One of the first Americans—only three years old at the time—was laid to rest in a pit inside his or her house 11,500 years ago, a new excavation reveals. The ancient home site and human remains—the oldest known in subarctic North America—provide an unprecedented glimpse into the daily lives of Ice Age Americans, scientists say.
What's more, if the remains yield usable DNA, the child could help uncover just who was living on the North American side of the land bridge that likely still connected the Americas to Asia at the time, experts added.
One thing that apparently isn't a mystery is how the child was memorialized.
"You can see that the child was laid in the pit—a fire hearth inside the house—and the fire was started on top of the child," study co-author Joel Irish said. Charred wood from the pit allowed scientists to assign a radiocarbon date to the site.
After the cremation, the child's hunter-gatherer clan apparently filled the 18-inch-deep (45-centimeter-deep) hearth with soil and abandoned the dwelling. No other artifacts exist above the fill line.
Even the new find represents only 20 percent of the child's skeleton, offering few clues as to how the child died. But what's left makes it clear that the youngster died before burial and was placed in a position of peaceful repose.
"From our perspective, the child is certainly extraordinary, but the house is also unique," said study co-author Ben Potter.
The dwelling's floor had been dug about 11 inches (27 centimeters) into the ground. Poles may have supported walls and a roof, according to telltale stains in the sediment.
In other words, this was a home—the oldest known in Alaska.
"All of the other finds dating to this period or earlier tend to be associated with either short-term hunting camps, or workshops where people are gathering high-quality stone materials and working them into tools," said Potter, an anthropologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
"We picture these people as foragers hunting large game, like bison or elk. But the fishing element is kind of new, and it's kind of striking that there are so many fish."
The apparent seasonal pattern of hunting and fishing, Potter added, is similar to that practiced by later Alaska natives.
Study co-author Irish, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, noted that some of the site's stone artifacts, construction style, and animal remains recall those found in today's Siberia.
They're particularly reminiscent, he said, of Siberia's Ushki Lake. At that roughly 14,000-year-old site, excavations have revealed a culture that has some parallels with later Native American cultures. Ushki is also home to the only other known burial site of this era in the vicinity of the Bering land bridge, also called Beringia.
For more, see Brian Handwerk's article at news.nationalgeographic.com.
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