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According to a new study, early human settlements in Alaska were closely traced to the movements of a female woolly grandmother who lived 14,000 years ago. The animal traveled about 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) from northwestern Canada to interior Alaska during its lifetime.
The revelation sheds light on the relationship between the prehistoric giants and some of the first people to make their way across the Bering Land Bridge, suggesting that people would set up their seasonal hunting camps where woolly mummies were known to gather.
Researchers from the United States and Canada established the link between the two species thanks to a new tool for isotope analysis, an ancient tusk and a map of archaeological sites in Alaska. The cause belonged to a woolly mammal later named Élmayųujey’eh or, for short, Elma. The specimen was discovered in 2009 at the Swan Point archaeological site in central Alaska.
The research, said lead author Audrey Rowe, a doctoral student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, began after the discovery of a “groundbreaking” high-precision instrument at the institution’s Alaska Stable Isotope Facility that breaks down samples to analyze strontium isotopes. — chemical traces that reveal details about an animal’s life.
Rowe’s adviser, Matthew Wooller, used the same method to identify the movements of an adult male mammal for a paper published in August 2021. Wooller is the study’s senior author, a professor in the university’s College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, and the director . the isotope facility.
Strontium is a stable isotope created when the mineral rubidium, a highly reactive metal, breaks down. It’s a slow process with a half-life of 4 billion years, Rowe said. As rubidium breaks down, it turns first to radioactive strontium 87 and, many years later, to stable strontium 86.
Outside where the mammoths left, the rocks broke into soil, plants grew, the animals ate those plants, and their tusks showed the level of strontium within their diet in each layer of ivory.
Woolly tusks grew wool at a consistent daily rate, with the earliest days of the animal’s life recorded in the tops of the tusks. The layers are clearly visible when a specimen of tusk is divided along its length.
That analysis can then be traced to mineral and strontium levels in rocks around Alaska to map where Elma wandered.
“The US Geological Survey has done a pretty good job of mapping rocks in Alaska,” Rowe said.
Wooller then suggested the team overlay the local archaeological sites on top of Elma’s movements.
“And lo and behold,” Rowe said, “you had a lot of overlap between the densest area of late Pleistocene archaeological sites in Alaska right on top of the areas that Elma, our mom, was using during her life.”
The new isotopic data joins data sets created from radiocarbon and DNA analysis of two related young mummies also found at Swan Point to create a more complete picture of life 14,000 years ago.
“She was a young adult in a big world. Her isotopes showed she was malnourished and died in the same season as the seasonal hunting camp at Swan Point where her tusk was found,” Wooller said in a statement.
Other researchers agreed. “This study adds a lot to our understanding of mammoth behavior, and also provides interesting clues about the interaction between humans and mammals,” said Love Dalén, professor of evolutionary genomics at the Center for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm, Sweden. , by email. Dalén was not involved in the new research.
The publications may also encourage more scientists to seek new combinations of research tools to advance their understanding of science and history.
“Overall, I think the paper is a great example of how using a combination of different molecular tools, such as isotope, DNA and radiocarbon analyses, can provide fresh and new insights into prehistory,” said Dalén.
The results were published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.
Changing the picture of hunter-gatherers
The new evidence furthers understanding of the early relationship between woolly mammals and humans.
“(Elma) circled the densest region of archaeological sites in Alaska,” Rowe said in a statement. “It appears that these early humans were setting up hunting camps in areas that were frequented by mammoths.”
The research also expanded on what Rowe, the lead researcher, thought was the image that comes to mind when thinking of each of the species independently.
The study team commissioned the natural history illustrator Julius Csotoni to create a digital image of the two species. The final image includes the three woolly mummies found in the Swan Point area, but instead of depicting the people as aggressive hunters surrounding their prey, Rowe insisted that the artist be a family instead.
“These people were just like us, but we only see the aggressive hunting times of their lives,” she said. Hunter-gatherers had to use “sophisticated” technology to kill mammals to survive “and it really required a lot of skill.”
Rowe wanted the image, including a woman, man and children looking at the moms, to show that “these people were spending a lot of time teaching their children how to do everything.”
Jenna Schnuer is an Anchorage, Alaska-based freelance writer, editor and audio producer who focuses (primarily) on science, art and travel.
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