October 1, 2012

The United States and Russia have agreed to preserve the Ice Age heritage of Beringia, an area that includes parts of northeastern Asia and northwestern North America and a land bridge that once connected them. During a recent visit to Russia, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton agreed with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to establish the Transboundary Area of Shared Beringian Heritage, a specially protected region that includes the Bering Strait and adjacent areas of Siberia and Alaska. Known as Beringia, this area is home to Inuit and Yuit peoples, who have a common language and traditions but are separated by international borders. A wide range of animals, including polar bears, whales, seals, and walruses, also live there.

At the Bering Strait in the northern Pacific Ocean, the United States and Russia are separated by about 50 miles (80 kilometers) of open water. But during the most recent ice age, huge glaciers covered much of the northern half of Earth and sea level was much lower than it is today. As a result, much of the Bering Strait was a vast stretch of dry land forming a bridge about 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) wide at its greatest extent that connected what are now Siberia and Alaska. Most scientists think the first American Indians, following the animals that they hunted, wandered across this harsh environment into North America at least 15,000 years ago. By 12,500 years ago, Indians had spread throughout the New World and were living from the Arctic in the north all the way to what became known as the Strait of Magellan in southern South America.

The Bering Stait is a narrow waterway that connects the Bering and Chukchi seas. (World Book map)

The Transboundary Area of Shared Beringian Heritage formally recognizes the symbolic links between the people and governments of Asia and North America. The new heritage area will aid conservation efforts in this natural ecosystem and promote international cooperation on scientific research and monitoring the enviroment. The new area will formally link two national parks in Alaska–the Bering Land Bridge Natural Preserve and the Cape Krusenstern National Monument–with the newly designated Beringia National Park in Chukhotka, Russia. The region will cover a total of about 7.2 million acres (2.9 million hectares).

United States President George H. W. Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev first announced plans to create a transnational park spanning the Bering Strait in 1990, but progress towards the creation of the park stalled. Many components of this new agreement are still being worked out, but officials hope to have a finalized agreement by the end of 2012.

Additional World Book articles:

• Bering, Vitus
• Paleo-Indians
  
• Prehistoric people
• Anthropology (1951) (a Back in Time article)
• The First Americans (a Special Report)

October 26, 2011

A spear point embedded in a fossilized mastodon rib discovered near Seattle is the latest archaeological finding to challenge a long-held theory that humans did not arrive in the Americas until about 13,000 years ago. Mastodons were elephant-like animals that lived across North America until they became extinct about 10,000 years ago.

Mastodons, like the two shown in this illustration, had huge tusks and wrinkled gray skin. World Book illustration by Bernard Robinson

Precise radiocarbon tests revealed that the rib dates to about 13,800 years ago. This date is several hundred years earlier than the first appearance of the Clovis culture in North America. (The Clovis culture is named for a site near Clovis, New Mexico, where remains of the culture were first recognized. The culture is identified by distinctive stone spearheads that are often found with the remains of extinct prehistoric animals.) For decades, scientists believed that the Clovis culture people were the first humans to arrive in the Western Hemisphere. The study of the mastodon rib, published in the Oct. 21, 2011, issue of the journal Science, strongly suggests that this long-held “Clovis-first” theory is wrong.

The fossil rib was discovered with other parts of the mastodon skeleton by a farmer in the late 1970′s at Sequim, Washington. Archaeologists found some signs that the mastodon had been butchered. But they did not find any stone tools that could have been used by human hunters to butcher their kill. The bones were kept in storage for nearly 30 years. Recently, scientists at the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M University took another look at the bones.

Computed tomography (CT) scans of the rib revealed an embedded spear point, showing that the animal had been killed by human hunters. The scans also showed that the broken tip of the spear point, which was made of bone, had been carefully sharpened to a needle-like point. The scientists believe the original point was about 10 inches (25 centimeters) in length. The age and location of this prehistoric kill site suggests that human beings migrated to the Americas long before the development of the Clovis culture. Most archaeologists believe that the first humans arrived in North America after crossing a shelf of land across the Bering Sea during low sea levels toward the end of the last Ice Age. These prehistoric people followed and hunted mastodons and such other large animals as camels, horses, giant bison, and mammoths that lived in the region.

Additional World Book articles:

• Indians, American
• The First Americans (a special report)