The
remains of two Ice Age infants, buried more than 11,000 years ago
at a site in Alaska, represent the youngest human remains from that
era ever found in northern North America, according to a new paper
published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The site and its artifacts provide new insights into funeral
practices and other rarely preserved aspects of life among people
who inhabited the area thousands of years ago, according to Ben
Potter, a researcher at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the
paper's lead author.
Potter led the archaeological team that made the discovery in
fall of 2013 at an excavation of the Upward Sun River site, near
the Tanana River in central Alaska. The researchers worked closely
with local and regional Native tribal organizations as they conducted
their research. The National Science Foundation funded the work.
Potter and his colleagues note that the human remains and associated
burial offerings, as well as inferences about the time of year the
children died and were buried, could lead to new thinking about
how early societies were structured, the stresses they faced as
they tried to survive, how they treated the youngest members of
their society, and how they viewed death and the importance of rituals
associated with it.
Potter made the new find on the site of a 2010 excavation, where
the cremated remains of another 3-year-old child were found. The
bones of the two infants were found in a pit directly below a residential
hearth where the 2010 remains were found.
"Taken collectively, these burials and cremation reflect complex
behaviors related to death among the early inhabitants of North
America," Potter said.
In the paper, Potter and his colleagues describe unearthing
the remains of the two children in a burial pit under a residential
structure about 15 inches below the level of the 2010 find. The
radiocarbon dates of the newly discovered remains are identical
to those of the previous findabout 11,500 years agoindicating
a short period of time between the burial and cremation, perhaps
a single season.
Also found within the burials were unprecedented grave offerings.
They included shaped stone points and associated antler foreshafts
decorated with abstract incised lines, representing some of the
oldest examples of hafted compound weapons in North America.
"The presence of hafted points may reflect the importance of
hunting implements in the burial ceremony and with the population
as whole," the paper notes.
The researchers also examined dental and skeletal remains to
determine the probable age and sex of the infants at the time of
the death: One survived birth by a few weeks, while the other died
in utero. The presence of three deaths within a single highly mobile
foraging group may indicate resource stress, such as food shortages,
among these early Americans.
Such finds are valuable to science because, except in special
circumstances like those described in the paper, there is little
direct evidence about social organization and mortuary practices
of such early human cultures, which had no written languages.
The artifactsincluding the projectile points and plant
and animal remainsmay also help to build a more complete picture
of early human societies and how they were structured, as well as
how they survived climate changes at the end of the last great Ice
Age. The presence of two burial eventsthe buried infants and
cremated childwithin the same dwelling could also indicate
relatively longer-term residential occupation of the site than previously
expected.
The remains of salmon-like fish and ground squirrels in the
burial pit indicate that the site was likely occupied by hunter-gatherers
between June and August.
"The deaths occurred during the summer, a time period when regional
resource abundance and diversity was high and nutritional stress
should be low, suggesting higher levels of mortality than may be
expected give our current understanding" of survival strategies
of the period, the authors write.
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