Yana RHS-30KYR Siberian arctic habitation

[Daryl Habel]

Dear friends,

I'm surprised that this find of a 30,000 year old archaeological site in the eastern Siberian arctic, the first of its kind in all of Beringia, has not received more comment.  I've been somewhat out-of-the-loop, so to speak, with medical problems for the past six weeks, but did get a chance to read the article last week.

The article makes a big fuss over the bone artifacts, certainly important and interesting, but the lithic artifacts are intriguing, also.  In spite of the age, which is well-dated by a good series of coherent and consistent standard and AMS 14C dates centered on about 27,000 rcyr bp (calibrated to 30 kyr bp), the lithic assemblage seems - and I emphasize that this is only my amateur unschooled impression - to have a more LP/MP cast to it, rather than what we usually ascribe to Upper Paleolithic.  Lots of choppers, scrapers, flakes, and some bifaces, rather devoid of blades and blade cores and such.  Does it seem that way to any of our trained archaeologists, or is this my imagination?

A cut-and-paste synopsis, with abstract, from the journal Science website follows:

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The Yana RHS Site: Humans in the Arctic Before the Last Glacial Maximum

Volume 303, Number 5654, Issue of 2 Jan 2004, pp. 52-56.
Copyright © 2004 by The American Association for the Advancement of Science. All rights reserved.

V. V. Pitulko,1* P. A. Nikolsky,2 E. Yu. Girya,1 A. E. Basilyan,2 V. E. Tumskoy,3 S. A. Koulakov,1 S. N. Astakhov,1 E. Yu. Pavlova,4 M. A. Anisimov4

1 Institute for the History of Material Culture, Russian Academy of Sciences, 18 Dvortsovaya nab., St. Petersburg 191186, Russia.
2 Geological Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, 7 Pyzhevsky pereulok, Moscow 119017, Russia.
3 Geological Research Laboratory of the North, Faculty of Geography, Moscow State University, Leninskie Gory, Moscow 119992, Russia.
4 Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute, 38 Bering Street, St. Petersburg 199397, Russia.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: archeo@archeo.ru, pitulko.volodya@nmnh.si.edu

Abstract:
 
A newly discovered Paleolithic site on the Yana River, Siberia, at 71°N, lies well above the Arctic circle and dates to 27,000 radiocarbon years before present, during glacial times. This age is twice that of other known human occupations in any Arctic region. Artifacts at the site include a rare rhinoceros foreshaft, other mammoth foreshafts, and a wide variety of tools and flakes. This site shows that people adapted to this harsh, high-latitude, Late Pleistocene environment much earlier than previously thought.

Related articles in Science:

ARCHAEOLOGY:
A Surprising Survival Story in the Siberian Arctic

Richard Stone
Science 2004 303: 33. (in News Focus) [Summary] [Full Text]  
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Also, the Associated Press  news story can be read online at:

CLICK HERE

Cheers,
Dar

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

Dear friends,

I'm surprised that this find of a 30,000 year old archaeological site in the eastern Siberian arctic, the first of its kind in all of Beringia, has not received more comment.  I've been somewhat out-of-the-loop, so to speak, with medical problems for the past six weeks, but did get a chance to read the article last week.

The article makes a big fuss over the bone artifacts, certainly important and interesting, but the lithic artifacts are intriguing, also.  In spite of the age, which is well-dated by a good series of coherent and consistent standard and AMS 14C dates centered on about 27,000 rcyr bp (calibrated to 30 kyr bp), the lithic assemblage seems - and I emphasize that this is only my amateur unschooled impression - to have a more LP/MP cast to it, rather than what we usually ascribe to Upper Paleolithic.  Lots of choppers, scrapers, flakes, and some bifaces, rather devoid of blades and blade cores and such.  Does it seem that way to any of our trained archaeologists, or is this my imagination?

Dar,

Like you, I am surprised (?) by the lack of comments --  And no, it is not your "amateur unschooled impression" or "imagination".

The site itself, with an apparently valid series of dates, flies in the face of all the "palaeoanthropologically correct, majority" scenarios that most – I should add, North American researchers -- have come up with.  What it says, at the very least, is that by 27,000 years ago (uncalibrated), or 30,000 years ago (calibrated), human groups were capable of living in westernmost Beringia, thanks, in part,  to a (lithic) technology that does show definite signs of being  "MP-UP transitional".

Another reason why I find this paper particularly interesting, is that it will force people to give some attention to the evidence from Eastern Beringia, namely, from the Bluefish Caves and the Old Crow Flats, in the Northern Yukon.

More later,

Jacques Cinq-Mars

[Mikey Brass]

Dar,

The site itself, with an apparently valid series of dates, flies in the face of all the "palaeoanthropologically correct, majority" scenarios that most – I should add, North American researchers -- have come up with.  What it says, at the very least, is that by 27,000 years ago (uncalibrated), or 30,000 years ago (calibrated), human groups were capable of living in westernmost Beringia, thanks, in part,  to a (lithic) technology that does show definite signs of being  "MP-UP transitional".

Another reason why I find this paper particularly interesting, is that it will force people to give some attention to the evidence from Eastern Beringia, namely, from the Bluefish Caves and the Old Crow Flats, in the Northern Yukon.

More later,

Jacques Cinq-Mars

I have a view that archaeologists working on the MP-UP transition simply are not versed, or well-versed, in evolutionary archaeological & behavioural ecological theoretical frameworks.

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

I have a view that archaeologists working on the MP-UP transition simply are not versed, or well-versed, in evolutionary archaeological & behavioural ecological theoretical frameworks.

Mikey,

I am curious, here. Could you be a bit more explicit?

Jacques

[Daryl Habel]

Dar,

Like you, I am surprised (?) by the lack of comments --  And no, it is not your "amateur unschooled impression" or "imagination".

The site itself, with an apparently valid series of dates, flies in the face of all the "palaeoanthropologically correct, majority" scenarios that most – I should add, North American researchers -- have come up with.  What it says, at the very least, is that by 27,000 years ago (uncalibrated), or 30,000 years ago (calibrated), human groups were capable of living in westernmost Beringia, thanks, in part,  to a (lithic) technology that does show definite signs of being  "MP-UP transitional".

Another reason why I find this paper particularly interesting, is that it will force people to give some attention to the evidence from Eastern Beringia, namely, from the Bluefish Caves and the Old Crow Flats, in the Northern Yukon.

More later,

Jacques Cinq-Mars

Dear Jacques,  

Thanks for the confirmation that my impression was not all imagination.  I'm with you in hoping that this will persuade some folks to re-appraise the evidence from Eastern Beringia.  

In the meantime, I'm posting the URL for Bruce Bradley's very good article describing the Clovis 'foreshafts', which are similar in design to those found at Yana RHS.  Be sure to follow the links to the 'figures' in the sections covering the East Wenatchee, Washington; Anzick, Montana; and Sheaman, Wyoming sites, in particular, since these lead to some fine illustrations of these artifacts.

Go to:

http://www.primtech.net/ivory/ivory.html

Regards,
Dar

[Mikey Brass]

Mikey,

I am curious, here. Could you be a bit more explicit?

Jacques

The various assemblages have fossil directeurs, leading one to expect that at X MSA site we should find Y,C and R. It's a static way of viewing the archaeological record. There are matters not only of the concept of evolutionary drift (as per evolutionary archaeology), but concerns other than say source material availability like what the people decided was necessary for themselves. Just because a community over the ridge made tools conforming to our modern expectations doesn't necessarily translate into another community having to follow the same pattern.

There is a nice article in American Antiquity which expounds upon this:

Schiffer, M. and Skibo, J. 1997. The Explanation of Artifact Variability. American Antiquity 62, 27-50.

I am also reminded of a case from West Africa where a Mousterian-like assemblage was found and, on the basis of typology alone, was automatically assumed to be pre-100kya. Radiocarbon dating was eventually applied and the site dates from the Holocene.

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

All,

Kudos to S. Tushingham and CA for taking notice -- however briefly -- of the momentous Yana report which, clearly, has yet to be fully and well digested by the luminaries of both the standard“Early peopling of the New World” orthodoxy and its recent “coastal” or “wet” avatar.

Tushingham, S. 2005. Oldest Arctic Site Discovered. Current Anthropology 46(1): 1

A recently discovered site on the Yana River in Siberia has been dated to 27,000 radiocarbon years before present, twice the age of any other known Arctic habitation. V. V. Pitulko et al. provide extensive radiometric and geomorphological evidence to characterize the Yana RHS site, 71°N, as the oldest known Arctic site in the world (Science 303 [2004]). Eastern Siberia was previously thought to have been occupied no earlier than 20,000 to 22,000years before present, and most believed that its severe environment would have made human occupation impossible before 18,000 years ago, at the start of the Last Glacial Maximum. The artifacts include a wide variety of lithic tools and flakes and a bone awl or punch. Most of the numerous Pleistocene bones, including those of many species of megafauna, show signs of scraping, butchering, or cooking. Additionally, three foreshafts (short, detachable pieces between the point and the main shaft of a projectile), two of mammoth and one of wooly rhinoceros, were found. Foreshafts were a technological advantage for big-game hunters, allowing for expeditious replacement of broken points. The rhinoceros foreshaft strongly resembles Clovis foreshafts found in North America. The site is located not far from the Bering land bridge, which connected Asia and North America at the time, and it firmly places human habitation in the high Arctic before Clovis (ca.13,000 years ago), suggesting that human migration to the Americas was possible prior to the Last Glacial Maximum.

The article Tushingham is referring to is:

Pitulko, V. V., P. A. Nikolsky, E. Yu. Girya, A. E. Basilyan, V. E. Tumskoy, S. A. Koulakov, S. N. Astakhov, E. Yu. Pavlova, and M. A. Anisimov. 2004. The Yana RHS site: Humans in the Arctic before the Last Glacial Maximum. Science 303: 52–56.

… and can be found HERE

Jacques Cinq-Mars