Not far from the Interior Alaska town of Nenana, on a ridge overlooking the Tanana River, are the ancient remains of the oldest known dwelling in the Western Hemisphere.
It's called Shég' Xdaltth'i', Athabascan for "they were there," and it dates back to about 13,800 years ago, when humans were still making their way across the Bering Land Bridge from Asia into North America.
It took a team of archaeologists and anthropologists more than a decade to unearth and interpret, along with help from the local tribe. That work culminated in a research paper published in the journal Science Advances in October.
University of Kansas anthropology professor Kelly Graf led the team. Graf says there are other sites, more like temporary hunting camps, showing humans were in the region known as Beringia somewhat earlier. But she says Shég' Xdaltth'i' stands out as the oldest site of actual habitation.
Listen to the interview at the link above. The following transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Kelly Graf: The Shég' Xdaltth'i' site, it's an early, 14,000-year-old base camp, and it's a base camp that Alaskan archeologists have been waiting to see for decades. I think the record that we know of and that we've all been studying for the past several decades is one in which most of the sites represent hunting camps, short-term camps, like logistical locations. But we haven't found the place where everybody's living and staying for for a season or for a slightly longer period, the home bases, right? So this is the place where everybody is living, habitating.
Casey Grove: You and the other folks that were involved in this research have taken a very close look at this particular site, and I wondered if you could describe that work for me. What does that look like?
KG: OK, you know, this site is on the west side of the of the Tanana River, so in order to get to the site, we actually have to take a helicopter to get there, and we get dropped off. We have to bring everything in, so we have to bring in our water, our food, and all of our gear, and then we set up camp, and it's really primitive camping, and we work at the site.
What we do at the site is we dig, you know, one-by-one-meter squares. We dig them really carefully with a trowel, methodically, you know, with a trowel. And the way we record the material is we use a total station. That's the instrument that you may see surveyors using out on the highways. That's kind of the day-to-day practice. I mean, it's it's not like Indiana Jones where we're doing crazy stuff.
And when we're excavating, I mean when we find really neat bones and stuff, we immediately hone in on that, and we carefully get the brushes out and excavate them very carefully, and then we take that location information, and we pull the bone up out of that, and we protect it in foam, and take it back to the lab.
CG: You're holding these things in your hands at some point. There's a lot that goes ahead of that to map it and make sure that you've got a good picture of where it was, and I think it's more than just bones, too, right? I mean, you mentioned lots of other artifacts, but what's what's going through your head when you have that in your hands?
KG: Yeah, I guess the first thing you think of is, "Wow, gosh, I'm the first person to hold this piece in the last 14,000 years." It's pretty amazing that someone else almost 14,000 years ago may have either made that object or used that object and then discarded it. And yeah, it's just amazing to think that that you're touching something that someone else so long ago touched.
CG: Well, I saw this research mentioned in a couple different stories, and I think one of them was like, "Look at all the stuff that they found at this archeological site." And then another one, somebody had just sent me a link directly to the research paper itself. And then I saw another headline that was like, "These scientists found the oldest known dwelling in North America," and I was like, "Oh wow, OK." And so I have to ask you: Is that what this is saying?
KG: So yeah, I mean, we think that, based on spatial analyzes. We don't have any superstructure left over from from this dwelling feature, because it just wouldn't preserve unless we were super lucky and had the perfect, perfect conditions, which we don't.
But based on the distributions of artifacts and what's known about the ways that people behave in dwellings, in shelters, it really looks like that's what this thing is. There's this obvious staining. It's about almost three meters by about a meter and a half to two meters in size. It's like the perfect kind of hunter-gatherer average house size, and so it really does look like it. And our reviewers, they obviously agreed with us at some level, right? And so, yeah, we, right now, think that's probably the case that this is the earliest structure in the Western Hemisphere.
CG: And that's the the distinction is that that we think there was a dwelling here, versus just like a hunting camp where people might have slept out for a little while?
KG: Out under the stars. Yeah, right.
CG: Was there a "eureka" moment where you pointed at and you were like, "This was a dwelling, and is obviously very, very old," or was it kind of more of a slow burn of building that understanding?
KG: Yeah, I think the dwelling was a bit of a slow burn at first. We were kind of like, "Whoa, there's just a lot going on, Is this related to a single hearth?" And then we saw, we excavated the hearth, and it was very, very obviously concentrated, but we still had this large area that was pretty charcoaly and kind of a little greasy. Like there'd just been a lot of stuff going on there to produce all of that organic material relative to the rest of the sediment at the site.
So we were scratching our heads, going, "Gosh, is that what this is? Wow, that would be really cool if that's what this is." But we had to do quite a bit of work, I think, spatially, too, doing spatial analyzes to really be able to feel like, "Yeah, that's what it is."
The problem is there have been so many interesting things that have come out of this site, it's hard to pinpoint (one). But I think maybe probably one I could give you is when one of the students was digging, and she really quietly — she didn't say anything until it was fully uncovered — and she was like, "Hey Kelly, you should come over here and look at this bone. I don't know what it is, but it's a jaw." And I was like, "Oh!" So I came running over, and I was like, "Oh my gosh, it looks like a dog jaw, you know, like a wolf or is canid of some kind," and it certainly is.
And the reason why that's neat is because everybody's interested in when dogs were domesticated, right? And geneticists had just published, right before this, a paper that predicted that the first domesticated dogs to enter the Americas across the Bering Land Bridge would have done it right around 15 to 14,000 years ago.
CG: And you think that's one that was was living with these humans, not one that had been hunted?
KG: Well, we don't know that. That's a great question. So size-wise, shape-wise, everything looks wolf, not domesticated dog. But geneticists and protein specialists that have been using proteomics to understand these, trying to get at this question of if we have wolves versus dogs in our archeological sites, they say that you may have a behaviorally domesticated wolf that morphometrically, biologically, it doesn't (look like a dog). It takes some generations for that change to happen and show up, so that you could have a wolf jaw, what looks like a wolf's jaw, and that could have been the jaw of an early domesticate, an earliest domesticate.
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