Fluted projectile points have long been recognized as the archaeological signature of early humans dispersing throughout the Western Hemisphere; however, we still lack a clear understanding of their ...appearance in the interior “Ice-Free Corridor” of western Canada and eastern Beringia. To solve this problem, we conducted a geometric morphometric shape analysis and a phylogenetic analysis of technological traits on fluted points from the archaeological records of northern Alaska and Yukon, in combination with artifacts from further south in Canada, the Great Plains, and eastern United States to investigate the plausibility of historical relatedness and evolutionary patterns in the spread of fluted-point technology in the latest Pleistocene and earliest Holocene. Results link morphologies and technologies of Clovis, certain western Canadian, and northern fluted points, suggesting that fluting technology arrived in the Arctic from a proximate source in the interior Ice-Free Corridor and ultimately from the earliest populations in temperate North America, complementing new genomic models explaining the peopling of the Americas.
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When did humans colonize the Americas? From where did they come and what routes did they take? These questions have gripped scientists for decades, but until recently answers have proven difficult to ...find. Current genetic evidence implies dispersal from a single Siberian population toward the Bering Land Bridge no earlier than about 30,000 years ago (and possibly after 22,000 years ago), then migration from Beringia to the Americas sometime after 16,500 years ago. The archaeological records of Siberia and Beringia generally support these findings, as do archaeological sites in North and South America dating to as early as 15,000 years ago. If this is the time of colonization, geological data from western Canada suggest that humans dispersed along the recently deglaciated Pacific coastline.
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The origin of contemporary Europeans remains contentious. We obtained a genome sequence from Kostenki 14 in European Russia dating from 38,700 to 36,200 years ago, one of the oldest fossils of ...anatomically modern humans from Europe. We find that Kostenki 14 shares a close ancestry with the 24,000-year-old Mal'ta boy from central Siberia, European Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, some contemporary western Siberians, and many Europeans, but not eastern Asians. Additionally, the Kostenki 14 genome shows evidence of shared ancestry with a population basal to all Eurasians that also relates to later European Neolithic farmers. We find that Kostenki 14 contains more Neandertal DNA that is contained in longer tracts than present Europeans. Our findings reveal the timing of divergence of western Eurasians and East Asians to be more than 36,200 years ago and that European genomic structure today dates back to the Upper Paleolithic and derives from a metapopulation that at times stretched from Europe to central Asia.
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The dispersal of
Homo sapiens
in Siberia and Mongolia occurred by 45 to 40 thousand years (ka) ago; however, the climatic and environmental context of this event remains poorly understood. We ...reconstruct a detailed vegetation history for the Last Glacial period based on pollen spectra from Lake Baikal. While herb and shrub taxa including
Artemisia
and
Alnus
dominated throughout most of this period, coniferous forests rapidly expanded during Dansgaard-Oeschger (D-O) events 14 (55 ka ago) and 12 to 10 (48 to 41 ka ago), with the latter presenting the strongest signal for coniferous forest expansion and
Picea
trees, indicating remarkably humid conditions. These abrupt forestation events are consistent with obliquity maxima, so that we interpret last glacial vegetation changes in southern Siberia as being driven by obliquity change. Likewise, we posit that major climate amelioration and pronounced forestation precipitated
H. sapiens
dispersal into Baikal Siberia 45 ka ago, as chronicled by the appearance of the Initial Upper Paleolithic.
Dispersal of Homo sapiens in Baikal Siberia 45,000 years ago coincided with warm and humid conditions of an obliquity maximum.
The Western Stemmed and Paleocoastal technocomplexes are prevalent in western North America. A working hypothesis states they are associated with the late-Pleistocene human migration into the ...Americas and derive from an antecedent located along the North Pacific Rim. Here, we review their records to create a techno-typological baseline, which we then compare to early archaeological records from the North Pacific Rim, Beringia, Siberia, and Russian Far East. Our results indicate stemmed points and related socket hafting were an important component of Upper Paleolithic technology across northeast Asia since at least the last glacial maximum. An associated diagnostic bifacial reduction strategy is present by the early part of the late glacial, and continues in younger technocomplexes. Future research should continue to focus on analyses of the chronological and technological relationships between different technocomplexes to uncover their evolutionary origins.
Human colonization of the New World is generally believed to have entailed migrations from Siberia across the Bering isthmus. However, the limited archaeological record of these migrations means that ...details of the timing, cause and rate remain cryptic. Here, we have used a combination of ancient DNA, 14C dating, hydrogen and oxygen isotopes, and collagen sequencing to explore the colonization history of one of the few other large mammals to have successfully migrated into the Americas at this time: the North American elk (Cervus elaphus canadensis), also known as wapiti. We identify a long-term occupation of northeast Siberia, far beyond the species’s current Old World distribution. Migration into North America occurred at the end of the last glaciation, while the northeast Siberian source population became extinct only within the last 500 years. This finding is congruent with a similar proposed delay in human colonization, inferred from modern human mitochondrial DNA, and suggestions that the Bering isthmus was not traversable during parts of the Late Pleistocene. Our data imply a fundamental constraint in crossing Beringia, placing limits on the age and mode of human settlement in the Americas, and further establish the utility of ancient DNA in palaeontological investigations of species histories.
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In Siberia, a scarcity of sites 22,000 to 18,000 years in age suggests that human populations unable to cope with extreme conditions of the last glacial maximum abandoned the region. After 18,000 ...years ago, as glaciers retreated and the tree line gradually advanced northward, humans wielding microblade technology recolonized the Asian north, ultimately spreading to the high arctic by 11,000 years ago. This chapter recounts the evidence for the timing of this colonization event and summarizes technological, subsistence, and settlement data from over 20 sites to reconstruct hunter‐gatherer adaptations during the Siberian late Upper Paleolithic. Results suggest that late glacial microblade‐producing populations were highly mobile hunters who commonly exploited single prey species from short‐term camps.
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