This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: The area of water between Russia and North America and the Pacific and Arctic oceans is now known as the Bering Strait. Yet it was once what we call the Bering Land Bridge, an exposed land and maritime region that connected Asia to North America.
The Bering Land Bridge formed 35,000 years ago, eventually disappearing under rising sea levels around 12,000 years ago. But the humans and creatures who inhabited the territory have left behind plenty of archaeological evidence of their presence. "It's fascinating to me how people have evolved and how our meager beginnings as hunter-gatherers have led to where we are now," said Kelly Graf, professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas.
Graf is part of a team of researchers who have spent years studying this region, leading to a new article titled "Highlights from an early base camp in Beringia 13,800 years ago: Shég' Xdaltth'i' and the Late Pleistocene Peopling of Alaska." This site in Alaska contains three early archaeological components dating to 13,800, 13,000 and 12,700 years ago, revealing important information about late-glacial peopling and settling-in behavior in this far northern setting. The article appears in Science Advances. The name Shég' Xdaltth'i' (pronounced shehg xuh-tuhl-th'ee) means "they were there" in Alaska Native Athabascan.
"The site is on a small ridge that overlooks the Tanana River, which is a major river system of the region. Today there are spruce trees all around. During the last part of the Pleistocene—the Ice Age—it was covered by shrub-tundra vegetation," said Graf, who co-wrote the paper with Ted Goebel, KU professor of anthropology and department chair; KU doctoral student Mia Harbort; and KU undergraduate Mason Sewing, along with other academics from the U.S. and Europe.
Graf said Beringia is full of evidence showcasing the hunting of megafauna. "Like at Shég' Xdaltth'i', they hunted mammoth, bison and horse. Those three particular sorts of animals are extinct now.
But then they also hunted caribou, which is extant today. Indigenous people in Alaska today hunt caribou. It's a really important resource for them, and it always has been," she said.
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