A windswept ridge above Alaska’s Tanana River has yielded one of the most detailed looks yet at how people lived on the edge of the Bering Land Bridge nearly 14,000 years ago, according to University of Kansas researchers.
The site, Shég’ Xdaltth’i’, holds three early occupation layers dating to 13,800, 13,000 and 12,700 years ago, the team reports in Science Advances. Its Athabascan name means “they were there,” and the finds suggest settlers were doing more than passing through.
A camp above Tanana
Kelly Graf, a KU professor of anthropology who directs the excavation, said the small ridge overlooks a major river system. Spruce trees cover it today, but during the late Ice Age it supported shrub tundra. Graf wrote the paper with KU colleague Ted Goebel, doctoral student Mia Harbort, undergraduate Mason Sewing and other researchers from the U.S. and Europe.
Mammoth, bison, horse and caribou
Animal remains show the occupants hunted mammoth, bison and horse, all now extinct, along with caribou, which still roams Alaska and remains an important resource for Indigenous people there. Graf said Beringia is full of evidence of megafauna hunting.
One of her favorite finds is a large stone anvil that sat inside a dwelling feature, surrounded by heavily battered bison bones and quartz and quartzite hammerstones. The team thinks the occupants broke the bones to extract marrow and probably to render grease, near a large earth oven. Bird bones were also shaped into needles.
Stone points link two continents
Among the most telling artifacts are numerous diamond-shaped bifacial points, possibly the sharpened tips of weapons. Graf said the site is the only one in Alaska with the clear diamond shape. The only other northern places with comparable points at this time are on the Russian side of the land bridge, which suggests people traveled across it to, and possibly from, the site.
Years of digging
Graf began making the long trek to the site in 2013 and visited every year until the COVID-19 pandemic, then returned in 2021, 2023 and 2025. She secured several National Science Foundation grants totaling $400,000. The excavations produced more than 80,000 specimens, including a distinctive hafted biface, bone tools, a range of animal remains and well-preserved activity areas.
Beringian occupations cluster in an area only slightly larger than Maryland.
Why it matters
The land bridge formed about 35,000 years ago and vanished under rising seas about 12,000 years ago. Graf said the past shows how humans have adapted to life’s challenges, and that studying early people helps us understand ourselves today. A species that began as a handful of individuals in a small region, she noted, now numbers more than 8 billion, in a sliver of geological time.