Arctic Beringia and Native American Origins

ABSTRACT

The central lowland of Beringia (aka the Bering land bridge) has been viewed alternately as a barrier or a refugium to the Native American founder population during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). Here we suggest that an equally – if not more – likely LGM home for the founder population is the arctic zone of Beringia. People were drawn to eastern arctic Beringia during the post-LGM Younger Dryas (YD) cold period and occupied western arctic Beringia during the cold interval preceding the LGM (GS5/HE3). Arctic Beringia probably contained adequate resources for an LGM human population, especially across the exposed East Siberian Arctic Shelf (“Northwest Beringian Plain”), which supported an extensive steppe-tundra habitat populated by mammoth and other large mammals before and during the LGM. An arctic Beringian refugium would explain a growing body of evidence that indicates an early (or pre-) LGM divergence of the Native American founder population from its Asian source.

KEYWORDS:

• Beringian environments
• Native American founder population
• “arctic standstill”
• East Siberian Arctic Shelf
• Last Glacial Maximum

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to E. N. Mashchenko, A. V. Protopopov, and I. Pavlov, as well as to the other members of the informal “Beringia Working Group,” including L. Bourgeon, L. J. Hlusko, J. A. Raff, D. H. O’Rourke, E. Yu. Pavlova, V. V. Pitul’ko, G. R. Scott, M. A. Sicoli, and J. L. Tackney for sharing ideas and information pertinent to this paper. Two anonymous reviewers for PaleoAmerica provided comments on the draft, which were helpful in preparing the final version of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

John F. Hoffecker is a fellow at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His research has focused primarily on eastern Europe and Beringia, and he has written numerous books and articles, including A Prehistory of the North: Human Settlement of the Higher Latitudes (2005), Human Ecology of Beringia (with Scott Elias) (2007), and Modern Humans: Their African Origin and Global Dispersal (2017).

Scott A. Elias is a professor of Quaternary Science at the University of London Royal Holloway, London. His research has focused primarily on the paleoenvironments and paleoecology of Beringia, through the study of fossil insects, and he has published numerous books and articles exploring these and other topics, including Encyclopedia of Quaternary Science (2013, Elsevier, Amsterdam), Human Ecology of Beringia (with John Hoffecker) (2007, Columbia University Press), and The Ice Age History of Alaska National Parks (1995, Smithsonian Institution Press).

Olga Potapova is Collections Curator and Manager at The Mammoth Site of Hot Springs, South Dakota. As a paleontologist, her research has focused primarily on the evolution and ecology of large mammals in the Pleistocene Arctic. Among her recent publications are articles in the journals Mammal Research, Quaternary International, Global Change Biology, and Doklady Biological Sciences, in which she presents results of investigations of frozen mummies of horse, mammoth, and bison.

ORCID

John F. Hoffecker http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6132-3012

Scott A. Elias http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0292-6718

Olga Potapova http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3589-2489

Notes

1 The wetlands probably attracted large numbers of waterfowl in the late spring/early summer months, while the extensive formation of peat deposits represent a potential fuel source.

2 The geographic definition of Beringia used here extends from the LGM margin of the coalesced Laurentide/Cordilleran ice sheets (or Mackenzie River) in the east to the Verkhoyansk Mountains (near the Lena River) in the west (see Hoffecker and Elias 2007, 2–5). “Arctic Beringia” corresponds to the areas within these boundaries above latitude 66° North.

3 The LGM is defined here broadly as the period between the end of MIS 3 (or beginning of MIS 2) and the final interstadial of the Pleistocene (GI1), which began ∼15,000 cal yr BP, thus including GS4–GS2.

4 A corresponding decline in floristic diversity also is reported for arctic Beringia during the LGM (e.g., Willerslev et al. 2014).

5 A new analysis of the vegetation based on environmental DNA and nematode assemblage composition (rather than pollen) reveals an arctic steppe-tundra flora dominated by forbs, with a woody component, and Willerslev et al. (2014) speculated that mammoth and other large mammals supplemented their diet with high-protein forbs. The stomach contents of an arctic Beringian mammoth that died during the middle of the LGM contained a large quantity of dwarf willow (van Geel et al. 2008).

6 The New Siberian Islands have yielded large quantities of mammoth tusk (estimated 10–12 tons per year) for commercial ivory collection during the past 200 years (Zimov et al. 2012, 40).

7 Sher et al. (2005, 564) concluded that mammoth, bison, and saiga populations in the East Siberian Arctic declined during the LGM due to reduced carrying capacity and that “the decrease in their numbers correlates with the decrease in relatively thermophilic insects.”

8 Lorenzen et al. (2011) emphasize that each taxon responded differently to the changes in climate during the past 50,000 years.

9 Nettle (1997) argued the reverse of Nichols (1990), suggesting that language stock diversity decreased rather than increased with time. In a response, Nichols (2008, 1115) observed that New Guinea, which was settled more than 50,000 years ago, exhibits extremely high language family diversity, and argued that multiple factors affect stock diversity.

10 Pinotti et al. (2019) estimated a “short Beringian standstill” of 2700–4600 years but assumed a date of entry or dispersal in the Americas of 19,500 cal yr BP, which is significantly earlier than the date of dispersal estimated by most other geneticists and archaeologists (i.e., < 15,000 cal yr BP).

11 Raghavan et al. (2015) estimated a period of genetic isolation (or population “standstill”) for the Native American founder group of ∼8000 years.

12 Sikora et al. (2019, supplementary information) found that Native Americans were more closely related to the 24,000-year-old Mal'ta child in southern Siberia (Raghavan et al. 2013) than to the Yana group, which is consistent with the conclusion that ancestral Native Americans represent a separate lineage that diverged from a Siberian source population at a later time. 

13 There is a special problem with the northeast Asian maritime area (e.g., Hokkaido) because the dental anthropology and paleogenomics of its population at the end of the LGM indicates that they do not represent a credible source for Native Americans (Adachi, Shinoda, and Izuho 2015; Gakuhari et al. 2019; Hanihara 1990; Scott et al. 2018b).

14 More than half of this area lies east of the Verkhoyansk Mountains and within the boundaries of western Beringia, as defined here. As such, it represents a large proportion of the total area of Beringia during both MIS 3 and MIS 2/LGM, and probably supported a major component of the large mammalian biomass of Beringia before and during the LGM.

15 Some evidence of human activity dating to the LGM has been reported in the form of mammoth remains exhibiting possible tool cut marks (Pitulko, Pavlova, and Nikolskiy 2017, 135–140).

16 In addition to a possible LGM occupation at Bluefish Caves, Vachula et al. (2019) report elevated coprostanol:stigmastanol ratios attributable to humans in sediments of LGM age from cores extracted from a lake (E5) on the North Slope of Alaska (latitude 68° North).

17 There is a long history of research and speculation regarding the role of arctic adaptation in shaping the living peoples of East Asia (e.g., Coon, Garn, and Birdsell 1950).

18 Wooller et al. (2018) base their reconstruction of BLB environments on the analysis of cores extracted from the floor of a volcanic lake on St. Paul Island, which represented an isolated upland feature sitting on a level and poorly drained lowland.