Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 25, 1993 TAG: 9303250195
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
FINDINGS CHALLENGE TIME OF LAND-BRIDGE CROSSING
The often-challenged theory that humans first entered the New World around 12,000 years ago in a single migration from Asia into Alaska took another blow Wednesday. Two archaeologists announced at a news conference that they have found evidence of two different cultures coexisting in Alaska between 11,000 and 12,000 years ago.They said the evidence suggests that there were several waves of migration, some possibly long before the traditional date. The new discovery fits well with a growing body of evidence that prehistoric people had already reached various parts of North and South America long before the traditional 12,000-year date.
The new finds consist of several flint spear points and other stone tools found atop a small mesa that looks out over a vast plain where bison and mammoths would have roamed.
"It was a hunting lookout," said Michael Kunz, an archaeologist with the Bureau of Land Management, who discovered the site in 1978 when surveying Alaska's North Slope before opening it to oil drillers. The age of the stone weapons has only just been established by radiocarbon dating of charcoal found with them.
What makes the spear points remarkable is that they resemble "Paleoindian" weapons common in the "Lower 48" states - including the famous "Clovis points" first found in Clovis, New Mexico. Because these have long been the oldest stone tools that can be unequivocally dated and because they appear at about the same time - between 10,000 and 12,000 years before the present - they have long been regarded as the work of the founding population of big game hunters who crossed into Alaska. This is also the time when the last ice age had locked up so much water on land that sea levels dropped hundreds of feet, exposing a land bridge hundreds of miles wide between Siberia and Alaska.
Yet, nothing like a Paleoindian weapon had been found in Alaska in a context that could be reliably dated. Instead, the state's only other culture of comparable antiquity, called the Nenana complex, made use of very different forms of stone tools. When the various tool types made by cultures differ significantly, archaeologists tend to think the peoples who made them belonged to different cultures - perhaps so different that they spoke separate languages.
The "Mesa site" is about 350 miles northwest of Fairbanks and lies just north of the Brooks Range. The contemporaneous Nenana culture is known primarily from a region south of Fairbanks.