New Bering Strait Discoveries May (Finally) Smash Clovis Barrier

NOAA Map of the Bering Strait showing the shallows that once constituted the land bridge

BERING LAND BRIDGE SUBMERGED 1000 YEARS EARLIER THAN BELIEVED; USE BY FIRST AMERICANS QUESTIONED

A recent discovery by oceanographic scientists may be the final piece of evidence needed to disprove the Clovis model of New World settlement, once and for all. The discovery, announced in an October 11 press release, describes findings suggesting that the so-called Bering Land Bridge, a stretch of exposed land that allowed Pleistocene man to migrate from Siberia to Alaska, flooded about 11,000 years ago – 1000 years earlier than previously believed.

If true, this finding constitutes only the most recent of a series of blows to the once almost universally accepted 'Clovis Model', which postulated that all early sites in the Americas were from one culture – named after an archaeological site in New Mexico – and dated to no earlier than 11,200 years ago. The challenge to the theory is inherent in the revised dating: if the Clovis model rests on the belief that 11,200 years ago is the earliest humans could have arrived in the New World, and this new data proves that the latest they could have arrived is 11,000 years ago, this leaves an unbelievably short window of opportunity for nomadic hunter-gatherers to have populated a continent.

The press release, issued jointly by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, describes a paper which is being published in the October issue of Geology Magazine. In the publication, Lloyd Keigwin of Woods Hole, Neal Driscoll from Scripps at UC San Diego and Julie Brigham-Grette of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst report results from three new core sites north and west of Alaska in the Chukchi Sea.

At these locations, accumulation of sediment is more than 100 times greater than at previous sites, allowing identification of climate changes that were previously unseen. "During the expeditions, the researchers extracted the longest piston core ever obtained from the Arctic region" the press release says

"Although we have only a few cores, this is the first evidence of flooding of the Chukchi Sea by 11,000 years ago, at least 1,000 years before previously thought," Keigwin said. "The new data are also consistent with data from other recent studies, and show potential for developing ocean and climate histories of this region."

Advocates of the Clovis model have been under attack for years by notable scientists such as Tom Dillehay, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky, Lexington and University of Alberta Anthropology Professor Emeritus Alan Bryan.

The crux of the dissenters' arguments has been that increasing (if still debatable) evidence for near Clovis-barrier dates in sites located in the farthest south reaches of the Americas, such as Dillehay's own Monte Verde site in Chile, means that the culture's spread could only have been accomplished with an almost mystical rapidity. As Dillehay says in his popular paperback "The Settlement of the Americas: A New Prehistory", issued in 2000, "all that has ever been needed to nail down the pre-Clovis argument is a single finding of undeniably human-made tools (or other proof of human activity) in an undisturbed, well dated geological deposit dated before 11,200 before present time, the earliest reliable Clovis dates."

While the Woods Hole/Scripps findings don't quite meet that standard of proof, they have made the eye of the needle through which early settlers of the New World must have passed that much narrower.

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