ARCHAEOLOGISTS UNCOVER 13,800-YEAR-OLD ALASKAN BASE CAMP

Researchers led by Kelly Graf, an anthropology professor at the University of Kansas, have described an ancient base camp in Alaska that reveals how people lived in the region nearly 14,000 years ago. The site, Shég' Xdaltth'i', meaning "they were there" in Alaska Native Athabascan, contains three occupation layers dated to 13,800, 13,000 and 12,700 years ago. The study appears in the journal Science Advances. Graf co-wrote the paper with Ted Goebel, Mia Harbort and Mason Sewing of the University of Kansas, along with academics from the US and Europe.

The site sits on a ridge above the Tanana River, a major river in the region, according to Graf. She said the area has spruce trees today but was shrub-tundra during the Pleistocene period. It lies within Beringia, once joined by the Bering Land Bridge, which researchers say formed around 35,000 years ago and linked Asia to North America, before disappearing beneath rising seas roughly 12,000 years ago to form what is now the Bering Strait. Researchers say archaeological sites across Beringia are concentrated in an area slightly larger than the US state of Maryland.

Graf said evidence from the site shows people hunted mammoth, bison and horse, species that are now extinct, as well as caribou, which remains important to indigenous communities in Alaska today. She said the findings illustrate how human populations evolved from early hunter-gatherer origins to the present day. The research team says the site adds to understanding of how humans settled the far north of North America during the Late Pleistocene period. Beringian sites from this era remain rare, researchers say, making detailed evidence from the camp significant for study of the region's earliest inhabitants.