“Technology is one of the main hallmarks of being human, and to be able to measure that in the archaeological past is really important.” 16,000 years ago a “projectile point” was used for hunting game. Though tiny, the artifact tells an outsize tale.
Perhaps, as Davis and other archeologists suggest, those people came from northeast Asia by boat, moving south along the Pacific coastline and setting up camps along the way. “The Pacific coast is the most likely candidate—it seems like it would have had areas of exposed and habitable land between about 17,000 and 16,000 years ago,” says Geoffrey M. Smith, executive director of the Great Basin Paleoindian Research Unit at the University of Nevada Reno, who wasn’t involved in the new research.
But this scenario presents some archeological challenges: First, there aren’t any boat artifacts from this period that’d suggest people had the technology to get from Asia to the Americas by sea. And as the world transitioned into the warmer climate we enjoy today, all that ice melted and drove up sea levels, shifting the Pacific coastline and submerging any potential artifacts.exactly people would have made the journey is also an open question—and perhaps an unanswerable one.
Davis and his colleagues don’t know if the groups from Japan and the Americas were genetically related—they don’t have the genetic material to actually back up such a theory. But the similarity of the projectile points each group produced could suggest a sort of ancient social network, the sharing of technology. “It doesn’t matter, necessarily, if their genetics are the same,” says Davis.
It would make sense that as humans flowed from Asia to the Americas, they’d use similar projectile points. “By bringing in the northern Japan connection, we’ve got a pretty good hypothesis about linking up Old and New World assemblages in a comparable time period,” says David Hurst Thomas, senior curator in residence of North American archaeology at the American Museum of Natural History, who wasn’t involved in the research.
Davis also thinks this may not have been a singular connection between Asia and the Americas during that time period. Perhaps after these people brought the knowledge of the projectile points with them on their journey, other groups kept coming, keeping the ocean-spanning technological network alive—adding more intriguing wrinkles to the enormously complicated history of the peopling of the Americas.
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