumGround SquirrelFaunal AssemblageAccelerator Mass SpectrometryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.