Immigrants from Siberia
(8000 - 2000 B.C.)

About 8000 B.C., at approximately the time that water began to flow through Bering Strait, small groups of hunters began to appear in Alaska, bringing with them a stone-tool technology that was alien to North America. This technology was based on Siberian Mesolithic styles, including the use of microblades small, sharp-edged slivers of stone made by a specialized technique and used to give sharp cutting edges to bone spears and knives. This was perhaps the last population to enter North America by land. Some archaeologists believe that these people were the ancestors of the Dene Indians of northwestern Canada and Alaska. Others suspect that they may have been the ancestors of the Eskimos and the Aleuts. The latter view is supported by the fact that archaeological evidence from the island of Anangula, at the eastern end of the Aleutian chain, suggests a technological continuity between these early immigrants and the Aleuts of the historic period. Elsewhere, the situation is not so clear. In most of mainland Alaska, there is evidence only of Indian occupation during the period between approximately 6000 and 2000 B.C. On the Pacific coast of Alaska, however, we find, as early as 4000 B.C., a maritime hunting culture technologically resembling that of the people on the adjacent Aleutian Islands. Again, there appears to be continuity between these people and the Eskimos who occupied the south coast of Alaska in historic times. There is, therefore, a possibility that the ancestors of the Eskimos and the Aleuts arrived in North America as early as 8000 B.C. and developed their distinctive maritime way of life along the Pacific coast of Alaska and on the Aleutian Islands. They may have been influenced by the rich sea-hunting cultures developing to the south, in coastal British Columbia.

Immigration from Siberia to Alaska did not stop with the flooding of Bering Strait. It is possible that ancestral Eskimos crossed the strait at some later time. The most likely candidates for such a movement are the people of the Arctic Small Tool tradition (ASTt). Their camps begin to appear on the coasts and in the tundra regions of northern and western Alaska around 2000 B.C. The stone tools found around these camps are the products of a technology totally different from any known to have existed earlier in Alaska or elsewhere in North America, and they are very similar to those used by Neolithic peoples of Siberia. As suggested by the name, "Arctic Small Tool tradition," almost all of the stone tools are extremely small. These include microblades similar to those brought to Alaska by earlier immigrants, burins (specialized bone- cutting tools with a chisel-like edge), tiny triangular endblades used as tips for harpoons, and small arrowpoints, probably the first evidence of the use of the bow and arrow in North America. The ASTt people never reached the south coast of Alaska or the Aleutian Islands, but they appear to have expanded rapidly across the Canadian Arctic and Greenland. We have found a few skeletons of their descendants, and these tell us that the ASTt people were of the Arctic Mongoloid physical type, similar to Eskimo populations. They may have spoken an ancestral Eskimo language, but it is also possible that their language was related to that spoken by the Chukchi or some other Siberian group. We sometimes refer to this group and their descendants as Palaeoeskimos. In any case, the ASTt people were the first occupants of the Canadian Arctic coast and islands.