Alaska Stable Isotope Facility, University of Alaska Fairbanks, AK, USA.
Department of Marine Biology, University of Alaska Fairbanks, AK, USA.
Sci Adv. 2024 Jan 19;10(3):eadk0818. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adk0818. Epub 2024 Jan 17.
Woolly mammoths in mainland Alaska overlapped with the region's first people for at least a millennium. However, it is unclear how mammoths used the space shared with people. Here, we use detailed isotopic analyses of a female mammoth tusk found in a 14,000-year-old archaeological site to show that she moved ~1000 kilometers from northwestern Canada to inhabit an area with the highest density of early archaeological sites in interior Alaska until her death. DNA from the tusk and other local contemporaneous archaeological mammoth remains revealed that multiple mammoth herds congregated in this region. Early Alaskans seem to have structured their settlements partly based on mammoth prevalence and made use of mammoths for raw materials and likely food.
阿拉斯加大陆的猛犸象与该地区的第一批人类至少重叠了一千年。然而,猛犸象如何利用与人类共享的空间尚不清楚。在这里,我们使用在一个 14000 年前的考古遗址中发现的雌性猛犸象象牙的详细同位素分析来表明,她从加拿大西北部迁徙了约 1000 公里,居住在阿拉斯加内陆地区人口密度最高的地区,直到她去世。来自象牙和其他当地同期考古猛犸象遗骸的 DNA 表明,多个猛犸象群聚集在该地区。早期的阿拉斯加人似乎部分根据猛犸象的存在来规划他们的定居点,并利用猛犸象作为原材料,可能还有食物。