“It was sitting within a dwelling feature, and all around it were really bashed-up bison bones. And there were a lot of quartz and quartzite-rock hammerstones, which were the hammers they used to break the bones. So we think they were using these stones to fully process the bones to extract marrow and likely to render grease. This was all happening near a large earth oven,” Graf said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A ridge above the Tanana River<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
“The site is on a small ridge that overlooks the Tanana River, which is a major river system of the region. Today there are spruce trees all around. During the last part of the Pleistocene, the Ice Age, it was covered by shrub-tundra vegetation,” Graf said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The name means “they were there” in Alaska Native Athabascan, and it was given by elders of Healy Lake Village. The site, formerly called McDonald Creek, was first found in 2010 during a cultural resources survey run by Colorado State University’s Center for Environmental Management of Military Lands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Behind the camp, a bedrock knob rises about 1,424 feet (434 meters) above the floodplain. In the study, the authors write that this position “provided inhabitants shelter from northwesterly winds as well as a commanding view of the Tanana River for tens of kilometers both up and down its floodplain.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Marrow, an earth oven and a lean-to<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The team excavated a 25-square-meter (269-square-foot) block and dated the layers with 66 radiocarbon dates. The oldest living surface held a hearth, a small pit and a post mold inside a charcoal-stained oval, which the researchers read as a lean-to that opened to the south.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few yards away lay a pile of discarded bones and a large burn feature packed with 230 pieces of fire-cracked rock, more than 5,200 bone fragments and over 27,000 tiny stone flakes. The authors interpret it as an earth oven, a pit filled with hot rocks, built “to likely slow-cook meat, probably for a large family group.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“The considerable time and energy investment required to construct this feature suggests a lengthy stay or expected return visits,” the authors write, adding that the evidence fits “a group larger than a small hunting party” and a stay “more consistent with a base camp than temporary hunting camp.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Needles, ochre and a long menu<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The diggers recovered eight bone needle fragments, four of them with part of the eye still intact. Seven were made from dense mammal long bones and one probably from a bird bone, and they came with an awl tip and an antler pendant with a drilled hole. Near a cluster of bison bones they also found a thin patch of red mineral, the kind of pigment often called ochre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In a Focus commentary published alongside the study, Spencer Pelton of the University of Wyoming calls the needles “the oldest in the western hemisphere” and links them to similar tools from the Old World Upper Paleolithic about 23,000 years ago. The Upper Paleolithic had started far earlier: in Germany, people were carving mammoth ivory into tiny bird figurines<\/a> about 40,000 years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nearly 7,000 bones turned up in the oldest layer, and 373 have been identified so far. They include bison, musk ox, caribou, mammoth, horse, arctic hare, wolf, red and arctic foxes, lynx and lemming, plus birds from ptarmigan and grouse to swans, geese, cranes, gulls and a raven.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Like at Sh\u00e9g’ Xdaltth’\u00ed’, they hunted mammoth, bison and horse. Those three particular sorts of animals are extinct now. But then they also hunted caribou, which is extant today. Indigenous people in Alaska today hunt caribou. It’s a really important resource for them, and it always has been,” Graf said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The stone tools include six complete or nearly complete bifaces, blades flaked on both faces, with a distinctive diamond outline and stems ground along the edges, a sign they were fitted into handles or shafts. Other early points from central Alaska, known as Chindadn points, are normally triangular or teardrop-shaped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “It’s the only site in Alaska that features this clear diamond shape. And the only other places at this time that have such points in a northern context are on the Russian side of the land bridge. It suggests people traveled across the Bering Land Bridge to and possibly from this location,” Graf said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The study names those western matches as Nikita Lake and Berelekh, in the Yana-Indigirka Lowland of northeastern Siberia. The team still calls the Alaskan pieces “hafted bifaces,” and avoids deciding between knives, spear tips or spearthrower darts<\/a> until microscopic wear studies are done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All 25 obsidian artifacts came from the Batza T\u00e9na source about 230 miles (370 kilometers) to the west-northwest, and a wolf jaw from the camp does not match dire wolves, Pleistocene Beringian wolves or modern northern U.S. wolves. That, the authors write, suggests “the site’s human inhabitants may have been dog owners.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n An area of east-central Alaska and southwest Yukon centered on the Tanana basin already holds 19 of the 28 known Beringian occupations from before or during the Clovis era, the time 13,200 to 12,750 years ago when fluted spear points spread across North America. The authors call it “the densest concentration of pre-Clovis-aged and Clovis-aged archaeology in the Americas.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Sh\u00e9g’ Xdaltth’\u00ed’ is remarkable because it is the oldest site in the Americas containing a large and rich assemblage of features, artifacts, and faunal refuse indicative of prolonged residential occupation, providing an unprecedented glimpse into the lives of North America’s first residents,” Pelton writes in his Focus commentary<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He argues that the camp looks far more like Clovis-age sites to the south than like many older claims, and adds that by comparison “many pre-Clovis sites south of the ice sheets barely look like sites at all.” The remark lands in a field still debating evidence such as the human footprints in New Mexico dated to 21,000 to 23,000 years ago<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Should one decide to devote their career to excavating pre-Clovis sites in the Americas, it is clear where they should go to guarantee a return on that investment: North, to Alaska,” Pelton writes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The authors go further and propose two separate streams out of Asia, one carrying microblade technology from the Lena River basin and another, linking Berelekh, Sh\u00e9g’ Xdaltth’\u00ed’ and the Nenana Complex of central Alaska, coming from arctic northeast Asia. “We posit that the Late Glacial interassemblage variability now documented between the microblade and nonmicroblade industries on both sides of the Bering Land Bridge represents cultural and not just behavioral differences,” they write.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Put the dates in a row and the camp’s place gets clearer. The White Sands footprints are put at 21,000 to 23,000 years ago. Swan Point comes next, around 14,200. Then this camp, at 13,800, with return visits at 13,000 and 12,700, and Clovis points, which spread between 13,200 and 12,750.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The camp is not the oldest in the region, since nearby Swan Point dates to about 14,200 years ago. Settling whether its people were Ancient Beringians or part of a separate population “will require ancient genomes,” the authors write.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Much of the analysis is still underway. Protein-based bone identification and size studies are ongoing, the dwelling and the earth oven both run into the walls of the trench, and the team notes that wolves and the earliest dogs can be “potentially indistinguishable in the archaeological record,” so the dog question stays open.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The dating model also narrowed the age of the oldest layer to 13,850 to 13,500 years ago, and the authors note that this may be “potentially ignoring signs of multiple occupation events” that began as early as about 14,050 years ago and ended as late as about 13,120 years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Graf wrote the paper with Ted Goebel, KU professor of anthropology and department chair, KU doctoral student Mia Harbort and KU undergraduate Mason Sewing, among others. The author list also includes Evelynn Combs of the Healy Lake Tribal Council and Donald Charlie of the Nenana Native Association.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “I remember taking North American archaeology during undergrad. I fell in love with the Bering Land Bridge concept: People hunting megafauna and traveling from one massive continent to another across exposed continental shelf. Studying extinct animals and the tools hunters used to take these animals. I just got caught up in the ‘wow’ of that,” Graf said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"Bone](\"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/en-109-medio1-bone-needles-osseous-tools.jpg\")
Diamond-shaped points with Siberian cousins<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Diamond-shaped](\"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/en-109-medio2-diamond-shaped-bifaces.jpg\")
A turning point for the first Americans debate<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
What the camp cannot settle yet<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
A team that includes Alaska Native partners<\/h2>\n\n\n\n