Fw: NYTimes.com Article: Discovery May Bring New Clues Into Peopling of the Americas

[Alethea C. Rudolph]

----------------------  Forwarded Message:  ---------------------
From:    "Kimiko Allen" <k_tempest at hotmail.com>
To:      "Alethea" <alethea.c at comcast.net>
Subject: Fw: NYTimes.com Article: Discovery May Bring New Clues Into Peopling of the Americas
Date:    Wed, 7 Jan 2004 20:05:30 -0500


----- Original Message -----
From: <elly at wam.umd.edu>
To: <k_tempest at hotmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2004 11:41 AM
Subject: NYTimes.com Article: Discovery May Bring New Clues Into Peopling of
the Americas


> This article from NYTimes.com
> has been sent to you by elly at wam.umd.edu.
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> Discovery May Bring New Clues Into Peopling of the Americas
>
> January 6, 2004
>  By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
>
>
>
>
>
> The discovery of 30,000-year-old stone tools and ivory
> spear shafts in the northern reaches of Siberia has more
> than doubled the earliest known time for human occupation
> of the Asian Arctic, Russian scientists reported last week.
>
>
> The research is especially intriguing to archaeologists
> because, if there were people in northern Siberia that
> early, it could provide new clues to the peopling of the
> Americas.
>
> In the depths of the last ice age, Stone Age hunters
> somehow survived the frigid Yana River Valley, which is 300
> miles north of the Arctic Circle.
>
> Archaeologists said they were at a loss to explain why
> humans had ventured so far north or how they could have
> managed to withstand the bitter cold.
>
> Yet there they were, some 16,000 years earlier than the
> previously oldest known occupation site in the Asian
> Arctic.
>
> The dates are corrected estimates of dates based on
> radiocarbon analysis, which gives increasingly lower than
> true calendar values at earlier ages.
>
> The discovery, made in the summers of 1991 and 1992, was
> reported in the journal Science by a team of scientists led
> by Dr. Vladimir Pitulko of the Institute for the History of
> Material Culture in St. Petersburg, Russia.
>
> Dr. Donald K. Grayson, a paleoanthropologist at the
> University of Washington, said he was surprised that people
> could live under such a harsh climate that long ago.
>
> But in an accompanying article, Dr. Grayson praised the
> discovery of "an extremely important site."
>
> The Yana site, in the basin of one of northeast Asia's
> largest rivers, is not the oldest evidence of human
> advances into Arctic lands. Two years ago, Russian and
> Norwegian archaeologists described finding artifacts
> establishing a human presence in the Arctic of European
> Russia perhaps as early as 40,000 years ago.
>
> But Dr. Pitulko's team was struck by similarities between
> the Yana spear shafts, made of mammoth tusks and rhinoceros
> horn, and shafts made by the Clovis people, thought to be
> the earliest migrants from Asia into North America, about
> 13,000 years ago.
>
> Archaeologists have long been puzzled by the lack of
> evidence of a human presence at the right time on the Asian
> side of the land bridge that connected Siberia and Alaska
> during the ice age.
>
> Other researchers cautioned that it is premature
> speculation to link the Yana artifacts to the settlement of
> America.
>
> "Although a direct connection remains tenuous," the Russian
> researchers wrote, "the Yana site indicates that humans
> extended deep into the Arctic during colder Pleistocene
> times."
>
>
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/06/science/06SIBE.html?ex=1074407286&ei=1&en=44d1
de03fab67d53
>
>
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