The Great Divide

Alaska,
     believe that the Dyukhtai microblades were intended to be slotted into antler points as
     weapons. If so, this could complicate matters, suggesting that this technique, which is
     also found in North America, was not so much learned or copied by ‘New
     World’ people from ‘Old World’ people, as a rational adaptation to
     an environment where reindeer were abundant. In other words, it is not in itself
     evidence of migration.
    But the fact remains that there are several other cultural similarities
     between the Dyukhtai complex in Siberia and sites found in Alaska. Both cultures, it
     should be said, are terrestrial cultures, which do not feature sailing among their
     skills, suggesting that these early peoples at least crossed Beringia on foot, rather
     than by canoe or something similar. (One interesting observation that may be more than a
     sideeffect is that the burial of a domesticated dog was recorded at a site in Ushki, on
     the Kamchatka Peninsula, dated to 11,000 years ago. Given that, even today, it is easier
     to move around in the Arctic Circle on foot during winter, with its hard frozen
     surfaces, than in summer, with its soggy, marshy landscape, this discovery takes on a
     significance it might otherwise lack.)
    The several prehistoric sites that have been discovered in Alaska show a
     complicated picture but one that does not necessarily negate the scenario given above.
     As Brian Fagan says, in his The Great Journey: The Peopling of Ancient America ,
     ‘Despite years of patient endeavour, no one has yet found an archaeological site
     in Alaska and the Yukon that can be securely dated to earlier than about 15,000 years
     ago.’ 14 A caribou tibia was found at the Old Crow site,
     close to the Alaskan-Canadian border, which had undoubtedly been fashioned by human
     hands into a ‘fleshing tool’, for removing flesh from hide. To begin with,
     this and related bones were dated to about 27,000 years ago, but were later revised to
     only 1,300 years ago. It has also since been discovered that certain other bone
     ‘tools’ found at Old Crow were actually naturally occurring artefacts as
     more became known about how predators break the bones of animals they are in the process
     of killing.
    The Bluefish Caves sites, about forty miles south-west of Old Crow, provided
     butchered animals, dated by associated pollen to between 15,550 and 12,950 years ago,
     together with stone tools at much the same date – stone tools moreover that, as
     Fagan says, would not be out of place in Dyukhtai. 15 Later, similar finds were
     made at Trail Creek, Tangle Lakes, Donnelly Ridge, Fairbanks, Onion Portage and Denali,
     with most dates in the 11,000 to 8,000 years ago range. At first, this tradition was
     known either as the Dyukhtai or Denali or Nenana complex, but Palaeo-Arctic is now the
     preferred term for these and slightly later artefacts. The diminutive size of the stone
     work is its most striking feature, and may stem from the fact that pollen analysis in
     the area shows that there was a rapid vegetational change beginning about 14,000 years
     ago, when the herbaceous tundra (grasses, mosses) gave way to a shrub tundra (woody
     thickets), which would have caused the mammal population to dwindle and may well have
     forced early man out of Beringia. As he moved on, smaller tools would have been
     preferable.
    Not all the sites in eastern Beringia contained microblades. Others contain
     large core and flake tools, including simple projectile points and large blades. And at
     Anangula, on the coast out along the Aleutian island chain, blade tools were made, but
     not the diminutive microblades as at Denali. So there was quite a bit of cultural
     diversity in Beringia around 11,000 years ago. We simply to not know if this represents
     distinct cultural traditions that existed side-by-side, or alternative adaptation
     strategies designed to cope with different forms of wildlife.
    The evidence, such as it is, suggests that there was no
     ‘crossing’ of the Bering Strait, in any modern sense. The early peoples
     spread into eastern Siberia, which then extended as far east as what is now the Yukon
     and Alaska. Then, when the seas rose, after ~14,000 years ago, the peoples of
     eastern Beringia were forced even further east, where the huge glaciers were themselves
     melting, allowing passage south, as we shall see. The seas rose behind them and they
     were isolated in the New World.
    An