Archaeologists Find a 13,800-Year-Old Camp in Alaska, the Oldest Dwelling in the Americas

Archaeologists digging in interior Alaska have found a camp that is 13,800 years old. Live Science says it holds the earliest known dwelling in the Western Hemisphere, along with the earliest needles, and possibly bones of the earliest domesticated dogs in the Americas. There are thousands of artifacts and fossils, and stone tools that show links across the Bering Land Bridge.

The site is called Shég Xdaltth'í, which means "They Were There" in the Alaska Native Athabascan language. It is about 34 miles (55 kilometers) southeast of Fairbanks. Some of the first people to settle in North America used the camp off and on for a thousand years. It lies in eastern Beringia, the region that joined northeast Asia and northwest North America during the last ice age. Studies suggest the ancestors of today's Indigenous Americans came to the continent around 21,000 years ago, but much is still unknown because sites there are often small seasonal hunting camps, scattered across a big area.

Kelly Graf, an archaeologist at the University of Kansas and first author of the study, said she expected to find hunting tools around a hearth or two. Instead the team found a base camp with tens of thousands of artifacts. It was a total surprise, she said. The study appeared on October 14 in the journal Science Advances.

The earliest layer, from about 13,800 years ago, shows people settling in. The team found a hearth, a small pit and a dirt stain left by a wooden post, probably the remains of a lean-to or early tent house. They also found stone tools, bone needles and a pendant made from antler. Close by was an earth oven full of charcoal and animal bones, probably used to slow-cook meat for a large family group. The researchers wrote that early Alaskans knew their surroundings well.

The stone tools are diamond-shaped and unique to central Alaska, but they look like tools found much farther west, in northern Siberia. Obsidian, a volcanic rock, was brought to the site from hundreds of miles northwest. Bones from more than a dozen wolf-like animals point to another link to Asia.