An appropriate moment to look back many millennia to the history of our species and planet. And gain perspective.

The lead article in the January 2020 Smithsonian Magazine takes us on a journey of exploration and migration by the first humans to the Americas starting over 20,000 years ago, with new evidence and theories of when and how the Americas were initially populated, with relevance to how humans had and did explore and populate the earth in general.

First, an acknowledgment of the moment we are in.

The decade has begun just as the last one ended, which we lingered on in our last post, The End Of Civilization As We Knew It, Part Seventeen, on The Decade in Pictures.

Life on earth is in a growing convergence of chaos, conflict and climate catastrophe, underpinned by the brutality of the most recent era in history of unsustainable and inhumane inequality, both cause and effect of the brutality of humans to each other and to all life on earth.

There are many specifics to comment on, some of increasingly momentous importance. That will come. For now, a few over-arching comments.

There is a narrative, which has an aspect of truth to it, that every year for some time now, things have actually gotten better. Extreme poverty, infant deaths and other such measures are referred to. There are some who bring attention to this with the very best of intentions, to preserve hope, while most of the time they devote themselves to ending the horrors on earth that they correctly identify.

We spent our initial years of work in many ways pioneering the message that proven solutions to these and other great crises facing humanity and the planet were demonstrable.

That is still true.

And things did get better in many ways, because of many historical factors, movements, policies, and actions that we, among many others, had the privilege of contributing to.

But things have not been getting better, in the main, for some time now. The measures of progress are on the basis of definitions, in many cases, that reduce humans to a math equation, as if the penny or dollar or more above a definition of extreme poverty changes the basic condition of incomprehensible suffering for billions, putting aside the many questions around the sources of such definitions, or the unsustainable mechanisms at this point that create some gains in some ways. We had an opportunity to move measures of progress rapidly forward at a point when all related issues would have tipped positive on the scale and we could have with relative ease transitioned from an unsustainable model of growth to a sustainable model of plenty for all. Instead, progress devolved into half-measures and back-pedaling at precisely the moment in history when the context of all the issues impacting each other would create a far more challenging set of problems than we have ever faced.

Inequality is not getting better, it’s gotten worse for decades–and it’s not an issue that waits for incremental change rather than systemic change and immediate action (its happened at key points throughout history)–countless screaming babies and a billion abused and deprived children can’t wait.

If you can let them wait, then you’ve just defined the problem.

And the same goes for adults having their lives destroyed without a guarantee of basic needs and rights.

And if you can let them wait, then get ready to answer the increasing throngs demanding equality on the streets of the world and to reap the whirlwind of the conflicts spun out from this–including winds of nuclear, chemical and bioengineered weaponry that no borders can protect you from.

And things are definitely not getting better for the planet, and all life on it, burning up, literally, more and more by the day since our last post.

The list goes on.

Sometimes, hope is not only best preserved, but can only be preserved, by facing the reality of catastrophe in real time and obliteration to come, and focusing fully on action to stop it.

And please, speaking of facing reality, don’t pull out the old, things have always been this way and always will be line.

That’s called a lie. Remember when a lie meant something?

Don’t worry, reality will intrude at some point to make it so again.

Of course, some things are the same, in some ways. And others have changed, beyond measure and beyond what anyone thought possible over and over throughout history.

The lie serves two fundamental purposes, consciously and unconsciously:

To inhibit change by those with power without the enlightened self-interest to change, and by everyone to the degree they wish to avoid the responsibility of what change requires.

Let’s be clear–none of this is a partisan political or ideological stance. We’ve made clear that defining everything by one ideology or another is nonsensical. On the landing page of World Campaign which has been the same since day one, the “Are You?” questions make clear our stance is one of principles achieved through open minds and pragmatic action. Furthermore, all individuals and organizations are responsible for their actions, but public policies are the context that create the rules and provide basic needs, rights and sustainable economic systems.

Nor are we talking about who or what path might best achieve the next needed steps in terms of political presentation as opposed to policies acted on. Franklin Roosevelt did not run on the New Deal in the 1932 campaign. But after being elected, he enacted it, led the US and the world through the great depression, World War Two and in creating the United Nations (brought to fruition with the historic declaration on human rights after his death by his conscience in many ways during his presidency and the most admired woman in the world, Eleanor Roosevelt). His policies vastly increased economic security and equality for most people despite the glaring holes and set the course for increasing equality and prosperity in the future.

These policies were adhered to and substantially increased in the main after his unprecedented four terms by the following seven presidents, both Democrats and Republicans, regardless of rhetoric during political campaigns, and by members of Congress of both parties. Even when many of these policies changed, again under both parties, which demonstrably occurred in tandem with the rise in inequality, some of these programs have remained untouchable. Even when regression occurs (which is not to say that changes were all purposefully regressive, or that course correction is never called for, or that no other progress was made), some of the foundations of progress remain, upon which future progress can build–can being the operative word.

The following principle has been elucidated on the World Campaign site from the outset:

People are suffering and dying now. All life is being threatened now. World Campaign advocates the urgency of action.

We cannot be immobilized by not having all the answers or by fear of the inevitable mistakes or unintended consequences inherent in any human endeavor. A preponderance of evidence requires action and trial and error are an integral part of the human experience. Lack of action in the face of suffering destroys the human spirit.

World Campaign just had the twentieth anniversary of its founding as the new millennium was about to start and is now in its 21st year and third decade as well. (The organization behind it, Planet Earth Foundation, will soon start its 44th year, with the work catalyzing it starting years before.)

The Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations, followed by the Sustainable Development Goals, were and are meant to address all the inter-related issues we and others have been dedicated to for a lifetime. They have helped, but not succeeded. And they can’t, any more than the United Nations and its declarations, starting with the landmark Universal Declaration of Human Rights, various conventions or international law can, without it being a global proposition, globally enforced with global cooperation.

It’s an appropriate moment, at the start of the third decade of the new millennium, to repeat again the beginning of our closing paragraph from our 2008 post, We Are One: The Force Behind Everything:

A structure built on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights requires some kind of basic democracy in the context of rules between nations, while allowing for the evolution of various forms of democracy within nations, in which basic human rights are respected, basic needs for all are met and individual initiative is reasonably rewarded.  It is the balance that nature keeps trying to tell us comprise the rules of the road. 

You of course know that the United Nations is in its 75th anniversary year, right? This is a blink of an eye in human history, the most significant blink yet, regarding whether life continues to exist.

In recent years, from the global to the personal, its been increasingly a know-nothing, self-gratifying, soul-debasing era.

But also, on the hopeful side, with eyes starting to open more and more.

The digital tools of our era, misused and overused, have irrefutably been cognitive wrecking balls. An enormous amount of work needs to be done, technically, socially and politically, to enhance positive applications of these tools and eliminate harmful ones.

At the same time, properly developed and applied, as one example, AI, which has many risks to be sure, could help to build a more equitable world rather than increasingly becoming the usual suspect in destroying jobs and invading privacy. Depending on public policy, with basic needs provided and human rights protected, it could expand opportunities for human endeavors–but that deserves its own exploration.

So, the question World Campaign posed twenty-one years ago remains:

Are you part of the problem or part of the solution?

Start with giving, not getting, as your fundamental act of living, to always providing and sacrificing and being there for the vulnerable and those in need, to always being willing to give it all up as may be required of any of us as moral beings.

And do whatever you need to do to require the system you are part of to be a system that requires basic needs and rights be provided to all. Which will create the necessary precondition for the necessary global application of these values in a sustainable manner.

Otherwise, from your personal fulfillment (the opposite of self-gratification) and your legacy, all the way to the impact on all life on earth, the following dictum, which we have quoted often, will apply:

The river in flood cuts an oxbow, the overfull dam gives way.

We will, of course, be back to continuing this commentary and exploration.

For now, as we start the new year and the new decade, let’s explore some of the initial human exploration and reflect on our history from the start, many millennia ago.

The lead article in the January 2020 Smithsonian Magazine, The Fertile Shore, by Fen Montaigne with photographs by Rafal Gerszak, takes us on an enlightening journey exploring “one of the greatest mysteries of our time”–when did humans make the first journey to the Americas?

The perspective gained from the article about time, humanity and life on earth is not something we find ourselves readily capable of putting into words. In part because it just so happens that the area focused on primarily in the article is the part of the planet we have lived in or near to all our lives.

One of the main goals of the decades-long investigations referenced in the article has been to document the ancient culture of British Columbia’s indigenous coastal communities. Out of which “cutting-edge techniques for finding coastal sites” put the investigations “in the vanguard of the search for the first Americans.”

The article begins:

For more than half a century, the prevailing story of how the first humans came to the Americas went like this: Some 13,000 years ago, small bands of Stone Age hunters walked across a land bridge between eastern Siberia and western Alaska, eventually making their way down an ice-free inland corridor into the heart of North America. Chasing steppe bison, woolly mammoths and other large mammals, these ancestors of today’s Native Americans established a thriving culture that eventually spread across two continents to the tip of South America.

In recent years, however, that version of events has taken a beating, not least because of the discovery of archaeological sites in North and South America showing that humans had been on the continent 1,000 or even 2,000 years before the supposed first migration. A subsequent theory, known as the “Kelp Highway,” came closer to the mark: As the massive ice sheets covering western North America retreated, the first humans arrived on the continent not only by foot but by boat, traveling down the Pacific shore and subsisting on abundant coastal resources. Supporting that idea are archaeological sites along the West Coast of North America that date back 14,000 to 15,000 years.

Now our understanding of when people reached the Americas—and where they came from—is expanding dramatically. The emerging picture suggests that humans may have arrived in North America at least 20,000 years ago—some 5,000 years earlier than has been commonly believed. And new research raises the possibility of an intermediate settlement of hundreds or thousands of people who spread out over the wild lands stretching between North America and Asia.

The heart of that territory has long since been submerged by the Pacific Ocean, forming the present-day Bering Strait. But some 25,000 to 15,000 years ago, the strait itself and a continent-size expanse flanking it were high and dry. That vanished world is called Beringia, and the developing theory about its pivotal role in the populating of North America is known as the Beringian Standstill hypothesis—“standstill” because generations of people migrating from the East might have settled there before moving on to North America.

Much of this new theorizing is driven not by archaeologists wielding shovels but by evolutionary geneticists taking DNA samples from some of the oldest human remains in the Americas, and from even older ones in Asia. Those discoveries have opened a wide gap between what the genetics seem to be saying and what the archaeology actually shows. Humans may have been on both sides of the Bering Land Bridge some 20,000 years ago. But skeptical archaeologists say they will not believe in this grand idea until they hold the relevant artifacts in their hands, pointing out that no confirmed North American archaeological sites older than 15,000 to 16,000 years currently exist. But other archaeologists are confident it is only a matter of time until older sites are discovered in the sprawling, sparsely populated lands of eastern Siberia, Alaska and northwestern Canada.

It’s an exciting, if at times esoteric, debate, touching on basic questions we’re all connected to, such as why people first came to the Americas and how they managed to survive. Yet no matter when or how they made the trek, the coast of what is now Canada was on their itinerary. And that’s what brought me to British Columbia to meet up with a group of anthropologists who have discovered important signs of ancient life along the Pacific.

When you think of places you’ve seen over the years as part of your geographical back yard, that were focal points of migration of the first Americans perhaps over 20,000 years ago, it gives you pause.

It was a completely different world. And not.

The story is both depressing and hopeful. Depressing because once again, as in so many such anthropological and archaelological studies, one sees a natural world of plenty inhabited by far less people at no threat of environmental destruction by them. Hopeful because the interplay between humans and the environment would seemed to have doomed humans more than once, but humans have proved adaptive, so far.

Here’s the article. Bon voyage.

Or perhaps more appropriately, Alixwa̱la, meaning “preparing to leave on a journey” in Kwakʼwala, the indigenous language, in danger of extinction, spoken by Kwakwakaʼwakw First Nations people on the north east coast of Vancouver Island and the adjacent mainland coast of British Columbia.

THE FERTILE SHORE, Smithsonian Magazine, January 2020

It’s one of the greatest mysteries of our time. But archaeologists and even geneticists are closer than ever to understanding when humans made the first bold journey to the Americas

BY FEN MONTAIGNE; PHOTOGRAPHS BY RAFAL GERSZAK

For more than half a century, the prevailing story of how the first humans came to the Americas went like this: Some 13,000 years ago, small bands of Stone Age hunters walked across a land bridge between eastern Siberia and western Alaska, eventually making their way down an ice-free inland corridor into the heart of North America. Chasing steppe bison, woolly mammoths and other large mammals, these ancestors of today’s Native Americans established a thriving culture that eventually spread across two continents to the tip of South America.

In recent years, however, that version of events has taken a beating, not least because of the discovery of archaeological sites in North and South America showing that humans had been on the continent 1,000 or even 2,000 years before the supposed first migration. A subsequent theory, known as the “Kelp Highway,” came closer to the mark: As the massive ice sheets covering western North America retreated, the first humans arrived on the continent not only by foot but by boat, traveling down the Pacific shore and subsisting on abundant coastal resources. Supporting that idea are archaeological sites along the West Coast of North America that date back 14,000 to 15,000 years.

The heart of that territory has long since been submerged by the Pacific Ocean, forming the present-day Bering Strait. But some 25,000 to 15,000 years ago, the strait itself and a continent-size expanse flanking it were high and dry. That vanished world is called Beringia, and the developing theory about its pivotal role in the populating of North America is known as the Beringian Standstill hypothesis—“standstill” because generations of people migrating from the East might have settled there before moving on to North America.

Much of this new theorizing is driven not by archaeologists wielding shovels but by evolutionary geneticists taking DNA samples from some of the oldest human remains in the Americas, and from even older ones in Asia. Those discoveries have opened a wide gap between what the genetics seem to be saying and what the archaeology actually shows. Humans may have been on both sides of the Bering Land Bridge some 20,000 years ago. But skeptical archaeologists say they will not believe in this grand idea until they hold the relevant artifacts in their hands, pointing out that no confirmed North American archaeological sites older than 15,000 to 16,000 years currently exist. But other archaeologists are confident it is only a matter of time until older sites are discovered in the sprawling, sparsely populated lands of eastern Siberia, Alaska and northwestern Canada.

It’s an exciting, if at times esoteric, debate, touching on basic questions we’re all connected to, such as why people first came to the Americas and how they managed to survive. Yet no matter when or how they made the trek, the coast of what is now Canada was on their itinerary. And that’s what brought me to British Columbia to meet up with a group of anthropologists who have discovered important signs of ancient life along the Pacific.

* * *

The rugged shoreline of British Columbia is carved by countless coves and inlets and dotted with tens of thousands of islands. On a cool August morning, I arrived on Quadra Island, about 100 miles northwest of Vancouver, to join a group of researchers from the University of Victoria and the nonprofit Hakai Institute. Led by anthropologist Daryl Fedje, the team also included his colleagues Duncan McLaren and Quentin Mackie, as well as Christine Roberts, a representative of the Wei Wai Kum First Nation.

The site was located on a tranquil cove whose shores were thick with hemlock and cedar. When I arrived, the team was just finishing several days of digging, the latest in a series of excavations along the British Columbia coast that had unearthed artifacts from as far back as 14,000 years ago—among the oldest in North America.

On a cobble beach and in a nearby forest pit that was about six feet deep and four feet square, Fedje and his colleagues had discovered more than 1,200 artifacts, mostly stone flakes, a few as old as 12,800 years. All testified to a rich maritime-adapted culture: rock scrapers, spear points, simple flake knives, gravers and goose egg-size stones used as hammers. Fedje reckoned that the cove site was most likely a base camp that was ideally situated to exploit the fish, waterfowl, shellfish and marine mammals from the frigid sea.

Digging on Quadra Island, about 150 feet above today’s sea level. (Al Mackie)

For Mackie, the archaeological riches of the British Columbian coast reveal a key flaw in the original Bering Land Bridge theory: its bias toward an inland, rather than a marine, route. “People say the coast is a wild, nasty environment,” said Mackie, a stoutly built man with an unruly gray beard and battered green hat, as he took a break from using a screen to sift through rock and earth from the Quadra dig site. “But you have lots of food resources. These were the same people as us, with the same brains. And we know that in Japan people routinely moved back and forth from the mainland to the outer islands by boat as long ago as 30,000 to 35,000 years.”

Several recent studies show that as the last ice age began to loosen its grip, portions of the coastline of British Columbia and Southeastern Alaska were becoming ice-free as far back as 17,000 to 18,000 years ago. Fedje and others note that humans walking across the Bering Land Bridge from Asia could have traveled by boat down these shorelines after the ice retreated. “People were likely in Beringia early on,” says Fedje. “We don’t know exactly, but there certainly is the potential to go back as early as 18,000 years.”

Left, a spear point presumably launched by an atlatl. Right, archaeologist Duncan McLaren takes a sample of Quadra Island sediment. Studying this sediment helped researchers learn that the shoreline wasn’t stable for a long time after the last ice age. (Rafal Gerszak)

Fedje, McLaren and Mackie stressed that one of the main goals of their decades-long investigations has been to document the ancient culture of British Columbia’s indigenous coastal communities. But in the opinion of many of their North American peers, the trio’s cutting-edge techniques for finding coastal sites have also put the men in the vanguard of the search for the first Americans.

* * *

Today, the coast of the Pacific Northwest bears little resemblance to the world the first Americans would have encountered. The lushly forested shoreline I saw would have been bare rock following the retreat of the ice sheets. And in the last 15,000 to 20,000 years, sea levels have risen some 400 feet. But Fedje and his colleagues have developed elaborate techniques to find ancient shorelines that were not drowned by rising seas.

Their success has hinged on solving a geological puzzle dating back to the end of the last ice age. As the world warmed, the vast ice sheets that covered much of North America—to a depth of two miles in some places—began to melt. This thawing, coupled with the melting of glaciers and ice sheets worldwide, sent global sea levels surging upwards.

But the ice sheets weighed billions of tons, and as they vanished, an immense weight was lifted from the earth’s crust, allowing it to bounce back like a foam pad. In some places, Fedje says, the coast of British Columbia rebounded more than 600 feet in a few thousand years. The changes were happening so rapidly that they would have been noticeable on an almost year-to-year basis.

“At first it’s hard to get your head around this,” says Fedje, a tall, slender man with a neatly trimmed gray beard. “The land looks like it’s been there since time immemorial. But this is a very dynamic landscape.”

That dynamism proved to be a blessing to Fedje and his colleagues: Seas did indeed rise dramatically after the end of the last ice age, but along many stretches of the British Columbia coast, that rise was offset by the earth’s crust springing back in equal measure. Along the Hakai Passage on the central coast of British Columbia, sea-level rise and the rebound of the land almost perfectly canceled each other out, meaning today’s shoreline is within a few yards of the shoreline 14,000 years ago.

In order to track ancient shorelines, Fedje and his colleagues took hundreds of samples of sediment cores from freshwater lakes, wetlands and intertidal zones. Microscopic plant and animal remains showed them which areas had been under the ocean, on dry land and in between. They commissioned flyovers with laser-based lidar imaging, which essentially strips the trees off the landscape and reveals the features—such as the terraces of old creek beds—that might have been attractive to ancient hunter-gatherers.

These techniques enabled the archaeologists to locate, with surprising accuracy, sites such as the one on Quadra Island. Arriving at a cove there, Fedje recalled, they found numerous Stone Age artifacts on the cobble beach. “Like Hansel and Gretel, we followed the artifacts and found them eroding out of the creek bed,” Fedje said. “It’s not rocket science if you have enough different levels of information. We’re able to get that needle into a tiny little haystack.”

In 2016 and 2017, a Hakai Institute team led by archaeologist Duncan McLaren excavated a site on Triquet Island containing obsidian cutting tools, fishhooks, a wooden implement to start friction fires and charcoal dating from 13,600 to 14,100 years ago. On nearby Calvert Island, they found 29 footprints belonging to two adults and one child, stamped into a layer of clay-rich soil buried under the sand in an intertidal zone. Wood found in the footprints dated back roughly 13,000 years.

Other scientists are conducting similar searches. Loren Davis, an archaeologist at Oregon State University, has cruised from San Diego to Oregon using imaging and sediment cores to identify possible settlement sites drowned by rising seas, such as ancient estuaries. Davis’ work inland led to his discovery of a settlement dating back more than 15,000 years at Cooper’s Ferry, Idaho. That find, announced in August 2019, meshes nicely with the theory of an early coastal migration into North America. Located on the Salmon River, which connects to the Pacific via the Snake and Columbia rivers, the Cooper’s Ferry site is hundreds of miles from the coast. The settlement is at least 500 years older than the site that had long been viewed as the oldest confirmed archaeological site in the Americas—Swan Point, Alaska.

“Early peoples moving south along the Pacific Coast would have encountered the Columbia River as the first place below the glaciers where they could easily walk and paddle into North America,” Davis said in announcing his findings. “Essentially, the Columbia River corridor was the first offramp of a Pacific Coast migration route.”

* * *

An axiom in archaeology is that the earliest discovered site is almost certainly not the first place of human habitation, just the oldest one archaeologists have found so far. And if the work of a host of evolutionary geneticists is correct, humans may already have been on the North American side of the Bering Land Bridge about 20,000 years ago.

Eske Willerslev, who directs the Center for GeoGenetics at the Globe Institute at the University of Copenhagen and holds the Prince Philip chair of ecology and evolution at the University of Cambridge, sequenced the first ancient human genome in 2010. He has since sequenced numerous genomes in an effort to piece together a picture of the first Americans, including a 12,400-year-old boy from Montana, 11,500-year-old infants at Alaska’s Upward Sun River site and the skeletal DNA of a boy whose 24,000-year-old remains were found at the village of Malta, near Russia’s Lake Baikal.

Yeatman Bay, near one of the excavation sites on Quadra Island. (Rafal Gerszak)

According to Willerslev, sophisticated genomic analyses of ancient human remains—which can determine when populations merged, split or were isolated—show that the forebears of Native Americans became isolated from other Asian groups around 23,000 years ago. After that period of genetic separation, “the most parsimonious explanation,” he says, is that the first Americans migrated into Alaska well before 15,000 years ago, and possibly more than 20,000 years ago. Willerslev has concluded that “there was a long period of gene flow” between the Upward Sun River people and other Beringians from 23,000 to 20,000 years ago.

“There was basically an exchange between the populations across eastern and western Beringia,” Willerslev said in a phone interview from Copenhagen. “So you had these groups hanging around Beringia and they are to some degree isolated—but not completely isolated—from each other. You had those groups up there, on both sides of the Bering Land Bridge, around 20,000 years ago. I think that is very likely.”

This new evidence, coupled with paleoecological studies of Beringia’s ice age environment, gave rise to the Beringian Standstill hypothesis. To some geneticists and archaeologists, the area in and around the Bering Land Bridge is the most plausible place where ancestors of the first Americans could have been genetically isolated and become a distinct people. They believe such isolation would have been virtually impossible in southern Siberia, or near the Pacific shores of the Russian Far East and around Hokkaido in Japan—places already occupied by Asian groups.

“The whole-genome analysis—especially of ancient DNA from Siberia and Alaska—really changed things,” says John F. Hoffecker of the University of Colorado’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. “Where do you put these people where they cannot be exchanging genes with the rest of the Northeast Asian population?”

Could humans have even survived at the high latitudes of Beringia during the last ice age, before moving into North America? This possibility has been buttressed by studies showing that large portions of Beringia were not covered by ice sheets and would have been habitable as Northeast Asia came out of the last ice age. Scott Elias, a paleoecologist with the University of Colorado’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, used a humble proxy—beetle fossils—to piece together a picture of the climate in Beringia 15,000 to 20,000 years ago. Digging in peat bogs, coastal bluffs, permafrost and riverbanks, Elias unearthed skeletal fragments of upwards of 100 different types of tiny beetles from that period.

Comparing the ancient beetle fossils with those found on similar landscapes today, Elias concluded that southern Beringia was a fairly moist tundra environment that could have supported a wide variety of animals. He says that winter temperatures in the southern maritime zone of Beringia during the peak of the last ice age were only slightly colder than today, and summer temperatures were likely 5 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit cooler.

“People could have made a pretty decent living along the southern coast of the land bridge, especially if they had knowledge of marine resource acquisition,” says Elias. “The interior in Siberia and Alaska would have been very cold and dry, but there were large mammals living there, so these people may have made hunting forays into the adjacent highlands.”

Proponents of the Beringian Standstill hypothesis also point to a cluster of remarkable archaeological sites on Siberia’s Yana River, located on the western edge of Beringia, 1,200 miles from what is now the Bering Strait. Situated well above the Arctic Circle, the Yana sites were discovered in 2001 by Vladimir Pitulko, an archaeologist with the Institute for the History of Material Culture in St. Petersburg. Over nearly two decades, Pitulko and his team uncovered evidence of a thriving settlement dating back 32,000 years, including tools, weapons, intricate beadwork, pendants, mammoth ivory bowls and carved human likenesses.

Based on butchered animal skeletons and other evidence, Yana appears to have been occupied year-round by up to 500 people from 32,000 to 27,000 years ago and sporadically inhabited until 17,000 years ago. Pitulko and others say Yana is proof that humans could have survived at high latitudes in Beringia during the last ice age.

Yet the ones who made it across the Bering Land Bridge were apparently not the people of Yana. Willerslev’s lab extracted genetic information from the baby teeth of two boys who lived at the site 31,600 years ago and found that they shared only 20 percent of their DNA with the founding Native American population. Willerslev believes Yana’s inhabitants were likely replaced by, and interbred with, the paleo-Siberians who did eventually migrate into North America.

Once in the New World, the first Americans, probably numbering in the hundreds or low thousands, traveled south of the ice sheets and split into two groups—a northern and southern branch. The northern branch populated what are now Alaska and Canada, while members of the southern branch “exploded,” in Willerslev’s words, down through North America, Central America and South America with remarkable speed. Such a movement could account for the growing number of archaeological sites dating from 14,000 to 15,000 years ago in Oregon, Wisconsin, Texas and Florida. Far to the south, at Monte Verde in southern Chile, conclusive evidence of human settlement dates back at least 14,500 years.

“I think it has become more and more clear, based on the genetic evidence, that people were capable of much more in terms of spreading out than we thought,” says Willerslev. “Humans are very early on capable of making incredible journeys, of [doing] things that we, even with modern equipment, would find very difficult to achieve.”

In Willerslev’s view, what primarily drove these ancient people was not the exhaustion of local resources—the virgin continents were too rich in food and the numbers of people too small—but an innate human yearning to explore. “I mean, in a few hundred years they are taking off across the entire continent and spreading into different habitats,” he says. “It’s obviously driven by something other than just resources. And I think the most obvious thing is curiosity.”

* * *

Some archaeologists, like Ben A. Potter at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, emphasize that genetics can only provide a road map for new digs, not solid evidence of the Beringian Standstill theory or the settlement of the Americas 20,000 years ago. “Until there’s actual evidence that people were in fact there, then it remains just an interesting hypothesis,” he says. “All that is required is that [ancestral Native Americans] were genetically isolated from wherever the East Asians happened to be around that time. There’s absolutely nothing in the genetics that necessitates the Standstill had to be in Beringia. We don’t have evidence that people were in Beringia and Alaska then. But we do have evidence that they were around Lake Baikal and into the Russian Far East.”

After Potter unearthed the 11,500-year-old remains of two infants and a girl at the Upward Sun River site in Alaska’s Tanana Valley—among the oldest human remains found in North America—Willerslev sequenced the infants’ DNA. The two scientists were co-authors on a Nature paper that “support[ed] a long-term genetic structure in ancestral Native Americans, consistent with the Beringian ‘standstill model.’”

But Potter thinks that news stories on these and other findings have been too definitive. “One of the problems with the media coverage is its focus on a single hypothesis—a pre-16,000-year-old migration along the northwest coast—that is not well supported with evidence.”

Excavations along the Yana River in Siberia in 2007, where cultural artifacts and human remains were found beneath 23 feet of frozen sediment. (Elena Pavlova)

Potter remains doubtful that humans could have survived in most of Beringia during the bitter peak of the ice age, about 25,000 years ago. “Across the board,” he says, “from Europe all the way to the Bering Strait, this far north area is depopulated. There’s nobody there, and that lasts for a long time.”

But some scientists retort that the reason no sites older than 15,000 to 16,000 years have been discovered in easternmost Siberia or Alaska is that this sprawling, lightly populated region has seen little archaeological activity. The area now defined as Beringia is a vast territory that includes the present-day Bering Strait and stretches nearly 3,000 miles from the Verkhoyansk Mountains in eastern Siberia to the Mackenzie River in western Canada. Many archaeological sites at the heart of ancient Beringia are now 150 feet below the surface of the Bering Strait.

Ancient sites are often discovered when road builders, railway construction crews or local residents unearth artifacts or human remains—activities that are rare in regions as remote as Chukotka, in far northeastern Siberia. “It means nothing to say that no sites have been found between Yana and Swan Point,” says Pitulko. “Have you looked? Right now there are no [archaeologists] working from the Indigirka River to the Bering Strait, and that’s more than 2,000 kilometers. These sites must be there, and they are there. This is just a question of research and how good a map you have.”

Hoffecker agrees: “I think it’s naïve to point to the archaeological record for northern Alaska, or for Chukotka, and say, ‘Oh, we don’t have any sites that date to 18,000 years and therefore conclude that nobody was there.’ We know so little about the archaeology of Beringia before 15,000 years ago because it is very remote and undeveloped, and half of it was underwater during the last ice age.”

* * *

Five feet down in a pit at a wooded grove on Quadra Island, Daryl Fedje is handing up stone tools with the good cheer of someone hauling heirlooms out of grandmother’s trunk in the attic. From the pit, illuminated by powerful lights suspended from ropes strung between trees, Fedje passes the most promising items to his colleague Quentin Mackie, who rinses them in a small plastic container of water nailed to a tree and turns them over in his hand like a jeweler inspecting precious stones.

“Q, have a look at this,” says Fedje.

Examining a dark stone the size of a goose egg, Mackie turns to me and points out the rock’s pitted end, which is where it was used to strike objects in the toolmaking process. “This has got little facets,” says Mackie. “I’m sure it’s a hammerstone. It’s symmetrical, balanced, a good striking tool.”

Mackie drops the hammerstone into a plastic zip-lock bag with a small piece of paper denoting its depth and location in the pit.

Next up is a two-inch-long gray rock with sharp edges, the chipped planes from the fracturing process clearly visible. “I think what we have here,” says Mackie, “is a double-ended graving tool—you can drill with one end and scribe antler with the other.” It, too, is dropped into a zip-lock bag.

And on it goes, hour after hour, with Fedje and his colleagues pulling roughly 100 stone artifacts out of the pit in the course of a day: a sharp tool likely used to cut fish or meat, the bottom half of a small spear point, and numerous stone flakes—the byproducts of the toolmaking process.

Fedje believes that an especially promising area for archaeologists to apply his group’s techniques is the southeastern coast of Alaska and the northern end of the Gulf of Alaska. “At just five feet above current sea level, you could find places that were great for people 16,000 years ago,” he says.

Ted Goebel, associate director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M University, says that recent developments in genetics, coupled with the work of Fedje and his colleagues, have spurred his desire to search for early Americans in far-flung reaches of Alaska, including tributaries of the Yukon River and parts of the Seward Peninsula.

“Five years ago I would have told you that you were full of crap if you were suggesting that there were humans in Alaska or far Northeast Asia 20,000 or 25,000 years ago,” says Goebel. “But the more we hear from the geneticists, the more we really have to be thinking outside that box.”

Michael Waters, director of Texas A&M’s Center for the Study of the First Americans, which has found pre-Clovis sites in Texas and Florida, says Fedje and colleagues have come up with “a brilliant strategy” for finding game-changing artifacts where archaeologists have never searched. “It’s some of the most exciting stuff I’ve seen in years,” Waters says. “I’m rooting for them to find that early site.”