“Of course, small, highly mobile groups of hunters wouldn’t have left much evidence behind and part of Beringia is now underwater.” “Finding no cultural material doesn’t mean that people weren’t there,” Bourgeon says. Archaeological evidence of their presence has been elusive, but the butchered bones of the Bluefish Caves might provide that missing link. But recent genetic studies suggest that some ancient people rode out the hostile conditions of the Last Glacial Maximum in isolation in the relatively hospitable Beringia- a continent, now mostly underwater, that once spanned from Siberia to Canada’s Mackenzie River-before moving deeper into North America when conditions improved. It was once assumed that the people of Siberia fled south when the glaciers advanced and returned to cross into North America as the ice retreated. “So when Tom Higham from the Oxford radiocarbon laboratory sent us the results … we were all very excited!”īourgeon says her results add weight to another controversial idea: the Beringian standstill hypothesis. Horses are thought to have disappeared from the region about 14,000 years ago. “We had suspicions that the human presence might be old when we found cut marks on horse bones,” Bourgeon says. Radiocarbon dating puts the bone at 24,033 to 23,314 years before present. Previously, the oldest accepted human occupations were at three sites in Alaska and one just over the border in Yukon, all dating to about 14,000 years ago.Ī figure from the researchers’ paper shows where the marked bone would have been in the horse’s jaw. The finding-published in the journal PLOS One-makes the Bluefish Caves the oldest known archaeological site in North America by a margin of almost 10,000 years-and confirms much of Cinq-Mars’s work. The most ancient: the 24,000-year-old horse jaw bone. The youngest, it turned out, was a 12,000-year-old caribou bone. That was the Spell of the Yukon!” she said by email.īourgeon sent six pieces of bone that showed evidence of stone-tool cuts to a lab in Oxford, England, for radiocarbon dating. The idea of researching such a controversial site appealed to Bourgeon: “Alaska, Yukon, bone accumulations, caves, the first peopling. That is so much older than anything else found in the Americas that Cinq-Mars’s conclusions were widely disputed, and the three small caves were largely left out of discussions about the peopling of the Americas. ![]() At the time, Cinq-Mars and his team concluded that the Bluefish Caves showed evidence of occasional human use as much as 30,000 years ago. The bones came from excavations led by archaeologist Jacques Cinq-Mars between 19 and have been in storage at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec. ![]() Millennia later, archaeologist and doctoral candidate Lauriane Bourgeon spotted those marks through her microscope at the University of Montreal and added the fragment of ancient jaw bone to her small selection of samples for radiocarbon dating. As they sliced out the horse’s meaty tongue, the microblades left distinctive cuts in its jaw bone. The hunters had killed a Yukon horse and were butchering it using super-sharp stone shards called microblades. Share this articleĪbout 24,000 years ago, when much of North America was buried under the ice of the Last Glacial Maximum, a few hunters took shelter in a small cave above the Bluefish River in what is now northwestern Yukon.
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