Research Indicates That Wide Variety Of Birds Migrated To Ice Age Yukon
Aylmer, Québec, April 21, 1999 - New research reinforces the belief that the Yukon could have been a comfortable home to the first North Americans at least 25,000 years ago, and likely, much earlier. The findings indicate that an Ice Age region known as Eastern Beringia, now the northwestern Yukon, was rich with potentially human-sustaining animal life at a time when much of Canada, and the northern United States was covered with kilometre-thick glacial ice.
Conducted by scientists from the Canadian Museum of Civilization and the Canadian Museum of Nature, the research results will be presented as part of a day-long symposium on Eastern Beringian Studies, Friday, April 30th, in Whitehorse, Yukon. The symposium is a component of the Canadian Archaeological Association's 32nd annual meeting.
This latest Beringian evidence comes in the form of hundreds of tiny migratory bird bones collected in the Bluefish Caves, an archeologically rich group of three caves located about 50 kilometres southwest of Old Crow, Yukon, near the Alaskan border. The avian bones indicate the presence of at least 18 species of migratory birds in the area over a period from about 25 000 to 10 000 years ago.
"When these birds arrived there was an environment productive enough for them to feed and breed. And the evidence of juvenile bones indicates that these migratory birds were breeding successfully in Eastern Beringia," says Darlene McCuaig-Balkwill, a zooarcheologist with the Canadian Museum of Nature.
The species identified would be familiar to present day Canadian birders. They include the red-tailed hawk, a fly-catcher, a redpoll, a waxwing, the snowy and hawk owls, and several species of swallows and plovers. The bones also include the earliest evidence in North America of a snow bunting, as well as the earliest record in Canada of a snow goose, a phoebe, and the American widgeon.
The great diversity of birds at this single site during, and shortly after, the height of the last glacial period contradicts earlier ideas that the region was a marginal habitat.
"The richness of the avian fauna reflects an environmental richness," says McCuaig-Balkwill. "For example, there was not just one species of shorebird but four different ones indicating a variety of feeding niches in the region."
This conclusion is supported by a plethora of contemporaneous mammalian remains from the site, including those of mammoth, bison, horse, dall sheep, caribou, moose, wapiti, saiga antelope, lion, bear, cougar and wolf.
The Bluefish caves site was discovered in 1975 and excavated between 1978 and 1987 by a research team led by Canadian Museum of Civilization archeologist Jacques Cinq-Mars. The Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre in Whitehorse showcases the results of this and other Eastern Beringian research.
The bird and mammal material found at the site is particularly valuable in that it forms the largest and most complex in-situ, or undisturbed, Pleistocene animal bone assemblage in Eastern Beringia. The caves have yielded what may be the earliest evidence of human occupation in the Americas - a mammoth bone probably flaked and shaped by human hands 23,500 years ago.
The caves have been protected as a historic site reserve by the Yukon government, with the support of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation.
The new bird evidence raises numerous questions both about both these flyers, and potentially, early humans in Eastern Beringia. Were the migratory birds travelling south to north over the glaciers? And, perhaps most intriguing, how long ago were the first North American's hunting them?
A snow goose scapula (shoulder blade) from the site, recently dated at approximately 8000 years old, shows clear, human-made cut marks. Cinq-Mars thinks that Beringian hunters took brief shelter in the caves over a period of 15,000 years.
"You can think of a small hunting party stopping in one of these caves for an afternoon. The whole limestone ridge system where they are located serves, even today, as a perfect vantage point, overlooking the broadening of the Bluefish Valley, and if it was a rainy day, or a bad blizzard, or a freak snowstorm, they could have been used as temporary shelters," says Cinq-Mars.
The challenge now is to find further hard evidence that human eyes followed the probable southward migratory flight of these Eastern Beringian birds as much as 25,000 years ago. Humans that would have pondered, where, over the wall of glaciers, these birds were going.
Note to Editors and Producers: To see and download media quality images of Beringian bird fossils and zooarcheologist Darlene McCuaig-Balkwill at work, visit the Canadian Museum of Nature's website at www.nature.ca/English/whtsnewe.htm
This research was possible thanks to the support of the Polar Continental Shelf Project.
For information:
Rachael M. Duplisea
Canadian Museum of Civilization
Tel. 819-776-7167
E-mail: rachael.duplisea@civilization.ca