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Wooly mammoth movements tied to earliest Alaska hunting camps
https://phys.org/news/2024-01-wooly-mammoth-movements-earliest-alaska.html [phys.org]
Researchers have linked the travels of a 14,000-year-old wooly mammoth with the oldest known human settlements in Alaska, providing clues about the relationship between the iconic species and some of the earliest people to travel across the Bering Land Bridge.
Scientists made those connections by using isotope analysis to study the life of a female mammoth, named Élmayųujey'eh, by the Healy Lake Village Council. A tusk from Elma was discovered at the Swan Point archaeological site in Interior Alaska. Samples from the tusk revealed details about Elma and the roughly 1,000-kilometer journey she took through Alaska and northwestern Canada during her lifetime.
Isotopic data, along with DNA from other mammoths at the site and archaeological evidence, indicates that early Alaskans likely structured their settlements to overlap with areas where mammoths congregated. Those findings, highlighted in the journal Science Advances, provide evidence that mammoths and early hunter-gatherers shared habitat in the region. The long-term predictable presence of wooly mammoths would have attracted humans to the area.
"She wandered around the densest region of archaeological sites in Alaska," said Audrey Rowe, a University of Alaska Fairbanks Ph.D. student and lead author of the paper. "It looks like these early people were establishing hunting camps in areas that were frequented by mammoths."
The mammoth tusk was excavated and identified in 2009 by Charles Holmes, affiliate research professor of anthropology at UAF, and François Lanoë, research associate in archaeology at the University of Alaska Museum of the North.
They found Elma's tusk and the remains of two related juvenile mammoths, along with evidence of campfires, the use of stone tools, and butchered remains of other game. All of this "indicates a pattern consistent with human hunting of mammoths," said Ben Potter, an archaeologist and professor of anthropology at UAF.
