Cousins to the first native americans (11,000 years old)
(originally posted 8/3/2020)
Today’s 10,000 year old site is home to the oldest known human remains in the Arctic Circle, the Trail Creek Caves in Seward Penninsula in Alaska, which juts out towards Siberia. The Bering Straight near these caves was created about 11,000 years ago, connecting the Arctic Ocean and Bering Sea and thus forever separating Siberia from Alaska, Eurasia from the Americas, and splitting the land known as Berengia into two. The people who lived by these caves 10,000 years ago, the Ancient Berengians, are believed to be an offshoot of the first people who had crossed the old land bridge into America over 15,000 years ago, but who had remained in this area, as the remainder moved into the rest of North and South America.
The caves themselves are rather small and thought to have been used only as a temporary shelter to wait out bad weather. 10,000 years old bone and antler artifacts were found to be made from Caribou. A 9000 year old 1.5 year old’s tooth found here shows signs of a diet composed mostly of Caribou. By that time, large mammals like Woolly Mammoths had died out in North America (though some remained on a nearby island off the far east Siberian coast in the Arctic, where no humans lived). They didn’t appear to hunt marine mammals such as seals either, despite living near the Arctic Ocean coast. The ancesters of the Inuit, who are famous for hunting these creatures, would not arrive in this area from Asia for another 5000 years. Elk were plentiful though and were likely used for much of their needs. Their antlers were used in their spear tips for one thing.
One theory posed in about 2013 is that the ancestor to all Native Americans moved into Berengia, the land that connected Asia to North America, maybe 25,000 years ago during the height of the Ice Age. They didn’t move into the rest of North America beyond Alaska because ice sheets blocked there path. For 10,000 years, they remained isolated in Berengia and became a distinct people separate from Siberians and other East Asians. Then 15,000 years, the glaciers that impeded their movements melted and a path was cleared for them to enter the rest of North America and South America. The Ancient Berengians would have been the ones who stayed behind and would be the closest related to the original Native Americans before they diversified.
Some recent finding have poked holes in that theory though, with a 20,000 year old skeleton found in Mexico just a couple weeks ago. In my mind, this matches some genetic information they recently gleaned from the tooth found in this cave and other samples done in a 2018 study. Genetic data says that the Ancient Berengians split off from the other ancestral Native Americans 21,000 years ago. Maybe that is when the rest of the Native Americans left Berengia and entered the rest of the Americas, leaving the Ancient Berengians behind? The genetic data also says that Ancestral Native Americans split off from East Asians and Siberians 23,000 years ago, so maybe that is when they first arrived in Baringia or at least became isolated? We’ll see if that’s that’s what the theorists go with, ha.
Some of these theories kind of assume that there was only one group of people who had crossed the land bridge from Asia to the Americas. As far as we know, everyone who has entered into America had passed through these lands. Some theories such as an early migration from Europe, Africa, or Australia due to similarities in skull shapes, stone technologies, and dna from these areas have mostly been refuted or explained away. But maybe we’ll find evidence one of these days that other people crossed this land bridge that sticks.
The caves were first discovered in 1928 and the child’s tooth (the only human remains found here) in 1949 by a Danish archaeologist. It was never analyzed and was put in a box and forgotten about until it was rediscovered in 2015. There is only one other site with Ancient Beringian human remains, a site south of the Arctic Circle in Alaska with teeth from two infants called Upward Sun River Site. The population seems to have died out and have no modern day descendants. One theory is that they were replaced or absorbed by other native american tribes that later re-entered the area.
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