A steppe bison bone found at Shég’ Xdaltth’í’; hearth oven feature in background.

Last week, the journal Science Advances published a report on a Late Pleistocene era archaeological site from Interior Alaska. The paper, titled “Highlights from an early base camp in Beringia 13,800 years ago: Shég’ Xdaltth’í’ and the Late Pleistocene peopling of Alaska”, was authored by Kelly Graf, Ph.D., from the University of Kansas and a team of 15 co-authors.

The site, Shég’ Xdaltth’í’, is located a few dozen miles south of Fairbanks, Alaska, putting it in the same general region as other ancient Interior Alaska sites, like Upward Sun, Swan Creek and the cluster of sites along the Shaw Creek that includes Broken Mammoth, Mead, Carpenter and Holzman.

Shég’ Xdaltth’í’ yielded intriguing artifacts left behind by the site’s Pleistocene residents, including an impressive assemblage of lithic (“stone tool”) artifacts, and a layer of “charcoal-stained sediment encompassing a hearth, small pit feature, and post mold” which Graf interpreted as “an artificial shelter, most likely a partially covered lean-to structure that opened to the south.” LiveScience hailed the ancient shelter as “the oldest dwelling in the Western Hemisphere.”

However, some of the most surprising finds are among the animal bone artifacts recovered at Shég’ Xdaltth’í’.

Fantastic fossil finds

Identified faunal remains from Shég’ Xdaltth’í’.
Identification NISP
Bison priscus 164
Ovibos moschatus 1
Bovidae 7
Rangifer tarandus 16
Mammuthus primigenius 12
Equus sp. 2

A complete table of the identified faunal remains (animal bones) from the site is available in the report, though the first few rows are given here. The table includes taxonomic identification (to species, genus or family, as best as the team was able) as well as the number of identified specimens (NISP).

The faunal remains included many species that would be familiar to Alaskans today, including various birds, hare, lynx and caribou (Rangifer tarandus).

However, Shég’ Xdaltth’í’ also yielded numerous specimens from long extinct animals, presenting a picture of what how different Alaska was in the Pleistocene. The Pleistocene fauna included the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), steppe bison (Bison priscus) and horse (Equus).

The authors note that the “mammal fraction is diverse” in the assemblage.

The presence of musk ox (Ovibos moschatus) is worth note, as musk ox bones appear to be rare, generally speaking, in faunal assemblages from the time and region. Musk ox survived the Pleistocene only to go extinct in Alaska in the 19th century and re-introduced in the 20th.

A dog-gone discovery

Another suprise in the fauna assemblage came from the presence of canids. The team identified 15 specimens of wolf (Canis lups), and another 9 specimens that the team could only identify to the genus level (Canis sp.).

One of the wolf bones, a right mandible (lower jaw) was studied using “two-dimensional geometric morphometric analysis”, and that team found that it did not directly match with either the extinct Dire wolves, known samples of Pleistocene Beringian wolves or modern wolves from the United States. The authors suggets that the wolf mandible may be indicative of “a unique population, different from the ancient and contemporary wolves of Alaska.”

It’s possible that some of these canid remains represent not wolves, but the first domesticated dogs in the New World, though the authors expressed caution. They note:

the site’s human inhabitants may have been dog owners. However, defining precisely when and where the domestication process unfolded is difficult because wolves and earliest dogs are potentially indistinguishable in the archaeological record