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Archaeologists have uncovered an 11 700-year-old hunting camp in Alaska.
The tools scattered around the site are different from any others in Alaska
from that time, and are forcing them to rethink American prehistory.

Michael Kunz, an archaeologist with the US Bureau of Land Management,
stumbled across the camp during a routine survey to assess the possible
environmental impact of oil exploration in the area. Radiocarbon dating
showed that the camp was occupied between 11 700 and 9700 years ago. This
makes it one of the earliest sites in North America.

All the artefacts at the site are associated with hunting, says Kunz.
The camp, high on a plateau, was an ideal lookout post: hunters could spot
mammoth and bison for 80 kilometres across the tundra in any direction.
As they sat, they may have crafted flint spear points and tossed the broken
ones into the fire, leaving behind telltale heat fractures on the stone.

The spear heads are unusual because none of this type has been found
at other Alaskan sites of this period. Instead, they are similar to those
found at later sites on the Great Plains. This suggests that the first wave
of immigrants to Alaska was not a homogeneous group. ‘This is going to cause
archaeologists to seriously rethink aspects of peopling the New World,’
says Kunz.

Although the date when people first entered America is hotly debated,
archaeologists agree that the first immigrants came from Asia across the
Bering land bridge. From Alaska, they moved south and eventually, the theory
goes, became the Paleoindians, ancestors of most American Indian peoples.
Only after leaving Alaska did they develop the distinctive, Paleoindian-style
of making tools. But the camp with its Paleoindian-style tools suggests
otherwise. ‘It demonstrates that the same group of people had a northern
branch,’ says Kunz, and that these people – and not other early Alaskans
whose tools resembled those from Siberia – may have given rise to Paleoindian
culture.

‘The cultural heterogeneity in Alaska shouldn’t be too surprising,’
says Robert Humphrey, an archaeologist at George Washington University in
Washington DC. ‘The land bridge was there for thousands of years,’ he says.
‘I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t have hundreds of small groups of
hunter-gatherers wandering across into North America.’

Interestingly, no spear heads like those found on the plateau have yet
been unearthed in Siberia. ‘I think that’s a sampling problem,’ says Dennis
Stanford, an archaeologist at the Smithsonian Institution. ‘Siberia is a
damn big place and there are very few archaeologists working there.’