Siberian Find May Give New Insight on Trek to Americas

A trove of spear points, scrapers and other artifacts discovered in central Siberia indicates that humans lived in the frigid Arctic region 30,000 years ago, almost twice as early as previously thought.

The find indicates that the early people were much more resilient and resourceful than had previously been thought and may shed new light on the peopling of the Americas. People living in the region where the artifacts were found could easily have made their way across the Bering land bridge and through the American continents.

Most early human sites in the Americas date from about 12,000 to 15,000 years ago, but some controversial finds suggest that humans could have lived here much longer. Until now, there have been few sites on the Asian side of the Bering bridge that provide evidence of the routes that might have been taken.

The new site was identified in 1993 when Russian geologist Mikhail Dashtzeren found a spear foreshaft made of rhino horn along the banks of the Yana River, about 60 miles south of its mouth at the Laptev Sea.

Following up on his find, archeologist Vladimir V. Pitulko of the Institute for the History of Material Culture in St. Petersburg and his colleagues returned and found a variety of artifacts, including other foreshafts made of rhino horn and mammoth tusks, several hundred stone points and flakes and butchered bones from mammoths, bison, cave lions and other animals.

The foreshafts bear a striking resemblance to those produced by the Clovis people, now acknowledged as the first Americans, Pitulko reported in the Jan. 2 issue of Science. That suggests the Siberians may have been their ancestors.

But experts cautioned that the stone tools were quite different from those made by the Clovis people, named after the first artifacts discovered near Clovis, N.M. The resemblance of the foreshafts could simply be an example of form following function.

Supporters of the view that the Siberians are ancestors of the Americans argue, in contrast, that the design of stone tools could have changed substantially over 15,000 years.