The Archaeology of Ushki Lake, Kamchatka, and the Pleistocene Peopling of the Americas

The Ushki Paleolithic sites of Kamchatka, Russia, have long been thought to contain information critical to the peopling of the Americas, especially the origins of Clovis. New radiocarbon dates indicate that human occupation of Ushki began only 13,000 calendar years ago—nearly 4000 years later than...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Published in:Science
Main Authors: Goebel, Ted, Waters, Michael R., Dikova, Margarita
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) 2003
Subjects:
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1086555
https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/science.1086555
Description
Summary:The Ushki Paleolithic sites of Kamchatka, Russia, have long been thought to contain information critical to the peopling of the Americas, especially the origins of Clovis. New radiocarbon dates indicate that human occupation of Ushki began only 13,000 calendar years ago—nearly 4000 years later than previously thought. Although biface industries were widespread across Beringia contemporaneous to the time of Clovis in western North America, these data suggest that late-glacial Siberians did not spreadinto Beringia until the endof the Pleistocene, perhaps too recently to have been ancestral to proposedpre-Clovis populations in the Americas.