Avi Blizovsky
Findings from the Yana River - Siberia
People who may have been the ancestors of the first Americans lived in Arctic Siberia, one of the most unforgiving environments on Earth at the height of the Ice Age. So say researchers who discovered the oldest evidence so far of human habitation near the fragile gateway to the New World.
Russian scientists discovered a 30-year-old site of hunters' dwellings near the Yana River in Siberia, about 400 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle and not far from the Bering Strait - which was then a land passage connecting Asia and North America.
Although the direct connection remains loose, the Yana site indicates that humanity spread deep into the Arctic region during colder periods," wrote the authors of an article that appeared in the journal Science.
The researchers found stone tools, ivory weapons and stones used by butchers who worked with mammoths, bison, bears, lions and rabbits, all the animals you would expect to find available to hunters during the Ice Age.
The scientists used copying techniques in which the carbon concentrations are measured, and they estimated the age of the objects at the site to be about 30 thousand years before the present. This means it is twice as old as Monte Verde in Chile, the oldest site depicting human life discovered in the Americas.
Donald Grayson, a paleontologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, said the discovery is significant because it far predates any previous evidence of people living in the fragile regions of Siberia and creating the gateway to the Americas.
Until the gate report, the earliest site in the Bering Gate area was dated at 11 years old," Grayson said. "All the other sites where we initially thought there were older evidences turned out to be false alarms."
At the time when Jena was settled, most of the high levels of the earth were under a thick ice layer that formed glaciers over most of the areas that are today Europe, Canada and the northern USA.
However, the Haine River area was free of ice, a dry floodplain without glaciers. It was home to mammoths, horses, musk deer and other animals that provided food for the human hunters who were brave enough to choose the Arctic region as a place to live. "A bountiful hunting ground means a lot of food," Dolly Brigham-Greta of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst told the journal Science. "It was not a desolate prairie as one could imagine."
Among the objects found at the Jena site were weapons reminiscent of finds from Clovis, New Mexico, a site dating back 11 years. However, Grayson and others say that the evidence is very weakly linked to the weapons and tools used by the Clovis people. Such objects have also been found in Europe and Western Asia," Grayson said.
The similarity (in the tools and weapons) is not enough to prove that they were the ancestors of the Clovis people in the New World," Grayson said.
However, some experts still hold out hope that the new findings provide important evidence about an ancient migration from Asia to America. "The evidence of an ancient settlement at the Jena site makes it a suitable place to contain the first people who moved to the Americas before the peak of the glaciation," said Daniel Mann of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. The last glacial peak was 20-25 thousand years ago.
Grayson and others, however, say that more evidence is needed before reaching an overall conclusion that the people from the Jena site are the ones who migrated to the New World.
The main problem, Grayson says, is that the archaeological evidence for a hunter-gatherer culture in Siberia is still sparse. Although there is a difference between the 30 thousand year old site in Vienna and other sites in Asia and the Americas, there was no physical obstacle to go from Asia to America during the period. The bridge between the continents existed until 11 years ago until the rise in sea level flooded the connection and created what is today called the Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska.
"Getting people across to the New World was not a problem," Grayson said. "The problem was getting them to that part of the world from which they could cross." And the evidence that this indeed happened in Beita, they are still not convincing."
Archeology
to Siberia, 30,000 years ago
Flint tools and spear blades made from mammoth tusks and rhinoceros horns, found near the Yana River in northern Siberia, indicate that humans inhabited the Arctic Circle more than 30 years ago. This dating is 16 thousand years ahead of the prevailing estimates of the beginning of human settlement in the polar regions.
The new findings may shed light on the first settlement of humans in the Americas. Some of the objects discovered are similar in design to objects from a later period of about 16,000 years, which were discovered in North America, a distance of 3,000 km. The earliest evidence of human settlement in America is from 14,000 years ago.
Humans began making figurines and drawing figures in caves in France and Germany just over 30,000 years ago, at a time when the weather was relatively mild. Since human populations were small at the time, there was no reason to assume that settlers had reached the arctic tundra then.
However, Vladimir Pitolko, from the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, reported this week in the journal "Science" that in the excavations he conducted with his colleagues along the Yana River, axes, tools for cutting stone, processed quartz crystals, tools made from wolf bones and spear points made from mammoth tusks and rhino horns were discovered.
The researchers found broken, cut and burned bones of many animals: mammoth, musk ox, brown bear, grizzly, bison, horse and cave lion. "The abundance of animals indicates that this was not an empty tundra as is commonly thought," Julie Brigham-Garrett of the University of Massachusetts told Science.
The site where the artifacts were found first received research attention in 1993, when a Russian geologist found a spearhead made of rhinoceros horn. In the summers of 2001 and 2002, Dr. Pitolko and his team began to excavate along the terraces created by the tides of the Yana River during the ice ages. They discovered additional spearheads, similar to ivory spearheads used in the Americas 13,600 years ago.
Daniel Mann from the University of Alaska told "Science" that the findings may confirm the theory that the first humans arrived in America long ago 14,000 years ago. According to him, "there were no environmental barriers that prevented them from migrating east."
