Fluted Spear Points Prove Early Native Americans Liked to Travel

Analyses of numerous spear points with fluted edges found in northern Alaska and Yukon, and artifacts from further south in Canada, the Great Plains, and eastern United States, prove that the Ice Age peopling of the Americas was much more complex than previously believed. The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could change how scientists view the traveling patterns and routes of early humans from 14,000 to 12,000 years ago as they settled in numerous parts of North America.

Early humans. Image credit: University of Utah via kued.org.

“Using new digital methods of analyses utilized for the first time in such a study of these artifacts, we found that early settlers in the emerging ice-free corridor of interior western Canada were traveling north to Alaska, not south from Alaska, as previously interpreted,” said co-author Professor Ted Goebel, an anthropologist with Texas AM University.

“Although during the late Ice Age there were two possible routes for the first Americans to follow on their migration from the Bering Land Bridge area southward to temperate North America, it now looks like only the Pacific coastal route was used, while the interior Canadian route may not have been fully explored until millennia later, and when it was, primarily from the south.”

“The findings of these fluted spear points provide archaeological evidence supporting new genetic models explaining how humans colonized the New World.”

Fluted point examples included in the analysis: (A) the northern fluted complex, (B) Northeast, (C) Folsom, (D) Clovis and Clovis Caches, and (E) Great Lakes. Image credit: Heather L. Smith Ted Goebel, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1800312115.

Traditional interpretations of the peopling of the Americas have predicted that early inhabitants migrated from Siberia through Alaska, and then followed the ice-free corridor that gradually opened in western Canada to reach the Great Plains of the western United States.

But newer genetic studies of ancient Siberians, Alaskans, and Americans, as well as the discovery of new sites south of the Canadian ice sheets predating the opening of the ice-free corridor, suggest instead that the first Americans passed along the Pacific coast.

“The key is that the projectile points are related in their technology and morphology, and the way in which some of these characteristics vary forms the pattern of an ancestral-descendent relationship,” said lead author Dr. Heather Smith, from Eastern New Mexico University.

“This suggests that the people who carried the artifacts to these locations were related as well.”

“It shows that these early people in western Canada and Alaska were descendent of Clovis (the first settlers of North America) and they used the same type of weapons to hunt for food, especially bison. These makers of fluted points were not just all over mid-continent North America but were also migrating northward back to the Arctic.”

“These artifacts can be used to document migration patterns of prehistoric peoples.”

Map showing extent of glacial ice at 12,000 and 11,000 years ago, examples of regional fluted-point forms, and inferred dispersal directions of fluted-point technological groups from a Clovis ‘heartland’ north into the Ice-Free Corridor and Beringia, east to the northern Great Lakes and far Northeast, and back to the northwest along the southern edge of the Laurentide ice sheet. Clovis existed in the American Southeast, too, but points from this region were not included in the present analysis. Image credit: Heather L. Smith Ted Goebel, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1800312115.

“The spear points prove that the peopling of the Americas was much more complex than we had believed and that these early settlers went in a lot of different directions, not just south. We now have a better picture of what weapons they used to hunt and where their travels took them.”

“This is tangible evidence of a connection between people in the Arctic and the Mid-continent 12,000 years ago, a connection which may be either genetic or social, but ultimately, speaks volumes of the capability and adaptability of early cultures in North America.”

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Heather L. Smith Ted Goebel. Origins and spread of fluted-point technology in the Canadian Ice-Free Corridor and eastern Beringia. PNAS, published online April 2, 2018; doi: 10.1073/pnas.1800312115