Alaskan spear points raise new questions about human arrival in North America

The discovery of fluted spear points in northwest Alaska strongly suggests that early humans carrying American technology lived on the central Bering Land Bridge about 12,000 years ago, showing that peopling of the Americas was more complex than previously believed, according to a research team led by a Texas A&M University professor.

12,000-year-old fluted points found among the Serpentine Hot Springs
artifacts [Credit: Texas A&M University]

Ted Goebel, professor of anthropology, along with colleagues Mike Waters, Heather Smith and Kelly Graf, all associated with the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M, and researchers from Baylor University, the University of Georgia, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the Desert Research Institute have had their findings published in the online version of the Journal of Archaeological Science.

The project was funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, and National Park Service’s Shared Beringia Heritage Program.

The researchers focused on an area in Alaska called Serpentine Hot Springs, now part of the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve located on the Seward Peninsula. Park archaeologists in 2005 discovered a fragment of a fluted spear point, long known as a hallmark of North American Paleoindian cultures. Goebel and the team later excavated the site, finding more fluted points.

“This shows for sure that there were humans on the land bridge by the end of the Ice Age, 12,000 years ago, because the spear points were found with charcoal and bone radiocarbon dated to that time,” Goebel explains.

“Several of the spear points were found in our excavation along with charred animal bones, probably caribou which ancient humans butchered and ate there at the site.  So the question becomes, ‘Who were these people , and where did they come from?’”

Goebel says that among the earliest residents of North America were members of the Clovis culture, thought to date to about 13,000 years ago. Clovis people specifically fashioned their stone spear tips with grooved, or fluted, bases. Such human-made projectile points have been known in Alaska since 1947, having been found at as many as 20 different archaeological sites.

“But no one has been able to determine the age of fluted points in Alaska  – were they younger, the same age as, or older than the Clovis residents in temperate North America?” Goebel says.

Scientists have chiefly considered two scenarios about Alaska’s fluted point makers:  either they were a pre-Clovis population that moved southward at the end of the Pleistocene era, or they were post-Clovis migrants who spread from south to north.

“The evidence from Serpentine supports the second theory – that either Paleoindian people or technologies were moving in a reverse migration pattern, from south to north, or more specifically, from the high plains of central Canada in a northerly direction into Alaska,” he points out.

Goebel says the findings show new possibilities about when and from where the early settlers of the Bering land bridge arrived.

“Not all of Beringia’s early residents may have come from Siberia, as we have traditionally thought,” he notes.  “Some may have come from America instead, although millennia after the initial migration across the land bridge from Asia. If the fluted points do not represent a human migration, they at least indicate the surprisingly early spread of an American technology into Arctic Alaska.”

He notes that the fluted points were used by the Serpentine residents as weapon tips for hunting large animals, such as caribou or bison. The bow and arrow would not appear in Alaska for several thousand more years.

“We know these early settlers were very mobile – they traveled great distances,” Goebel adds.

“Humans carried tools made of the volcanic glass called obsidian to the site from nearly 300 miles inland in central Alaska. The artifacts and other debris they left behind suggests very short stays, perhaps just several days and nights.

“Nonetheless, fluted points have yet to be found in neighboring Chukotka (in Russia) suggesting that the fluted-point makers never made it any further west than the Seward Peninsula. By 12,000 years ago, the land bridge was becoming swamped by the rising Bering and Chukchi seas.”

For more about the Center for the Study of the First Americans, go to their website.